And Then I Woke Up
Dreams in the Notes & Novels of Cormac McCarthy
1. “Could Not Go Back To Sleep.”
In Cormac McCarthy’s private papers—acquired last year by the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University, and made available in October—scholars will find the following typewritten page where Cormac details a dream he had on May 11th, 2005, one month before the publication of No Country for Old Men:
“Farther down the table on my left I see my father sitting looking at me. I am amazed at the likeness which my mind has produced. He doesn’t speak. He looks at me and I look at him. Then I wake up.”
I’m quite moved by this passage. Since my own father was killed when I was very young1, perhaps I’m more susceptible than some to dreams about fathers. But I suspect many reading this will resonate with Cormac’s memorandum.
When I first read this, the final pages of No Country for Old Men leapt to mind. The novel closes with Sheriff Bell recounting this dream:
“It was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin through the mountains of a night. Goin through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept goin. Never said nothin. He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up.” (309, emphasis mine)
