The Dream Weaver: Memoir

I started keeping a dream journal, fully illustrated, when I was seven. It was on very poor quality brown paper in a floppy wide notebook, and I still have it. I probably began this tradition after hearing my parents say for the umpteenth time, 'you should write them down!' as I related my dreams in tedious detail morning after morning.

One of my earliest recorded dreams was of waking up in the early hours after a nightmare and going in to my parents' bedroom only to find they had disappeared and been replaced by two ugly old women, who screamed at me to get out. Which I did.  In Freud's time this would have had all kinds of psycho-sexual elements attributed to it, but I think today's interpretations would be somewhat different. At the heart of it, I believe, was a child's simple fear of parental abandonment. Another early dream was of a pavilion on the top of a hill, with endless empty rooms that each got smaller and smaller until I was, like Alice, squeezing my way through tiny spaces and wedging myself into an irreversible position.  A third early dream was of an attic room with three windows of different shapes (yes, probably too much Play School on telly)  each of which opened onto an entirely different scene: a desert,  the mountains, the sea, and I had to choose which world I wanted to enter - but knew I would not be able to return.  This evolved into the current Dilemma story, thirty years later, in my Wishing Tree collection.

I have continued to keep dream journals ever since, and now I am glad of it. When I was eleven years old I briefly met my great-grandmother for the first, and last, time. It was in Ireland. She was in her nineties then, and had led a fascinating life, being sent to Burma at the age of 15 to live with an uncle she'd never met because he was a 'relative' as opposed to the affectionate family who were willing to take her in after her mother died.  Anyway, we didn't say much to each other until, for some reason, my dream journal was mentioned, when she informed me that she, also, had written her dreams down all her life. Our bond was instant. I asked her which was her most memorable one, and she replied immediately that she had once dreamt of two children who grew up, met each other as young adults, fell in love, married, had children, grew old, and finally - in her words - 'met Father Time'. That always stayed with me, the epic scale of it. I wondered how she remembered all that detail from a single dream. That was before I began having very long, detailed, and rather epic-scale dreams myself.  But I've never had one quite as remarkable as that.

My great-grandmother, whom I only ever knew as Nan, died not long after we met her. She was feisty and sharp-tongued and had a habit of cutting people off and freezing people out, but to us she showed nothing but courtesy and good humour. I knew her then, and ever since, as a dream weaver extraordinaire.  This blog post is for her.