Dream. Ona nonday I sleep. I dreamt of a somday. Of a wonday I shall wake.

“Dream. Ona nonday I sleep. I dreamt of a somday. Of a wonday I shall wake.” compresses sleep, dreaming, and hoped-for waking into three altered measures of time. Its wordplay makes the anticipated return to consciousness feel both cyclical and unsettled: waking is promised, but only for a day whose name, like the dream itself, resists definition.

Form and sequence

The expression advances in three short clauses: sleep in a “nonday,” a dream of a “somday,” and the prospect of waking on a “wonday.” The changing day-words give the sentence a forward motion without locating it on an ordinary calendar. Its final verb, “shall wake,” makes waking a future expectation rather than a completed fact; the formula ends at the threshold of an event it does not narrate.

Language and time

The invented compounds deform familiar units of time while retaining the recognizable rhythm of a simple account of sleeping, dreaming, and waking. That combination keeps the expression legible as a sequence but prevents its temporal terms from settling into precise meanings. The movement from sleep to dream to wake therefore has a double force: it suggests a passage toward consciousness and leaves the timing of that passage suspended.

Recurrence and the book’s dream form

The expression’s explicit dream setting resonates with the book’s account of writing as a proteiform graph, a text whose marks and meanings remain difficult to stabilize. Elsewhere, the words following a warning sign may be taken in any order, and the document is described as accumulating changes through shifting minds, spellings, pronunciations, and meanings. Against that instability, the three-part dream formula offers a memorable pattern—but not a fixed interpretation. Its anticipated waking also belongs to the book’s recurring movement between sleep and return: the sentence promises an ending that may also begin another cycle.