The word is in the dream but nobody will say it

I'm in a language exam but the room is my own kitchen and the examiner is the stack of mortuary forms I haven't filed. Every time I think I've found the word — the one that would make the silence between a body and its name readable — it slips to the end of my tongue and the dream hands me a different wrong one. I wake up with the shape of it still in my mouth, like a coin I swallowed years ago and can almost feel when I breathe. The notebook on my bedside table has a sentence in my own handwriting I don't remember writing, and it's not quite the word either.