Dream Girl

In Islam, dreams fall into three distinct categories:

1. Messages from God

2. Messages from the psyche

3. Messages from the devil

While there are holy texts dedicated to deciphering the messages buried within dreams, it is impossible to know the messenger with any degree of certainty. There is a hadith that of the forty-six signs of Prophethood, the only one that remains is the ability to receive visions from the divine. It is for this reason Islamic scholars forbid amateurs from attempting the sacred art of dream interpretation.

Once upon a time, a king dreamt that all his teeth fell out of his mouth. The first dream interpreter he visited told him his entire family would die in the very near future. The king grew angry. He visited a second dream interpreter who told him to rejoice for he would live the longest among his relatives. The king hugged the man and thanked him for the glad tidings.

The week before my sister dies, my mother dreams of weddings.

أعوذُ بِٱللَّهِ مِنَ ٱلشَّيۡطَٰنِ ٱلرَّجِيمِ

Ayeeyo says.

To dream you are a wedding guest can mean you will soon be the recipient of joyful news. To dream you are hosting a wedding is a bad sign, however, though the specifics of the misfortune are in the details of the dream. If there is dancing at the wedding, there will be an impending tragedy. If you dream you are planning a wedding, you will soon attend the funeral of a family member. If a sick woman dreams she is marrying a man whose name she does not know, that means she will die of her illness. To dream of wedding rings is to dream of debt. If a man dreams of marrying a dead woman, that means he will soon revisit an abandoned project. If a pregnant woman dreams of her own marriage, she will give birth to a girl. If a pregnant woman dreams of her wedding night, she will bear a son.

Night after night the sound of screaming pierces the thin veil of my sleep. I trace the sound back to myself. Sometimes I come to in the hallway, my heart flailing against the cave of my chest. My body shakes. My parents and siblings run out of their rooms in a panic. I am embarrassed.

“Was it a nightmare?” Hooyo asks. “Or a memory?”

I cannot tell the difference.

Not long after Ayan’s death, I see a doctor who hands me a tissue while I sob on his exam table. At the end of the appointment, I have prescriptions for Ambien and Xanax. I take both and sleep for two days. When I am asleep I do not think of my sister’s body, an hour and a half away, under mountains of dirt. I do not think at all. The world is static and white noise.

I start to forget large swaths of most days. There are years I cannot summon. I meet new people and forget their names. I forget important conversations with friends. I forget promises and appointments. I forget to call people back. I forget who I am still meant to be angry with and who I have forgiven. I am in the car and I cannot remember where I am going and so I miss my exit. I wander the grocery store aisles hoping the sight of something will jog the memory of what I am meant to buy. I forget where I put my phone. I don’t know where my purse is. I cook and forget the stove is on until I hear the smoke detector’s bleary diction. I forget to eat until I stand up and my vision is swarmed by blackness. I heat up my coffee after forgetting it on the table and then I forget it in the microwave until I have already poured myself another cup. I forget the exact sound of my sister’s voice. I forget the last movie we watched together. I forget if it was she who hated onions or if that was my other sister. I forget where I put my keys. Some mornings I wake up and forget my sister is dead.

Hooyo jokes: “If your head wasn’t on your body you would forget that, too.” She says it like she’s worried, like it isn’t funny at all.

In a reoccurring dream, I am trapped in a house made of doors. One door opens only to give way to another. The key to the last door slips from my hands, and I fall to my knees and scan the wood floors like a machine made to perform this singular task.

In another version of this dream, there is a young girl in my care who stands on the other side of a locked door. To let her in, I must sever her from her shadow. When I wake up from this dream, I call my mother in a rush of compassion because I feel I finally understand the cruel calculus all mothers are required to perform.

In yet another iteration of the dream, the doors are positioned in absurd places. There are doors on the floor, on the ceiling, under the bed, in the kitchen cabinet. I must secure them all if we are to live. There is something sinister outside that I must protect myself and my family from. Their dream selves are oblivious to the danger. The responsibility buckles my knees. In this dream I am, like all sleeping girls, prey to something larger and stronger than myself.

The dream is not about the house. The dream is not about the door or what threatens to breech it. It is not about the beast, that darkness of unknown origin. In the dream, the woman of me stands before the girl of me. They are both afraid. We are both afraid. There is no grammar that can contain us. There is a door between us. It does not matter whether the door is locked or unlocked. Neither one of us possesses the key that will free us from the burden of our inheritance. Blood rings in our ears like brass. Our teeth glint in the dreamlight, like iron.

To dream of a door represents the ability or inability of the guardian of the house to protect her household. To dream of a door closing means the guardian of the house faces imminent death. To dream of a door opening into a garden means the dreamer will enter paradise. To dream of difficulties closing a door foreshadows marital troubles. To dream of a locked door means the dreamer will be protected from all evil.

Good night, sleepless wonder, Jessie texts me one evening, and I smile at how charming she has made my insomnia sound. I have only recently started to use the word insomnia; it feels clunky in my mouth, like a word in a language I do not know.

The nights are, at first, exhilarating. Long stretches of time to myself; the world is a kingdom of which I am the sole inheritor. After some time, the nights become cold, lonely. I start to grow anxious in the evenings and do whatever I can to delay the coming of the night. Let’s get dessert I say to whoever is around me, or let’s dance to one more song, by which I mean don’t leave me here alone, but there are places we cannot accompany one another, there are things we cannot save each other from.

First my memory goes, and then it isn’t long before I begin to lose my body. I’ll come to on a couch or in my bed or at the top of the stairwell or in front of the hallway mirror or in the office or in front of the computer or on the laundry room floor, and I’ll have no idea how I have gotten there. I’ll have no memory of the minutes or hours directly before a startling and sudden return to awareness. Or I’ll be in the middle of any number of ordinary tasks—standing over the stove, brushing my teeth, watering the plants, having a conversation—and will feel myself starting to float away from my body. If I am lucky there will be a tell. The sounds and voices around me will get louder, collapsing into a single overwhelming note, the colors impossibly bright. I’ll dig my heels into the floor, reach for the closest wall, but it is always too late. My body becomes a locked door. I wait outside of it to be let in.

I eventually confess my lost hours to a therapist. She tells me I must ground myself. I can hold someone’s hand. Ask for a tight hug. Pinch my arm. Bite my tongue. Take my shoes off and press my feet into solid ground. Name what I see, what I smell, what I taste with as much detail as possible. I must itemize the conditions of the body to remember I have a body.

Once, in the passenger seat of a car that belonged to a man I might have loved if my grief had not been more precious, I stared out the window as we drove past a car accident on the freeway. The sound of emergency sirens and their bright lights blurred my vision. My breath quickened. He was speaking to me but not in any language I knew.

Where do you go when you leave, he asked me when some time had passed.

In literature, an inciting incident is the event that sets the story’s protagonist on a new course of action. It is the river from which all other sources of water in a story run. It is the heart of the story, the beating and fragile mass at its center. The protagonist is at the mercy of this incident. It is the moment of rupture—the moment when the protagonist is severed from her past self. It is the event that both makes and unmakes her. She carries the wound of that moment like the flag of a country.

Once upon a time I had a sister. This is not a fairy tale, although I concede this is how most fairy tales start. I have her still, though now she is dead and buried in an Islamic cemetery in Corvallis, Oregon, two hours away from Portland where we grew up together like the roots of a tree, bound and inseparable. But then she died at nineteen so now she is nineteen forever. And I who had once been twenty-two was cleaved clean from girlhood like bone.

I remember the last time I saw Ayan alive. It was 7 AM. I was late for work. The door to her room was ajar. I could see the shape of her body beneath the comforter. I close my eyes and return to that moment, straining to catch a glimpse of her face, but all I see is her outline, faint like dust caught in a web of light.

I would slip away from myself at the most inopportune moments: my body a country I was always trying to flee. In the early days of my dissociative spells, my mother would drag me to the shower and turn the water on until I came to. Eventually, I would learn to recognize the signs of an impending break from consciousness. I’d get warm and dizzy. I would lose the ability to trace the limits of my body, of my reality. I would feel a flash of fear at my own porousness. And because I could not separate myself from the world, I was afraid I could not join it either. In a cold moment of lucidity, I would wonder if I was the only real thing in a made-up world, or if the world was real and it was me who was not.

Now, if I feel myself start to slip away, I’ll ask someone I trust to rub an ice cube against my forehead or to hold me tight, the way a mother might hold her crying infant. I’ll ask someone to squeeze my hand hard until I feel my hand and know it again in relation to my arm, and know my arm in relation to my shoulder, and know my shoulder in relation to my neck, and know my neck in relation to my head, and know my head in relation to my hair, black like my sister’s, like my mother’s, to know my hair in relation to my scalp, the scalp that my grandmother would oil when I had a headache while I sat on the floor between her legs. The floor is hard, and her body is warm. The oil is cold against my skin. Sometimes it drips down the nape of my neck and I flinch. Sometimes the yellow of it will leave a stain on the collar of whatever shirt I am wearing, proof of this moment, proof of my existence. The weight of what I remember is a force strong enough to eject me from the world, but it is also the only road that returns me to it.

You should keep the details of a bad dream to yourself. Upon waking, spit three times over your left shoulder and seek protection in Allah from the whispers of shaytan.

أَعـوذُبِكَلِمـاتِ اللّهِ التّـامّـاتِ مِنْ شَـرِّ ما خَلَـق

I seek refuge in the perfect words of Allah from the evil of what He has created.

In the English language, tense can be thought of as the verbal category that indicates the distance between when something happened in relation to the time of its utterance. Tense can also denote the continuation or the completeness of an action—what is fixed like life and what is, also like life, ongoing.

When I say my sister died, what I am saying is she dies each day, what I am saying is the record catches and loops again and loops again and loops again and loops again and I cannot escape the brutality of its repetition, the brutality of a note that begins but does not end.

I have not seen Ayan once in my dreams. My mother and siblings, aunts and friends, have all dreamt of her numerous times since her death. I want to see her alive again even if only for the length of a night. My mother says dreaming of her is agony. She is slow to rise the mornings after, acutely aware of the hollow place inside her. I do not care. A dream sister is better than no sister at all.

Instead, I have repeated dreams I am in love with a man whose face fades with morning. I dream we are in a car together, and I climb on to his lap to get closer to him. The car crashes into a tree. I dream we are walking through a grocery store holding hands, and still it is not close enough. I lift his hands to my lips and kiss his fingers. He looks at me and I see my own want mirrored back to me, the black pool of my desire. I am always hungry in these dreams; the thick muscle of my heart is as bare as a mouth.

In English, the second person pronoun refers to the speaker’s audience. In my dreams the “you” on the other side of my longing is always my sister.

I grow close to a man who doesn’t speak English. I have always wanted to know who I was outside the prison of this language. We are a world apart, separated by an ocean, by borders. I fall asleep as he wakes up. Where our days overlap is a small island, and it is not big enough to hold us both. Everything that is said is an approximation of what is meant. I do not speak Somali; I speak English which I then translate into Somali. English is a noose and I go limp against it.

I speak into the phone’s muffled black to ask him about his day. Where he is, the moon is already a pear slice in the darkening sky, and I am shaking myself loose from the heat of my dreaming, slowly returning to this world of letters and numbers and endless war, and war, and war, this world where my sister is still dead and I do not know who will go next into the room where she waits. His voice ushers me into an uncertain future, delineated by what he details of yesterday, my today, this past I hide inside like a seed, small and waiting. Love is the border between his country and mine. Grief is the border between my country and his. And still, he waits for me at the foot of a time come and gone, certain I will join him when I rise, and I do, until one day I don’t. He loves me the way I love my dead sister. He announces my name in rooms where I have never set foot. He carries my memory into a day where I do not yet exist.

If you are sick and dream of a dead person entering your home, you will die soon. If you dream of a dead person’s embrace, it means you will live a long life. If you speak to a dead person in a dream and ask them how they are doing, their answer will be an honest description of how they are faring in the afterlife. If you dream you are carrying a dead person, this means you are overwhelmed by a secret burden. To dream you are feeding the dead means you will lose your wealth. If a dead person asks you for a favor in a dream, you should make a charitable donation in their name the next day. To dream of the dead Prophet is the most noble dream of all, as the Prophet is the one form the devil cannot take.

Time erases me. I exist outside of chronology. I forget and I forget. I become a museum. I become that museum’s sole archivist. I feel my memories dissipate like smoke. I close my eyes and see white. A persistent blankness.

It is 1995. Ayan is being born and no doctor can stop the bleeding. I blink and she rips through my body. I blink and Ayan and I are holding hands underwater, pretending to be mermaids, chlorine reddening our eyes. I blink and I am my mother asking for asylum at the Toronto Pearson Airport. I blink and I am my grandmother burying my firstborn son in a hole I dug myself. I blink and a government is collapsing and there is nothing my father can do but watch it happen through a television screen. I blink and there is blood between my legs. I blink and I am at a funeral, but I do not know who has died. I do not know if what I remember is a memory or a dream or a premonition.

Everyone knows how the story goes. There was a divine command. There was a tree that bore forbidden fruit. There was a cruel serpent. There were many years of joy. Then the devil tempts them and an apple, a fig, a nectarine, some blessed fruit, becomes their downfall. Hawa and Adam become aware, for the first time, of their nakedness and feel a sudden burst of shame. They try to cover their bodies with their hands.

What is characterized in other faith traditions as an act of grave disobedience is seen in Islamic theology as an act of forgetfulness.

When Allah created Adam, he placed each of his descendants on his back. He placed a bright light between the eyes of every person.

“Who are these people?” Adam asked.

“These are your children,” his Lord responded.

Adam’s gaze was caught by one person in particular whose light outshined the rest. “Who is this man?”

“This is a son from a future generation whose name will be Dawuud.”

“How long will he live?”

“For sixty years.”

“Take forty years from my life and give them to him.”

When the Angel of Death approached Adam at the end of his life, he rebuffed him. “Why are you here? Do I not have forty more years to live?” The angel reminded him that he had given those years to his son.

In the Quran, the Arabic word that is used to refer to human beings shares the same linguistic root as the verb “to forget.” Adam forgot and so his children forget.

In The Book of Fate there is a narration that depicts a confrontation between Musa and Adam in a realm outside of time and space. Born in an era of catastrophe, saved from the torment of the river, and tasked with the weight of revelation, Musa has not lived an easy life.

“Oh, Adam,” he says. “You are our father who disappointed us and cast us out of Paradise.”

In this version of events, we are at the mercy of both blood and memory, the axis upon which the story of both girl and country are defined.

Memory is a fate worse than death. It is a door without a key. A cruelty from which none of us will be spared. This is the inheritance of the Children of Adam.

To dream of war signifies inflation and rising prices. To dream of jihad means a triumph over one’s enemies. To dream you are walking away from the battlefield means you will forsake your familial responsibilities. To dream of winning a fight means you will overcome a current hardship. To dream of losing a fight means an imminent loss of joy. Dreaming of blood represents illegal wealth, if the blood is someone else’s. If the blood belongs to the dreamer, it represents a battle with their personal demons. Dreaming of blood on your clothes means a close friend has been lying to you. If blood is pouring from a wound on your body, you will gain as much wealth as there was blood. But to dream of drinking one’s own blood means you will pay off a debt by contracting another.

Once I was a girl and I was spared. Each time I look in the mirror, a different woman meets my gaze. Sometimes it is my mother before she is my mother. Sometimes it is Jamila, whose name I bear, or Asha, who smoked too much, or Zaynab, who died in a refugee camp waiting for asylum, or Ayan, whom God plucked from my rib, or Ayeeyo, pregnant with my father, or Hibo before the anger steeled her spine, or Awo as a child crowned in a halo of frizz.

Loss rips through me not unlike a child. My grief strikes the horizon like a rising sun. It covers the earth with its bulbous hands. I unclench my fists and restore what I have razed. I cannot tell the living from the dead.

During the summer of my acute insomnia, blackout curtains didn’t bring me sleep. Only a persistent darkness. I could not tell the difference between morning and night.

I greeted each hour with the same gaze.