hovering dreamwings, folding around (FW65, No. 40 - III.4, 572-578)

The scenes in III.4 of the parents hurrying into the child's room, and the mother comforting and singing lullabies, are touching, and present some temporarily sure ground to stand on, like when you feel the sandy sea floor briefly under your foot as you are swimming towards the shore and testing the depth. Of course, it also confuses me, which shouldn't be surprising. 

In another version, this chapter could have represented inside and outside the dream simultaneously: the frame breaks momentarily to hear the mother's soothing words. This doesn't seem to be the case. The mother's voice is not given after an em-dash, not represented explicitly as quoted speech. More strangely, on p. 576, it is surrounded by five brief quotations marked in this way, which could be read as the four evangelists making comments about what they see, but which, for me, are the mother and father sleepily talking about what to do when their child is clearly not sleeping deeply yet. (Of course it could be both.) This positions the mother's speech as in line with the bulk of the text of FW, visually indistinct from the different narrators, both identified, implied, and not, throughout the book. 

There is, however, an interplay between the child being comforted and the subject of the surrounding dream.

While hovering dreamwings, folding around, will hide from fears my wee mee mannikin, keep by big wig long strong manomen, guard my bairn, mon beau (FW 576.14-16).

Like on p. 565-566, the mother believes the child is having a nightmare. There, she says that the big man won't hurt him; here, she calls him a big man himself (he is growing; the child is becoming the father), although the "fear" that she is protecting him from hide fear (Ir. "man"). She speaks about him not only as her little son (Eng/Ir bairn) but her beau, her handsome man. 

Just earlier, the dream focused on the trail of a man accused of incest, the presentation of evidence against him, the attempt of his wife to exonerate him, and the inconclusive ending (the case seems to be thrown out because a corpse has no right to property). The dreamer being comforted does seem to be reflected in this dream. But what follows does not seem to be the continuation of the dream, but an elaborate prayer (back in FW's usual dream language dialect) for the parents' safe return to their bed. 

We could say that this is Mamalujo speaking, watching what is happening, but I'm not so sure. If FW is not simply the dreams of a person, from falling asleep to waking (with some interruption), there may not be a simple way to explain it in a basic communicative understanding of how narrative works. It is "about" the night, "represents" dreams, mimics them, and even, in III.4, evokes the difference between waking and sleeping, but that does not mean that we are in the thoughts of one or more dreamers, and that the dream speech is coherent with a bedrock real world "reality conceit" as I have called it (I think that is still a thing, but it does not have to ground the dream in the way I am describing here). I am still searching for the way to describe this.