Other People's Dreams
Had a dream that my first girlfriend had died. She drowned in the dream and they say it is the nicest way to die, though I suspect they are wrong. Because how the fuck would they know?
The dream took me on a journey to monied and sunny parts of Southern England, her old stomping ground: lush greenery and old, old stone. Flint chips in mortar. Red brick that saw Civil War musket balls. Narrow green glass rattling in squat, square windows. Winding pathways and private roads, all dappled sunlight in an endless summer.
It was a dream. It probably rained a lot at the time. I don't remember. It was a long time ago and the rainy bits aren't the most interesting parts, apart from one particularly pregnant storm. Rainy days did not inform this part of my subconscious.
Though it is hard to say what did. The image of that girl is so heavily pressed into my memories of that time - I was very keen - that this strange post-her landscape bears no relation to any of my actual experiences. In the dream there is an attractive but severe aunt presiding over things. She is a vague but sexy threat, full of censure and sustained eye-contact; black, Spanish eyes, spattered with white light. She never existed. Nor did the sprawling Bohemian house she lived in: the long rooms under glass, the lamps and throws, the fabric mirrored and fringed, and light falling lazily in stripes, stubborn shadows clinging. This seems more like a swollen exaggeration of the West Hampstead flat that she moved to while we were still nominally going out. Perhaps the last place I saw her.
Friends appeared in the dream: spindly, dressed-in-black friends, as they were thirty years ago. Sometimes they are hazily out of focus, and sometimes edging into super-natural clarity, so eyelashes and skin pores can be counted. Other friends, unknown friends, friends who didn't exist yet, also pop up. No doubt for symbolic value. Though what they symbolise I have no idea.
As usual the dream was a strange stagger through memory, softening the plasticity of the past, melting and teasing it into new sudden shapes, and adding its own odd ideas for unknown ends. Why is she dead? Why did she drown? (She hasn't actually died to the best of my knowledge) Who is the aunt? (She did have an aunt - a chippy woman in a terraced house in Cambridge - I didn't much care for her and the aunt in the dream definitely wasn't her) Why are there people from Belfast cropping up in this green ribboned Dream of Wessex? This is Tir na nog an obvious Land of the Young - we are all beautiful here. She even leaves behind a beautiful corpse. Though I never appear in the dream - the dream is framed like a murderer's P.O.V. in a 70's Giallo: all that's missing are the leather gloves breaking into the frame - I know that from the context I am young. I am thin and dark haired and not yet scared to smile. Maybe that's why I wake from this dream smiling, despite it being about the death of someone I haven't seen for twenty five years.
It was nice to go back. The sun, the stone, the glass, the green, the youth. Youth does have its advantages.
The dream took me on a journey to monied and sunny parts of Southern England, her old stomping ground: lush greenery and old, old stone. Flint chips in mortar. Red brick that saw Civil War musket balls. Narrow green glass rattling in squat, square windows. Winding pathways and private roads, all dappled sunlight in an endless summer.
It was a dream. It probably rained a lot at the time. I don't remember. It was a long time ago and the rainy bits aren't the most interesting parts, apart from one particularly pregnant storm. Rainy days did not inform this part of my subconscious.
Though it is hard to say what did. The image of that girl is so heavily pressed into my memories of that time - I was very keen - that this strange post-her landscape bears no relation to any of my actual experiences. In the dream there is an attractive but severe aunt presiding over things. She is a vague but sexy threat, full of censure and sustained eye-contact; black, Spanish eyes, spattered with white light. She never existed. Nor did the sprawling Bohemian house she lived in: the long rooms under glass, the lamps and throws, the fabric mirrored and fringed, and light falling lazily in stripes, stubborn shadows clinging. This seems more like a swollen exaggeration of the West Hampstead flat that she moved to while we were still nominally going out. Perhaps the last place I saw her.
Friends appeared in the dream: spindly, dressed-in-black friends, as they were thirty years ago. Sometimes they are hazily out of focus, and sometimes edging into super-natural clarity, so eyelashes and skin pores can be counted. Other friends, unknown friends, friends who didn't exist yet, also pop up. No doubt for symbolic value. Though what they symbolise I have no idea.
As usual the dream was a strange stagger through memory, softening the plasticity of the past, melting and teasing it into new sudden shapes, and adding its own odd ideas for unknown ends. Why is she dead? Why did she drown? (She hasn't actually died to the best of my knowledge) Who is the aunt? (She did have an aunt - a chippy woman in a terraced house in Cambridge - I didn't much care for her and the aunt in the dream definitely wasn't her) Why are there people from Belfast cropping up in this green ribboned Dream of Wessex? This is Tir na nog an obvious Land of the Young - we are all beautiful here. She even leaves behind a beautiful corpse. Though I never appear in the dream - the dream is framed like a murderer's P.O.V. in a 70's Giallo: all that's missing are the leather gloves breaking into the frame - I know that from the context I am young. I am thin and dark haired and not yet scared to smile. Maybe that's why I wake from this dream smiling, despite it being about the death of someone I haven't seen for twenty five years.
It was nice to go back. The sun, the stone, the glass, the green, the youth. Youth does have its advantages.
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