A Voice in the Night

Is something otherworldly trying to reach me?

Photo by Min

It was the call of my name.

“Dave.”

A male voice, firm, not angry, not urgent.

“Dave.”

It startled me for a moment, and in that second, I thought maybe there was someone close, someone in the house, someone just outside the bedroom window. For that split second, I believed I was not alone. I sat up in bed and looked at the bedroom door, at my sleeping wife, and again at the window and its slightly open blinds. No one. No shadow. Nothing. The dog hadn’t moved. In time, I rested my head on the pillow again and feel back to sleep.

“Someone called my name last night,” I told my wife over coffee.

“Like, really called your name?” she asked.

“In a dream. But it felt very real.”

I have a history of odd, vivid, almost psychedelic dreams. But this was not fully a dream. It was simply a voice.

“You’re weird,” my wife said. It’s not the first time she’d said this when I reveal my sleep world.

A few nights later. This time under a full moon.

“Dave.”

Same voice. Same tone. Middle of the night.

“Dave.”

“Was it your father’s voice?” my wife asked.

My father has been dead for many years. But his voice, well, I have his voice. We sounded very much alike. When I was a college kid and one of my father’s friends telephoned our home and I’d answer, they’d assume it was him. I had to correct them.

“It was a man again, certainly. Not sure who it was.”

“Was it yourself?”

Hmm. Was it? My self-conscious trying to reach me?

“Dave.”

“What name did your father call you?” my wife asked.

My mother always called me David. She fell in love with the formality of my name, the Biblical connection. “David” had weight.  My father, on the other hand, liked the friendliness, the intimacy of “Dave.”

“Anyone else call you Dave?”

A few people, I recalled. But the more I considered this, the more I thought the voice sounded like me. Do I prefer Dave or David? I use both in speech and in writing. I sign my name David, but often introduce myself as Dave. However, thinking about this only confused the story.

Who was calling? Why?

Ask analysts and therapists about dreams. They’ll tell you that hearing one’s name in a dream, a calling out, is not unusual. They say it often means your inner self is trying to reach you, to force you to recognize something, to be aware. Carl Jung wrote and spoke about this. He believed dreams were a map to our interior lives.

It’s been a few days now and I haven’t heard the voice in my sleep again. I miss it. I want to hear it. I want to connect with whomever it is. Maybe myself. Maybe something divine. Or, as my wife says, maybe I’m just “weird.” Or maybe the voice has already done its work. Maybe the calling out was simply to force me to wonder, to be aware, to recognize my own self in some new way. And as I write now about what happened, aren’t I doing just that at some level? Maybe we don’t require something earthshaking to awaken ourselves, our unconscious, to help us consider where we are in the world, what our inner self wants.

Maybe we just need a nudge.

“Dave.”

“What do you think this voice is trying to tell you?” my wife asked.

I have no idea.

Maybe the next time it calls in the night, the voice will give me a little clue to that part of the story. Or maybe the simple calling out of my name is all it will ever be, and the rest is up to me.

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David W. Berner is the author of several award-winning books of fiction and memoir. His memoir Daylight Saving Time: The Power of Growing Older is available now for pre-order.