I Remember You

Chapter 18

Although man has pondered the meaning and purpose of dreams for ages, no definite conclusions have yet been reached. It makes no difference whether it’s scientists who try to find physiological explanations, religious groups who read divine messages in dreams, or New Ageists who believe that dreams provide insight into the indefinite future. Some progress has been made, however: for example, scientists have been able to identify which neurotransmitters populate the brain in a dream state and prevent the limbs from moving in conjunction with what the dream tells the body is happening. They have also determined the stage of sleep in which dreams take over. Psychiatrists flirted with dream interpretation in the mid-twentieth century, but their theories had long since been put aside when Freyr began his specialized studies and were taught only for their historical significance. Dreams, after all, are dissimulators; their contents are distorted and reports of them merely patchy recollections that give no indication of what is missing – if anything – from the story, or whether something was fabricated to fill in the gaps. There are no independent witnesses to dreams, making them, as factors in psychoanalysis, at best crutches to use when all other options have been exhausted.

Now for the first time Freyr regretted not being more familiar with the most recent theories on dream interpretation. He knew that many clinical studies were being conducted on dreams, but very few of the articles published in the journals appealed to him. He had thus merely skimmed through them. He owned an excellent book on the subject, in which more than fifty thousand dreams were investigated, but it was somewhere in storage. Actually, Freyr recalled that the result of this extensive investigation had been something along the lines that people throughout the world generally dreamed the same things and that the dreams depended to a large degree on events in their daily lives. Firemen dreamed more often of fires than divers did, and so on. It was difficult to tell whether this conclusion fitted in Védís’s case, except perhaps that if her dreams reflected her everyday reality, that reality was considerably different to what Freyr was used to.

Freyr had read through every single dream in her diary, since they were neither numerous nor long. He read some twice, some three times. He wanted to try to understand what these strange descriptions and interpretations said about the woman; what she saw in her dreams, how she reported them and what she thought most interesting about them. He even scrutinized Védís’s handwriting in the hope that it would shed some light on her condition at the time of writing down each dream. But there was little to be discovered from it. The delicate script was nearly always the same, with nothing to indicate that any unusual agitation was controlling her hand. Every single letter was crisp and clear; the script slanted slightly to the right and the capital letters were more elaborate than Freyr was used to. Yet although the handwriting said nothing about the woman, her dreams were a different story. Freyr believed that the descriptions were realistic and that the woman hadn’t made up anything that she described; he based this, among other things, on how irregular the entries were. If she’d written about her dreams day after day, Freyr would have been suspicious, since no cases existed of people being able to recall their subconscious adventures every single morning.

It wasn’t until 2007 that her dreams became significantly interesting. Prior to that they’d been very normal, describing banalities that sleep distorted and changed into adventure or horror. Védís either ended up in situations characterized by overabundance and positivity, or else she was trapped in a world in which her arm fell off, the earth swallowed her home, she wound up in jail or something in that vein. Her interpretation of these dreams was extremely simple: bad events were omens of good things and vice versa. If her friends or relatives appeared in her dreams, she would write about them particularly, often noting to herself at the conclusion of her interpretation to contact them and warn them of this or that or ask about prospective heirs who proclaimed their arrival in one way or another. Twice, dead relatives of prospective parents had come to give names for the children and, according to her entries, she wanted to pass this information on. These were the extremely ordinary dreams of an extremely ordinary woman.

But as if someone had clicked their fingers, the descriptions took on a completely different form in February 2007.

When her dreams had first taken an odd turn, Védís seemed rather reluctant in her interpretations. Now they no longer centred on family and friends or anything else she was familiar with, but instead she entered a world characterized by darkness, danger and evil, from which she repeatedly woke terrified and drenched with sweat. At first she tried to interpret this as a positive omen: soon she would win the lottery, if she could just manage to count how often specific things that appeared repeatedly in these dreams turned up, but this soon stopped and Védís approached her dreams with increasing fear and tension. Freyr wasn’t surprised. The woman now seemed to be prevented from sleeping peacefully and getting enough rest, and that alone created fertile ground for psychological difficulties, anxiety and depression. It was impossible to say which came first, the chicken or the egg, but after these dreams had been going on for around six months, it was difficult to follow the thread of the woman’s readings of them; her language and references grew ever vaguer, making it harder to grasp their significance without further information about the woman and her circumstances.

But he didn’t need to know anything more about Védís to connect one specific detail to her life. Or rather, her death. During the last two months before she died, garden shears started appearing more and more often in her dreams. They were bloody, and they frightened Védís. As she described them, the shears were either lying on the ground or in the hands of a boy who was the main character in these unsettling dreams, from the very first one to the last. Védís never saw his face, and she woke with a start every time he seemed to be on the verge of showing it. He generally appeared in the distance or turned his back to her as he stood, head bowed, at the edge of the dream. Védís didn’t give any indication of who this boy was, but in her dreams her task was to get to him and speak to him. But she never accomplished this. He was always out of reach, no matter how fast she ran or how kindly she spoke to him. Freyr was fairly certain that Védís thought she knew who this boy was, but she never put his name to paper; she only hinted that he seemed familiar to her, but she could never be entirely sure of who he was – besides not being certain that she wanted to know. Freyr felt that this suggested Védís could have had something on her conscience that she pushed aside, and that by doing so she was depriving herself of the healing or comfort that could be found in coming to terms with a painful experience. If she refused to deal with her problems in her waking state, it was no surprise that they invaded her dreams.

The last dream she recorded was from the night before she died. The night before Freyr’s son disappeared. He read over the description of this dream particularly carefully but discovered little to shed light on this strange coincidence. The dream was essentially the same, a hopeless chase of this unknown boy through dark corridors and fog, past crying children. They leaned up against the walls of the maze through which Védís wandered and refused to show their faces when she bent down to them. The children were covered with cuts, sores and bruises, which were visible when they reached out to grab her legs. In fact, the only significant difference between this dream and the others was that now there was a green lustre to everything, and Védís felt she couldn’t breathe properly because of this green air. For further clarification she’d written that she felt as if she were in a submarine that had run out of air. The dream ended differently as well. This time she managed to approach the boy from behind and touch him. As soon as she placed her hand on his bony shoulder she regretted it and realized that it was a terrible mistake, as she wrote clearly in her dream diary. Then she heard the boy say: ‘You shouldn’t have done that.’ The voice was much more like that of an elderly man than of a child, but the worst thing was that it seemed as if the voice came from behind her. The boy she was holding onto wasn’t the same one she was always chasing. He stood behind Védís, and when she turned around slowly she woke up, her chest heavy.

‘The only connection that I can see to Benni is so random that it hardly deserves a mention.’ Freyr had just told Dagný all the details of Védís’s dreams. ‘One of the boys playing hide-and-seek with Benni said that Benni was going to hide in a submarine, but then he immediately took it back.’ Freyr’s eyes stung from all the reading, and he blinked several times to moisten them. ‘This suggested what the police always considered most likely – that he’d gone down to the sea – but there was nothing there that could have been described as a submarine, even as viewed through a child’s eyes.’

‘But why would the boy have said something like that out of the blue and then taken it back?’ Dagný sat opposite Freyr at the kitchen table, the dregs of some red wine in one of the two wine glasses that had come with the house. It was nearly midnight.

‘Children are extremely poor witnesses. The boy was probably chuffed that the police were talking to him and wanted to add something. Maybe his childish imagination told him that a submarine had taken Benni and sailed away with him. His parents said he’d recently watched a film involving a submarine. It doesn’t make much of a difference anyway, because it turned out that this boy had left the game to go to his cousin’s birthday party before Benni went missing, so he couldn’t have seen or heard anything that mattered. His parents confirmed it.’

Dagný nodded and changed the subject. ‘I’m wondering whether Védís’s death would have been investigated differently if they’d had this dream diary.’ Her cheeks reddened slightly. ‘You know – all this with the garden shears.’

Freyr emptied the wine bottle into her glass. He had enough wine in his, and didn’t expect to finish it. He found the idea of being tipsy uncomfortable under these circumstances. ‘I suppose so. It could very well be that there’s a connection between the dreams and the accident, but not a criminal one. The two things could be connected easily if we suppose that Védís handled the shears clumsily precisely because of her dreams – she’d been stressed about handling them and thereby wasn’t careful enough. But I have no idea why she dreamed about garden shears in the first place; there could be a thousand reasons for it and none of them particularly noteworthy. It’s not possible that anyone planted it in her mind, which somehow led to her death, if that’s what you mean.’

‘No, not at all.’ Dagný pulled one leg underneath her. ‘There was clearly no one else involved. I was wondering more whether it was suicide.’

Freyr shrugged and placed the bottle on the counter ‘I think that’s rather unlikely, although suicide of course takes a variety of forms.’

‘But don’t you find it strange that she also dreamed about Halla, sitting and weeping, her face purple and her tongue sticking out, in a church that resembled the one in Súðavík?’

‘Yes, of course that’s striking, in the light of what happened to her. I also think it’s interesting that the only people she mentions by name in the book after the dreams become so bizarre are her childhood friends from the class picture.’

‘Why would that be?’ Dagný’s teeth were stained from the wine, but to Freyr this just increased her charm. ‘I’m not one for prophecies and dreams, but I don’t see what logical explanation there could be for this. Védís died before these people started popping off. It’s out of the question that she could have been connected to their deaths in any way, even though she seems to have predicted all of them.’ Dagný paged through the dream diary quickly until she found what she was looking for. ‘Here, look. Jón appears here with a black face and no eyelashes. He’s missing half his fingers, and the others are black and burned.’ She turned to the next page. ‘Silja is blue and frosted, lying on a snow bank and speaking to her without blinking, while snowflakes gradually fill her eyes. You remember that she froze to death?’ She flipped rapidly through more pages. ‘Here. Steinn. Lying at her feet, broken and shattered, and Védís writes, and I quote, that some of the injuries are so bad that nothing can heal them; precisely what happened to him. He lay there like a doll thrown off a high-rise and stared at her unable to speak, let alone anything else. The only thing he could do was blink his glazed eyes.’ Dagný looked up from the book. ‘I read the police report that was compiled after he was run over, and her description fits it pretty well. The same thing can be said of all of them; Védís appears to have dreamed how they would die.’

Freyr took care over what he said next, since the topic had taken a strange turn and it would be easy to jump to unrealistic conclusions. ‘It’s stated clearly that Védís got in touch with all of these people, and even though they didn’t all take her overtures well, none of them hung up on her. So they heard her descriptions, and who knows, maybe they had some effect. Although I don’t believe in that kind of thing, I’m afraid I’d be concerned if an old friend called me and told me sadly that she was always dreaming that I’d drowned or something like that. I might actually start behaving differently on lakes or out at sea, which might cause me to fall in and drown. That’s what I think happened in each of these cases, as well as where Védís herself is concerned. Perhaps there’s nothing that mysterious about it.’

Dagný ran her fingers over the book. ‘I’m not completely convinced, sorry. But you get marks for trying.’ She stared at the blue lettering as if searching for a hidden meaning that could explain all of this. ‘Do you think this might be forged? That it wasn’t written by her at all, but by someone else after her death – and therefore after the others had all died too?’

This hadn’t crossed Freyr’s mind. ‘Interesting idea.’ He reached for the book and turned to the first page. ‘I doubt it, but we would need to compare the handwriting with hers to eliminate the possibility completely. Otherwise, the handwriting might not be the main issue. This fits with what Halla’s widower said in his conversation with you, that Halla had started calling these childhood friends of hers around three years earlier – after Védís got in touch with her. It says in the book that Védís was thinking of speaking to Halla around the same time that she first appeared in her dreams. So, she seems to have rekindled her relationship with this old friend of hers, although it didn’t last long because she died a short time later.’

‘I wonder what they talked about? The meaning of the dreams, or how they might take advantage of these omens to avoid the danger?’

‘I guess they’d have just talked about everything. The dreams were the trigger for their renewed acquaintance, but then they discovered that they had things in common and sought out each other’s company.’

‘That doesn’t explain why Halla turned to the others when Védís slipped and cut herself to death on the garden shears.’ Dagný took a tiny sip of wine. ‘Védís probably told her all her dreams about the group, and when she died the way she did, Halla probably wanted to spread the message and continue to warn the others. It actually begs the question why the others continued to answer her phone calls and get in touch with her. According to Halla’s widower, there were a lot of long telephone conversations over an extended period of time.’

Freyr paused for a moment before replying as he tried to remember the name of the childhood friend who was still alive. ‘Obviously, the most direct course of action would be to ask the only one of them left about what actually went on.’ Freyr flipped through the book a bit in search of entries concerning the man. ‘Lárus. The one who appeared to Védís with his guts hanging out.’

‘What sort of death do you suppose awaits him?’ Dagný rested her glass on her leg and swirled the wine in it like an experienced wine taster preparing to sip and spit.

‘No idea. Maybe stomach cancer.’ Freyr pushed back thoughts of accidents and illnesses that could do serious damage to one’s abdomen. ‘Perhaps I’ll try to find him tomorrow, since I’ll be in town. He lives in Reykjavík.’

Dagný looked at the kitchen clock. ‘I’d forgotten that you’re heading south in the morning. I’d better get going.’ She put down her glass and stood up. ‘I like the idea of you trying to reach Lárus; I’d prefer this not to get mixed into the investigation with things as they are. I don’t want to have to explain all this spooky stuff to my boss or the police down south. It can wait.’

When they were at the front door Freyr wished he could ask her to stay the night, but was afraid she would say no. Dagný herself seemed unsure how to say goodnight, and she appeared relieved to remember a detail that she’d forgotten to ask him about in their conversation concerning the diary. ‘Do you remember how Védís wrote near the end that she’d started being woken by noises in the basement and that it disturbed her dreams, so that she couldn’t finish them?’ Freyr nodded. ‘Have you noticed anything, heard a knocking like she describes or any other noises?’

‘No, not that I recall.’

‘Too bad.’ Dagný smiled. ‘Not that I want you to be haunted or anything. I was just hoping that if the noises were still occurring, they might be coming from broken pipes or something in the house itself, and that way we could solve at least one part of the puzzle.’

Once Freyr was under the covers he listened for noises from the house, instead of falling asleep to music on his iPod as he usually did. It wasn’t long before he regretted it.