Other people’s dreams

Other people’s dream stories are almost as dull as other people’s drug stories, so forgive me. But I’ve had wretched nightmares, I feel shaken, and I want to write them down.

In the first part, I was being chased and chased and chased in the dark. I didn’t know anything except that I was being chased. I was caught and seized by countless cut-off arms and hands. The hands reached into my mouth, more and hands, gripped my jaws, and began to pull.

The second part was longer and more lucid. I was thrown into the middle of a Hercule Poirot mystery. I was investigating a series of murders. I knew who’d done it, and how, but there was no proof. There were four of them. They took turns to control and possess the recently dead, and marched bodies around like extensions of life. Two dead men shuffled down the street in a pantomime horse. I woke in a four poster bed. A dozen corpses stood in a rigid circle around me, staring, staring. One of the four watched me from a mirror. Another watched from a house across the street. At last, we came to the great denouement and I knew that it would all be over and that Poirot would pin the villains, because he always does. But he turned and pointed at me. The four murderers sat back and grinned as a host of characters fell upon me and ripped me into chunks and pieces. The last thing I saw was a smarmy smile from one of the four and I knew, I knew, that he was about to possess the tatters of my dead body.

And then I woke up.

I almost never remember my dreams. I sometimes wonder if I write as a substitute—if dreams are how the subconscious files information, couldn’t writing do the same? Both writing and dreams are the invention, collection, curation, evolution and distillation of lived experience.

I’ve seen both Indy and Dora with a baby’s nightfrights, their faces crumpled with whatever milky horrors a baby can imagine. Can a baby even experience enough to twist it into nightmares? Probably more than an adult, now I think about it. Dreams tap into the darkest corners of our extraordinary brains. Dreams take us, stumbling, into the unmapped places—and for a new baby, there is far more to explore. Dreams lead us to unopened doors, or doors opened long ago and locked up ever since.

It’s fading, now. I still remember what happened, but the dread is melting away. I rocked Indy back to sleep and now I have a cup of tea. I have a writing day today, and I’m going to see British Sea Power tonight. Sparrows are squabbling in the dog roses. It’s 6.29am, and I think I hear Dora on the stairs. It’s another day.