I Was only Dreaming
I Was only Dreaming
The ball shot out of the scrum and bobbled back towards our own corner flag. I followed it. We were playing Argentina; the country that had recently beaten the All Blacks for the first time; the country that gave us the late great Maradona, known at least once to have handled a ball, though unfortunately he was never picked for that proud country's rugby team. The Argentineans would have been expecting me to pick up the ball, William Webb-Ellis style, like an Englishman, and run with it. Their towering winger, and their pack of eight lumbering forwards, were waiting to pounce on me. Cleverly, using previously unsuspected soccer skills, I spun sharply on the ball and started dribbling it up the sideline, past their winger and away from our try line.
Crash! I woke up on the floor, the books from my bedside table lying on top of me. One of my toes was hurting. Rather than spin away from the opposition players, I had cleverly spun myself out of bed. I was destined at some future point if it kept happening to be a candidate for a head injury assessment.
"I don't think I know how to write fiction,” I told my wife one time.
"Fiction is easy,” she said. "You just make it up.”
"No,” I explained. "That's impossible. You have to have character, plot, dialogue, that sort of thing.”
"That's why you have dreams,” she said. "Even impossible things can happen in dreams. Then you just get up and write them down.”
So, in dreams, anything is possible.
* *
We were all living together in a dusty loft above a farm shed. Downstairs, there were animals, bales of hay, old equipment made of metal and leather. Not unlike the former milking shed on our farm at home. The cramped space upstairs was accessed by rickety wooden ladders. That was where we slept, boys, girls, men, women, like one big happy family, all connected by our need to earn a living by working on the farm.
One young couple were obviously very much in love. They were both physically stunning, the most attractive people on the property. They agreed on everything. They would hear no opinions on anything other than each other's. They finished each other's sentences. They went everywhere together. But, in the unnaturally close circumstances in which we were living, they were more like brother and sister than man and wife.
The other workers on the farm hatched a plan. They sent the young woman off to somewhere else they made out to be married to an unknown suitor. They explained to the young man that, as his part of the arrangements, he would need to dress in his best suit and walk across the fields to the nearest town to get a certificate for the wedding.
*
Dreams. Freud's "royal road to the unconscious"; a secret code to unlock the mysteries of our hopes and fears and desires; our sleep-time replaying of the concerns of the day. Freud would have found new material with this one. He famously came up with the idea of the Oedipus complex, named after a mythical Greek king, the secret desire of every little boy to kill his father and marry his mother. He had nothing to say about brothers and sisters. But he would have had some perceptive comment to make.
I have another, literally more prosaic, explanation. That pile of books beside my bed, the ones that had landed on me after my earlier dreams, were Victorian novels I had been reading in preparation for a course I was about to take. The accommodation on the farm could have come from that shared by Tess Durbeyfield and Angel Clare before they became an item. The brother and sister destined to become husband and wife could have been David Copperfield and Agnes Wickfield. Not some deep psychological explanation, not some Greek myth, but ideas from my own bedtime reading.
Modern brain imaging can observe in general terms what we are experiencing during dreams, which parts of the brain are being used, which senses are being stimulated, in what order and for how long. Most dreams are completely forgotten, unless we wake up during the dream. What we recall when we wake corresponds very poorly to what happens during the dream. Even our vivid details of the dream when we first wake are typically quickly forgotten. Fortunately, for writers, we can usually remember the dream differently sometime later, making our own story, adding details as we go, interpret our initial experiences in some other way to make more sense to our rational mind.
Dreams can be dangerous. My parents ended up sleeping in separate beds because of my father's violent dreams. One night, he dreamt he was being attacked by a rampaging bull. He grabbed it by the throat, then fortunately woke up in time to realise it was really my mother.
In fiction writing, we are taught to avoid dreams, not to make up feeble surprise endings, not to end the story of some fanciful event with, "then I woke up and realised I was only dreaming".
*
As the boy from the barn, in my dream, dressed as instructed in his finest clothes, set off across the fields, I followed him. We came to a river, flowing peacefully through the countryside, lined with willows. Not like the steep streams in the dry hills around our home, or in the dense native forest of our favourite walks. More like an old English scene. Like a Constable painting. Or like the more settled farmland in the tamer parts of New Zealand. There was a ford across the river. Before that, there was a flat grassy meadow.
*
I recognised the scene as a place I had been to before. I don't know where it is exactly. And if I knew I would not be able to tell you. I do know exactly what happened when I was there. But that too I am unable to tell you. I am sworn to secrecy. It was a river crossing I had come across while training with the New Zealand Medical Aid team in the countryside around Rotorua, which involved an overnight outdoor exercise. The details, we were told, we were not to divulge to any other person. Like spy school. Like most secrets, of which by their very nature we are prevented from unburdening ourselves, it has stuck in my mind.
I don't know why I dreamt of these things, how they came in to my head. But, because of what happened next, I was keen to work it out.
*
In the meadow by the river were the people from the farm. The men were washed and shaved and wore suits and ties. The women wore colourful ball gowns. Like a period-drama. The beautiful girl from the farm shed, Tess or Agnes or whoever, wore a long white wedding dress. They all smiled as the handsome boy, David or Angel, whoever he was, slowly realised what was going on. He was to be the bridegroom.
We all danced, dangerously performing more and more intricate movements on the rough grass surface. As the bride twirled in her long flowing gown, the circles became faster and tighter, her high-heeled shoes moving uncertainly across the ground. Somehow, I became the bride. As she stumbled, I stumbled. As her foot caught on a clump of grass, and her shoe came off, I was the one who was falling.
*
"What are you doing down there?" asked my wife. I was lying on the floor. Again. My chin hurt. I stumbled into the bathroom. There was a massive bruise on the side of my face.
“I dreamt I was dancing,” I explained.
Me, dancing? I have a fear of dancing, like some people have a fear of public speaking. One of the people at work suggested I might have a secret wish to dance in high heels. They were wrong. I don’t want to dance in anything. I would rather be subjected to extreme pain. Why were people dancing in the meadow? There had been a question on The Chase the previous evening about Swan Lake, the ballet. Perhaps I had chosen to locate that story at my secret river. Or Cinderella? Did my dream borrow ideas from that tale? The handsome couple. The shoe coming off at the end. Maybe. I just wish it had not made me so unstable on my own two feet.
There were plenty of smart comments at work. Some suggested I be admitted as a patient to the hospital, so that I could be observed after my head injury, or so that I could answer the standard screening question on our admission form: "Do you feel safe at home?" Others suggested I fill out the falls risk assessment form or install cot-sides on my bed.
I did have some serious questions of my own about what had happened. I didn't feel right. My head hurt. My bruise was throbbing. My words came out the wrong way round. I asked someone for "an ultra scan sound" rather than an "ultrasound scan". A CT scan of my own head would have been a more appropriate investigation to ask for. I requested my colleagues to keep an eye on me in case I did something unknowingly stupid. They suggested I leave work early and rest my brain. I was careful driving home.
Did the events of that night, like my dream, happen the way I remember them, in that order? Did I fall in my dream, and hit my chin? Or did I get up for some other reason, fall, and knock myself out, and make up the dream later? I will never know. To my mind, I was only dreaming.