🇬🇧 Dreams That Evaporated

Topographies of Forgetting | 05

Part I: A Dream of Childhood

Waking in the middle of the night always carries a shadow –

a shadow that resists interpretation,

a shadow not of the body, but of the dream.

When I was a child, my dreams had hard edges:

Warsaw, the nineties, the housing blocks of Praga,

neon light seeping through lace curtains,

the smell of radiators that never worked when they should have.

Back then, I dreamed of cities –

larger than the one I lived in,

of playgrounds I’d never visited,

of apartments with elevators spoken of only with envy.

Sometimes, I dreamed of places

that didn’t exist even in my parents’ stories.

Or voices — sharp, unfamiliar,

filtering through the door, unsure if they had the right to enter.

At times, I’d wake with a word on my lips,

a word that meant only one thing: that I had been dreaming.

It would vanish the moment I awoke.

Childhood dreams have the structure of mist.

They blur, disintegrate,

resist verification.

I never know which images truly belong to me

and which were shaped by overheard phrases,

by the stolen conversations of grown-ups,

by guesswork and silence.

Sometimes I think childhood is not a history,

but a collection of unreadable dreams –

that we grow up only to learn

how to forget we ever dreamed any differently.

How do dreams overwrite a reality too heavy to bear?

There are days from my childhood I remember only through dreams.

Scenes that return not in waking life,

but at night:

falling from the jungle gym,

my father’s face lit by the television,

my mother disappearing into the kitchen alcove,

the echo of weeping through the wall.

Dreams turn reality into a half-truth –

softer, gentler, easier to swallow.

Sometimes the light in my dreams was warmer than it was by day.

Sometimes fear took on a different hue,

less sharp, less wounding.

Sarah Manguso once wrote that a diary is a way of fighting forgetfulness,

a means of “taming the fog.”

But who keeps a diary of their dreams?

Who writes down what evaporated

before it reached the tongue?

Roland Barthes, in his “writing the body through sleep,”

noted that night is the moment

when everything might be written anew –

but no one ever knows

what will survive into the morning alphabet.

These days I often wake

with the feeling that I dreamt something important.

But it all dissolves into forgetting.

The shadow on the wall is more real

than the entire plot of the dream.

The trace of cold sweat on my pillow

becomes the only proof

that anything happened at all.

My dreams sometimes carry a face I can’t recall –

I don’t know if it was mine,

or someone else’s,

someone long gone,

or someone I’ve yet to meet.

Are forgotten dreams a loss — or a kind of rescue?

Is a dreamt life the same as a remembered one?

Maybe dreams exist

so we can survive the truths

we couldn’t bear by daylight.

Maybe evaporated dreams

are our gentlest defense mechanism.

I ask myself — and you, reading this –

do dreams matter

if we can’t recall them?

Did what vanishes upon waking

ever truly belong to us?

Or was it, perhaps,

most ours

because we never allowed it to be named?

A dream is an alphabet of indecipherable signs,

and childhood a language

understood only through the prism of forgotten images.

Now, when I fall asleep, I know:

dreams are more than a form of loss.

They are the way memory negotiates with reality.

They are the shadow that lets me rise in the morning

without mourning what has passed.

And yet, somewhere deep inside,

I still long for the dream

I never managed to tell myself.

Part II: Dreams Left Unspoken

There are dreams that defy telling –

as if every attempt at translation were a betrayal of their intimacy,

or worse, a kind of violence against what matters most in them:

their untranslatability.

Lou and I dream separately.

We dream in different languages.

Sometimes I try to describe my dream to him –

but less and less over time,

because I know that half of it is already lost

in the phrase “I dreamed…”

He, when he talks about his dreams,

does it with that French lightness,

a softness, a shrug, a smile –

as if the dream were a brief anecdote over morning coffee.

In Poland, we carry dreams like omens,

like warnings,

like whispers that might still intrude into waking life.

In his world, dreams are a nocturnal footnote –

a curiosity, nothing more.

Sometimes we try to build a bridge between our dreams.

Lou asks, “What did you dream about?”

And I fumble through ellipses,

murmuring about a dream I can’t fit into sentences,

about images that dissolve under the pressure of French

before I can even coax them out of Polish.

Sometimes I just stay silent,

turn toward the window,

leave the night where it belongs –

in the shadow behind my eyelids.

Maybe that’s the point:

some dreams refuse to be told.

Their strength lies in the silence I wear beneath my skin.

Sometimes, Louis dreams about me.

He tells me afterwards:

we were by the sea,

the sky was clear,

I was laughing –

not like I usually do.

I listen to these stories with tenderness,

with detachment,

as if they were about someone else.

I envy him –

this ease, this ability to let go of dreams

without regret.

But there are dreams I share with no one.

I dream of Warsaw again and again –

of apartments that no longer exist,

of people I haven’t seen in years.

I never tell Lou.

I wouldn’t know how to translate it into French,

wouldn’t find the right gestures

to carry the weight of those images.

In those moments, I feel

dreams become more real when they have no language.

That only when left unspoken,

tucked into the bottom of my private night,

do they become truly mine –

undivided, unerasable, unanalyzable.

Does what remains unspoken cease to exist?

Or does it grow stronger,

deeper,

more indelible?

There’s a kind of tenderness in not speaking about dreams –

a tenderness that words could never replace.

And there’s fear too –

that what isn’t said

will melt away,

evaporate,

leaving behind nothing but a trace of emotion,

a dampness on the pillow.

The longer I am with Lou,

the more clearly I see

that dreams are not just stories –

they’re survival strategies.

They hold a space that shields us

from the blunt force of the day.

A place to be ourselves

without explanation,

without the need to turn shadow into light.

Maybe that’s why

I’ve begun to keep my dreams to myself more often.

I let them go.

Let them vanish.

Let them stay as flickering memory –

a trace I’ll never have to speak aloud.

Part III: The Alphabet of Night

Night is the space where the body learns to forget.

When the lights go out,

and Lou is already asleep,

I lie on my back and feel the hardness of the mattress beneath me –

uncomfortable, but real,

as if it were the only thing still keeping me tethered to reality.

I close my eyes

and return to the alphabet of night:

to the flickering beneath my eyelids,

to the pressure in my chest,

to the restless search for a position

in which sleep might allow me to vanish for a while.

Childhood is a catalogue of nighttime fears.

I used to wake often –

suddenly, for no reason,

sometimes with the sensation I was about to fall from the bed,

sometimes with the conviction

that someone was sitting next to me,

even though no one was there.

Back then, the night was an untranslatable territory.

My mother’s voice behind the wall,

my father’s breath in the other room,

the distant hum of cars outside –

these were like signs

I couldn’t piece into any word I knew.

I feared the dark,

but even more than that,

I feared the stretch of my own thoughts

casting themselves like shadows on the walls.

With time, the night becomes more familiar –

but never completely.

Adulthood brings its own fears:

bills,

responsibility,

the uncertainty of tomorrow,

unsent emails,

unreturned books,

sentences left unsaid.

Night never stops being a place

where the body keeps record

of what it failed to erase during the day.

The nighttime body is an archive of tremors:

cold sweat,

racing pulse,

fingers clenched around the edge of the duvet,

a sudden jolt of wakefulness

and the vague feeling that something has gone missing.

Sometimes I dream in the alphabet of night:

A for alarm,

B for broken sleep,

C for the shadow on the ceiling,

D for a touch I can’t remember,

E for the echo of a scream long past.

Louis doesn’t understand my nighttime fears.

For him, the night is a place of rest,

a soft ritual –

a warm shower,

a cup of tea,

a few pages of a book.

For me –

it’s always part battlefield, part ledger of losses.

The body remembers more than the mind.

It’s at night

that the unspoken fears return.

It’s at night

that the body learns to forget:

filtering the fear through itself,

quelling the unrest,

turning the unsaid into silence.

Is it possible to learn to dream again?

Is it possible to forget the alphabet of night –

to stop reading in the body

the signs that still demand attention?

Maybe, with time, dreams will grow lighter,

less burdened.

Maybe one day

waking will feel like a return, not a rupture.

But tonight, here in Marseille,

with shadows on the wall,

I write my own alphabet of sleep –

without a translator,

without a safety net,

without a dictionary.

Maybe it’s the only language

I’ll never fully learn.

And maybe, in that unknowing,

there’s a chance

for dreams yet to come –

lighter,

quieter,

ready to evaporate

before they ever become a weight.

Part IV: Waking

Morning in Marseille is light

spilling through the crack in the curtain –

light that doesn’t ask permission to enter.

Before I even recognize my own body –

the stiffness in my neck,

the lingering warmth from Lou,

who always goes down to the kitchen before I do –

I try to hold on to what’s left of the dream.

But the dreams are already elsewhere,

washed away by the ordinary,

scattered like dust in the sunbeams.

I remember just one detail:

a line of dialogue,

the clasp of a hand,

a face that is and isn’t mine.

Waking is always a kind of violence against the dream.

A clean cut

that severs the shimmering narrative of night,

leaving a blank page behind.

You can try to return –

close your eyes,

chase the fragmented images –

but they slip further away

with every movement,

with every breath.

Lou calls from the kitchen,

asks if I want coffee.

I answer sleepily –

first in Polish,

then in French.

Neither of those words

belongs to the language of dreaming anymore.

Daylight speaks in another grammar:

yes, please, merci, encore cinq minutes.

The light on the floor reminds me of childhood –

mornings spent trying to understand

whether what I’d dreamed

could have really happened.

The memory of a dream is like a shadow on the wall –

you can never quite catch it,

never fully fill it in.

There are dreams I can’t recall at all,

and others I remember so vividly it aches –

but only for a moment,

only in that fragile space between sleeping and waking.

How long does the threshold between dream and forgetting last?

Is waking final,

or is there always a slit of time

through which something still slips?

Psychologists call it the dream remnant phase –

that state where reality

still blends with the logic of night,

where the body doesn’t yet know it’s awake.

Is that where literature is born?

Is that the place

where all the stories we’re too afraid to say aloud remain?

Lou returns to bed,

lies down beside me,

pulls me into him.

We breathe, for a while,

in the same rhythm.

The silence of morning

is different from the silence of night –

it’s gentle,

it doesn’t judge,

it asks for nothing in return.

In that gesture –

in an embrace without words,

in a touch that needs no translation –

there is something of a dream

that hasn’t yet evaporated.

Something of a longing

that can still be held for a moment

before the world makes its claim.

Maybe that’s where the answer lies:

the dreamt life

and the remembered life

intertwine only for an instant –

on the shifting border of morning.

Then everything disperses,

drifts,

evaporates.

And still –

each of those moments

is a place

where we can find ourselves again.

If only for the length of a breath.

If only at the edge of light and sleep.

Author’s Note:

This essay was written in Marseille, in the spring of 2025, during the first months of my life in emigration, amid an intense learning of a new language, a new city, and a new version of myself.

– The Author

🇬🇧 Note to the Reader

on cultural and emotional context

Dear Reader,

The essay you have just read is steeped in intimate geography — of memory, of childhood, of language lost and re-learned. It moves between Warsaw and Marseille, between Polish and French, between silence and speech, between the body and the dream. These spaces — linguistic, emotional, and architectural — carry with them resonances that may not be immediately apparent to a non-Polish reader.

In Polish, dreams are often burdened with significance — portents, warnings, echoes from the unconscious — whereas in the French context depicted here, they are treated with greater levity, as fragments of the night easily discarded. The difference is not merely stylistic, but cultural. Likewise, the physical spaces of Polish childhood — the blokowisko (concrete housing estates), the trzepak (a common courtyard structure used for beating rugs, but also a playground improvisation) — are saturated with the textures of post-socialist reality, its losses, its constraints, its quietly coded rituals of play and survival.

The author’s migration to France, and his life with Lou — his partner — introduce a tender but profound negotiation between languages and affective registers. Some images resist translation; others demand it. In this English version, I have aimed to preserve the poetics of absence and suggestion, the tension between what is said and what cannot be said. When published quotes from Roland Barthes or Sarah Manguso were available in English, I used the official translations; when not, I translated their spirit rather than their syntax.

This is not a literal translation, but a transposition: a migration of breath, shadow, and light into another language. I hope it allows the reader to step into the borderlands of morning and dream, where memory becomes vapor — and where even silence speaks.

– Ł.R.