The Manderley Dream Period

The Manderley Dream Period is a recurring sequence in which Michael Noonan’s sleeping life draws him back to Sara Laughs, turning bereavement and creative paralysis into an increasingly threatening landscape. The dreams begin after a conversation about the crowded fall 1998 publishing lists, recur through the winter of 1997, and culminate in a nightmare that leaves Michael crawling and striking his head against a bedroom corner. Their force lies in the contrast between a daytime life in which he rarely thinks of Sara Laughs and a night world from which he wakes with grief, dread, and an uncanny sense of return.

Beginning and Pattern

Michael later connects the dreams’ beginning to an October 1997 telephone call from his agent, Harold Oblowski. Harold’s stated purpose was to congratulate him on the impending release of Darcy’s Admirer, but he had also spoken with Michael’s editor, Debra Weinstock, about the fall 1998 publishing season. The exchange concerned the crowded fiction lists and the appearance of surprise additions; in retrospect, Michael identifies that call as the likely point at which the dreams began.

The dreams initially have a surreal simplicity. Michael wakes wanting to turn on the bedroom light and confirm where he is, as if the dream had loosened his hold on ordinary reality. Their atmosphere recalls the charged stillness before a thunderstorm: colors seem feverishly vivid, and the experience leaves behind a feeling that is not quite sickness. He sometimes thinks of the dreams through the image of returning to Manderley, while the lake and its loons become part of the dream’s ominous imaginative geography.

The recurrence is itself unsettling. Michael describes waking from the dreams and establishing his return to reality by turning over and proving that his body still obeys his mind. The repeated dream seems to him like the subconscious insistently digging at something that cannot be dislodged. Yet the emotional pattern is mixed: he feels foreboding and sadness on waking, but also admits that part of him enjoys the dream’s breathless summer calm and exotic strangeness, qualities missing from his waking life while his imagination remains blocked.

The Culminating Nightmare

The last dream in the series follows a day of distress over Harold’s proposed contract. As a storm intensifies and the power fails, Michael falls asleep; he later calls the resulting nightmare the series’ culmination. It starts in familiar fashion, with him walking up the lane among the crickets and loons, but the scene changes when he notices a WBLM radio-station sticker on the Sara Laughs sign. Looking up, he sees Venus and wishes, as he habitually does, for Johanna.

The nightmare converts Michael’s approach to the house into a trap. A presence behind him seems to prevent him from turning, and his fear gathers around the prospect of what may be inside Sara Laughs and what is following him through the woods. When the back door opens, a swift, shrieking figure emerges: human in outline, wrapped in a crumpled white covering, with no visible face. Michael takes it for Jo escaped from her coffin and winding shroud. The figure races toward him, and the dream leaves him expecting an encounter that will end in terror and permanent madness.

The awakening does not immediately restore the ordinary world. Michael wakes on the floor, crying out and repeatedly banging his head against the point where the bedroom walls meet. He has fallen out of bed and crawled across the room while asleep; with the power out and no bedside clock to tell him the time, he cannot establish how long he has been there. At first he cannot leave the corner because it feels safer than the open room, and he remains afraid that the white figure will come from the bathroom. Shivering, cold, and wet because he has lost control of his bladder, he wonders whether a nightmare could drive him insane. He dates the episode to a March night and remembers it as a moment when the dream’s force held on after waking.

Grief, Return, and Change

The dreams belong to a larger pattern of Michael’s continuing grief for Jo. An earlier encounter with a paperback copy of The Moon and Sixpence makes her death newly undeniable: a line he is reading prompts the recognition that Jo will never turn the page, and the small book makes the loss more immediate to him than the coffin or funeral had. Later, while alone in his Derry office, Michael pours champagne and tells Jo that he is done. There is no response, and he explicitly distinguishes that silence from the later sense that he is not alone in an apparently empty room. The dreams thus occupy a stage in which Jo remains present in memory and desire, but not yet as an answering presence.

After Michael returns to Sara Laughs, the emotional aftermath shifts. Following an early morning’s work, he sits on the railroad-tie steps down to the lake and cries for the years spent without Jo, friends, or work; he also cries in gratitude that the years without work may be ending, while acknowledging that eight pages do not yet make a career. Fear is part of the release: he realizes he has been walking a white line since Jo died and believes he has somehow been carried out of danger. The lake water feels like a resurrection. In the later supernatural confrontation, Jo appears through the rain and clouds, exhausted but present, after Sara’s hatred has been burned away. Michael recognizes her as having come to help him, and their shared sense of having succeeded gives their bond a new form rather than simply reproducing the earlier silence.

At the close of his account, Michael says he has shut his book of dreams of his own free will, though he remains haunted and refuses to haunt himself deliberately. His care is now also directed toward the child sleeping down the hall, whom he describes as his little one. He has lost his taste for ghost stories and sees other things as more important than returning to them. The dream period therefore registers both the persistence of bereavement and a change in what claims Michael’s attention: Jo’s memory remains part of his life, but no longer occupies the whole of it.