21 March 2017

just a dream

We are on a ferry travelling to Heligoland. The ferry is crowded and noisy and we have a hard time keeping track of each other. On land, I have an appointment with a surgeon who makes two large incisions in my abdomen. His operating theater is the back room of a pub. He remembers something he must get and puts a large brown sticky bandage on my abdomen.
I wait for a while but I know that he is not coming back. I get up and try to find R and the friends we have been travelling with but the crowds push me towards the railway station and I take a train home.
When I walk into the house, R and all his things are gone.


I rarely remember my dreams. This one felt like a cold wind when I woke from it and I had to get up, wrapped myself into a blanket and went downstairs where R was going through his early morning teacher routine (listening to the world service, reading on his phone and drinking black tea). Like a child who cannot keep a secret I blurted out my dream and he looked at me and said, it's just a memory of your mother, go back to bed.

In the late 1980s, my mother repeatedly tried to kill herself - unsuccessfully. I wasn't there, I have no idea how serious she was, how much of it may have been due to whatever mix of drugs and drink she was trying to shake off. I had left all that behind me years ago. I was safe and sound living in paradise.
My sister eventually forcefully persuaded her to spend some time in a fancy clinic on the North Sea coast and when she returned home after several weeks, probably sober and with good intentions, my father had packed up his stuff and left like a thief in the night.
Years later during one of our rare visits she told me that while in the clinic, she had read a travel guide to paradise and had made inquiries about airline tickets and vaccinations, putting all her hopes of recovery, of saving her marriage, into visiting the daughter who had abandoned her and who was now living in a tiny African country.  And while she told me this, she started to cry and then she pulled the travel guide from the bookshelf and threw it into my face and I left. That was not a dream. That was how we communicated.

Heligoland is a rather dismal place, a small island in the middle of the rough sea, crowded with day visitors buying duty free booze. At least that's what it looked like in the summer of 1978. But i was seasick and supposedly chaperoning a group of troubled teenagers. A job I got through the student union.

20 comments:

molly said...

Whenever I remember dreams (not often) they are just as bizarre. I'm glad R was still there, and acting normal, when you woke up! It is fascinating the things that go on in our heads while we sleep. "They" say it's our subconscious mind trying to untangle the chaos of our lives. You couldn't make the stuff up! Stuff like a surgeon performing surgery in the back room of a pub! The chaos may not get untangled but the efforts to do so are highly entertaining. Not to mention puzzling....Sounds like your mum was a difficult and complicated woman. I really do hope we all meet up again in the afterlife so we can sort out all the hurts and misunderstandings and unfinished business.

37paddington said...

Personal history has so many layers. So many of them painful. I've had such dreams. I wake up breathing hard and terrified.

Elizabeth said...

Wow. Keep remembering writing and dreaming -- perhaps these are all the same.

Roderick Robinson said...

A travel guide to paradise. Have you ever tried to define paradise? It's a weird experience. Almost everything you cite is likely to crop up in someone else's view of Hell (The jury's out on whether that should carry a capital letter; me, I have no intention of arousing powerful enemies.)

You might seek tranquillity, your next door neighbour demands stimulation. An infinite library is of no consequence to a smart-phone addict. And if you have a taste for jam doughnuts you won't want to wash them down with twenty-year-old claret.

As Paul Simon says: "One man's ceiling is another man's floor."

And Heligoland sounded so exotic, distant, sea-girt, populated by foreign versions of Catherine Earnshaw, plus shawl. I am doomed now to spend my summer hols in a suburb of Stuttgart.

joared said...

I think my dreams reflect predominant feelings I'm having at the time. For some years now I don't often recall them or lose them soon after awakening. Have been surprised if I prompt myself when going to sleep to remember any dreams I often do.

Colette said...

I'll give credit where credit is due, your mother was a masterful guilt tripper. Or, considering all she had been through she was likely a desperate person hanging on by a thread. Our parents loom large. Their failures, transgressions, and personal suffering become the stuff of nightmare in our dreams, and sometimes in our lives. You are anxious right now for good reason. It makes sense that your dreams (and your writing) will reflect that. As always, you use it well to make us think.

Anonymous said...

I used to remember my dreams in almost alarming detail. Then, I had what a neurologist called a "neurological event"... a headache that seriously hurt enough to make me go to the nearest ER. I have not remembered a single dream since then, and it's been almost six years. Your dream reminds me of what I am missing, and I am both sad and relieved not to remember. I think R was right that you were dreaming of your mom. Our brains tell us stories at night that we attach a coherent narrative to. Sometimes those narratives can really break our hearts.

Zhoen said...

Less and less often, I dream I am still in my parent's house, trying to find an apartment, often waking so relieved that I have Dylan, and our own house.

Parental nightmares are built into our psyches, we can only dilute them. I'm sorry for yours. Rewriting them was the central point of PTSD therapy. Write on.

am said...

There is something powerful and healing in speaking our dreams out loud and/or writing them down. They do have something for us to feel in dream language. Good to have R's perspective on that one. Of course I thought of this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgqGUBP3Cx0

I noticed that his mother and father appear in the collage of images.

Sabine said...

Indeed, you couldn't make the stuff up. And think of all the rest we don't remember in the mornings!

Sabine said...

My paradise, the one I refer to here and elsewhere in my blog, is a small African country, with stunning natural and human beauty, with a perfect climate, no major health risks - such as malaria - and an impressive education system. We spent several years living and working there and are still homesick.
I would use a capital P if only for the nepotism and money laundering that affect small countries in far away locations.

Sabine said...

I tried that but it doesn't work for me. Lucky you.

Sabine said...

My mother had a complicated life. Every time I think of her, I realise I am only beginning to get a glimpse of what it may have been.

Sabine said...

I wonder what is worse/better, remembering or not being able to. but that event in itself must have been alarming. I am glad you are ok.

Sabine said...

Yes, the relief when waking from it. Almost makes it worthwhile.

Sabine said...

Years and years ago, I attempted to keep a dream diary but found it too difficult and soon realised that I was unintentionally embellishing the bits and pieces I had jotted down upon waking. It felt not right. I gave up.

am said...

What I was trying to say was that writing your dream down here had a powerful and healing effect on me. Wasn't suggesting that you keep a dream diary (-:

It is mysterious how dreams cannot be fully remembered, and that there is another consciousness that we have along with our waking consciousness.

Crafty Green Poet said...

dreams are fascinating

Colette said...

The British folksinger, Linda Thompson, sings a haunting song called Many Dreams Must Fly Away that I think captures my mother - a walled off mystery to me, as well. A woman I love deeply, but still a woman of many secrets and quite a few lies. I can't find a YouTube video, if you are interested you could, no doubt, find it someplace to listen to. Just a thought.

Sabine said...

Thanks Colette, in this household, we love Linda and Richard Thompson.