On Dreams
Around a year and a half ago I started to write down my dreams. What prompted me to do this I am not entirely sure but sometime around then I recall having a very vivid and intense dream where I went to bed with a girl that I had once been very much in love with and, knowing me, that probably had something to do with it.
Another factor was my onsen dreams. Onsen are the hot spas in Japan, often with steaming outdoor pools of mineral water in glorious Alpine locations. When I lived there, I really got into them, almost to the point of obsession and, after leaving, I have missed them intensely for there is, in my opinion, no finer way of relaxing. Stick your spa experiences at the local country club; they pale beside a genuine Japanese onsen.
Anyway, I noticed that I was regularly having dreams about going to onsen or, to be more precise, not going to them. The dreams were never identical, but all shared the same basic plot. I would go back to Japan for some reason — as a holiday, to live and work or visit friends — and would make it my goal to revisit that one glorious onsen that I had loved so much during my time there, up in the mountains (bear in mind, this was not an actual place, more my visualisation of the perfect onsen). But for some reason, things kept getting in the way of my going to it, be it friends who didn’t want to go, delays to do with work, or just little jobs that kept stopping me, and I would always wake before the holy grail had been reached.
I had these dreams so often that I began to think they must mean something, although what that was, I could not fathom. However, when I went to visit North Korea in 2015, on my return to China I visited a genuine oncheon (the Korean version of onsen) which matched its Japanese cousins in all aspects and, after that, the dreams stopped. But as that trip faded, they began again, only fading once more when we went on our European van trips and sampled the waters in some of the continent’s famous mineral baths.
All of which got me to thinking about what do our dreams actually mean? As an adolescent, I’d formulated a theory that the purpose of dreams is to remind us of those things that are important to us, but which do not get the chance to rise to the top of our minds due to the chaotic demands of daily life. Taking this theory, the onsen could symbolise my desire for that perfect onsen (and travel) experience that I yearn for, but which keeps getting pushed back due to the strictures of day-to-day living.
Which brings me back to my decision to start writing down my dreams. The idea was that I would do it for a few months and then have a look at the results to see if they backed up my theory and if I could learn anything else from them. After all, we spend a significant portion of our lives dreaming and so it is a shame that all of those experiences get totally forgotten.
And so, eighteen months on, what have I learnt? Well…
Firstly, there is the process of remembering and recording. Dreams are notorious for being hard to recall almost as soon as you awaken. I cannot tell you what I dreamt about last night, let along a week, a month or a year ago. So, they need to be written down immediately upon waking, and even then, it is difficult, the dream having faded before you even get enough consciousness to put pen to paper. These days I sleep with a diary and a pen which I turn to immediately, before my eyes can even focus and see the page, writing down as much as I can recall in spidery, almost illegible handwriting before it fades away. Later (usually every three months) I then transfer these notes onto an online file. Making sense of them is sometimes a challenge, but less than you would think. What is remarkable is that although the dream had been (I thought) totally erased and forgotten by my brain, when I read those written cues, often it starts to reform itself in my mind and I can recall it quite vividly. Which leads me to think that, somewhere in the brain is a huge filing section where past dreams are stored, just waiting to be accessed with the right password (i.e. my written summary). How wonderful it would be if, in the future, we could work out how to access this in its entirety and to really and truly explore numerous past dreams!
Nor is that the only thing that I have learnt about the remembering process. Another is that it gets easier the more that you do it. When I started, remembering even the bare bones of a dream was very difficult, but then after a few days, it got easier and then I was recalling numerous dreams in a single night in some detail. But if I fell out of the habit, as I often do, then the skill is lost again, and I can have a week with no dreams recalled before I manage to get into the swing again and recall several days straight of numerous and detailed dreams.
I also find that the knowledge of the fact that I need to recall and write down my dreams impacts on the dream itself and that this can lead to what I call corrupted dreams. This is when I have a particularly vivid (and in my dreaming state, I imagine meaningful and significant) dream, I remind myself whilst still asleep that I really need to remember this one and work out its deep meaning and so I find myself replaying it, looking for gaps and exploring certain aspects of it so that the original dream becomes corrupted and almost lost, like a recording on a magnetic tape that had been played and chewed up so many times that only a garbled rendition can be heard.
But onto the dreams themselves, what of them? Well, firstly there is an amazing cast of over two hundred characters from throughout my life. Of these, the largest single group (forty-two) are colleagues from various jobs which demonstrates, I suppose, the huge amount of time we all spend at and thinking about work. From the general secretary of the Aegis union to former prison officers at HMP Dovegate and the landlady of the Bird in Hand where I worked as a barman during my late teens, they’re all in there. The other significant groups are family (twenty-five) and former classmates and teachers at Draycott Manor Primary School and Blythe Bridge High School. Add to these the eleven visitors from my degree at the University of Leeds and the importance of the time that we spend in education becomes apparent, even when it is far back in time. Indeed, what these figures do not express is the frequency of appearances — some may make one fleeting appearance in a dream, others are regular visitors — but dreams about being back at school are common.
Connected with the above are the ten students who have appeared, all from my time spent in HMP Dovegate or at the George Byron School in Varna, Bulgaria. Work and school really do have a massive impact upon us.
Another large group are the thirty-three characters I have met on my travels. These are such a mixed bunch as to hardly be called a single group, ranging from a girl I met on a package holiday to Corfu in 1996 to ex-girlfriends, roommates in North Korea and folk I walked the Camino with. And this latter group are definitely worth mentioning, for Camino dreams were amongst the most frequent of them all. This is partly explicable by the fact that I was walking it during the period that I dreamed the dreams, but even so, their frequency is striking, and it is clear that my mind was often on Camino when my body was not. There were no less than twelve Camino visitors, a third of all those travelling friends and they were amongst the most frequent.
Another intriguing group are the five fellow volunteers at the Foxfield Light Railway where I worked from 1993–6 at the weekends. Saying that Foxfield was so far back in my past and so unimportant on my life today, the frequency of Foxfield dreams was startling; that little railway was often on my mind, and I am unsure as to why? Was it because, like the onsen, I was subconsciously missing its impact on my life?
The final group of interest were the eight attendees from my Japan days, perhaps tied in with those onsen dreams. The remaining forty-eight were a complete mixed bag of neighbours, partners of other characters, vicars, political leaders, and friends acquired at random points in life. All in all, what was striking was just how much more holistic the array of characters in my dreams is than the number of people who cross my mind in the waking hours.
But whilst those are the numbers of people, who turns up the most? Well, perhaps unsurprisingly, those closest to us are the most frequent visitors. My son is a regular, but so too my parents (and I am often still a kid in those dreams). My maternal grandmother is another regular and, interestingly, one of the most frequent locations is her house. This was a large place that we spent many happy hours in growing up but, when she died, my uncle inherited and then sold against her wishes, something that did not go down well with either my brother or me. Does its regular appearance mean that, psychologically, I still long for it (or what it represented — innocence, childhood, playtime) or that I am still angry with him for what he did? I can’t say for sure but one thing that is for sure is that her house is one of the very few places that is not affected by what I term dream location.
What I mean by this, is that when her house appears, it appears much as it was in real-life (or very similar too). But most of the locations do not. So, I will go to, say, Ōsawano where I used to live in Japan, but it is nothing like the Ōsawano of reality. Nonetheless, I know that it is Ōsawano and this same, alternative version of Ōsawano often crops up in multiple dreams whilst the real place never does. And this is common, very common, whilst the real places are rare. Weird, and I can’t explain it.
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But going back to my frequent visitors, another group that just keep turning up are past amours. E, a girl that I fell in love with at university, is a regular, but it is rare that we are together. Instead (our relationship ended badly) the dream normally focusses on seeing her for the first time in years and us uneasily greeting each other and agreeing to put the past behind us (although never that warmly). It is better with some others; cute girls that I fancied at school or met on my travels regularly turn up to hang out in my dreams. Oh, if only life echoed dreamtime in that sense!
As well as frequent visitors, there are the frequent destinations. I have mentioned my grandmother’s house and walking Camino, but they are not the only ones. Foxfield is another, most unexpected regular, as too Blythe Bridge High School and the village where I grew up as well as the city where I live now.
Then there is the question of what causes one to dream of certain things. There are countless books dedicated to this and the symbolism of certain dreams, but some are more obvious than others. Like the time I dreamed that I was watching a Sri Lanka versus England test match at Galle during the period when England were on a test tour of Sri Lanka, or another when I dreamed about travelling on one of the new Lupo trains north to Scotland from Kings Cross when, the last thing that I’d done before going to bed had been to watch a YouTube video by a guy who was taking a trip on… you guessed it, a Lupo train from Kings Cross.
So, they are the obvious ones, but surprisingly few are that clear cut. Many more head back into time into places like my grandmother’s house or primary school that are not on my immediate mind today. Many more though, are seemingly random, with locations ranging from council tower blocks to a Greek ferry, an alternative version of to an imaginary subterranean railway station called Cheviot Puff.
And perhaps that is where I should leave all this, for if I have learned anything about my dreams these past eighteen months or more, it is that whilst there may be meaning embedded within them somewhere, more often than not, they are simply random, jumbled, incoherent and entirely puzzling to a degree that a huge number are probably better best forgotten.
Conversely, there is the odd gem in there, and for those few precious pearls, it is worthwhile keeping jotting them down.
But I have spoken enough and so, instead, I shall close my eyes to sleep and finish this essay with a selection of ten of the best and weirdest of my nocturnal wanderings into the realm of illusions.
Sweet dreams!
#1: We go to see R (my brother). B (my niece) is a baby. Tom accidentally kills her by screwing her into a jar of mayonnaise and putting it in the fridge.
#2: Strange short dream. Foxfield Bank had been tarmacked and N (Foxfield volunteer) was riding a white horse up it. The horse stumbled, fell, and broke its leg. N went to get help. The horse drowned in a deceptively deep puddle.
#3: Went to Santiago on holiday. Walked the last mile or two of the Camino with Tom. His school were there too. I wouldn’t go into the cathedral (or see it) as I didn’t want to spoil it for when I arrived on my real Camino. Saw P (guy I met travelling in North Korea). He admitted that he’d done psychosocial drugs but stopped before it got out of hand. Earlier on I also saw N (girl I used to work with). Had slept with her in another dream. We agreed that we’d both been a bit messed up then, but that we’d enjoyed the experience and, who knows, perhaps we would do it again in the future.
#4: In Florida, Mar-A-Largo. See a woman in a tourist bazaar with big hair. Recognise her as a former Sri Lankan female international cricketer.
#5: In my grandmother’s house. We were aware that it belonged to someone else. Some of my ex-students from Bulgaria came for a party. Also, a former Italian nun who was very shy. It turned-out that she had been Uncle D’s secret lover and, apparently, the only person that he’d ever told was Aunty J.
#6: A coherent dream in which I am on a cruise/ferry sailing to Israel possibly from Italy. I am travelling with my goddaughter and others and am on a vegetarian diet. We stop off at different places including an island with a holy spring. We stop off in Egypt and there is a pretty girl there with long raven hair who is actually a figure from history — perhaps a shrine keeper — and is of Greek extraction. We never get to Haifa.
#7: Was being chased by Jeremy Beadle supported by clones of Margaret Thatcher through a vast council tower block. Got out. Escaped through San Francisco whilst being chased by people in cars. On the Golden Gate Bridge as it collapses into the water in a post-apocalyptic scene. I am playing in the ruins and the Boatcake barge is there run by a cage fighter. The final scene was a rugby match with Matt Tindall and other famous players, mostly retired, and M (union colleague) who returned with a weeping eye as an ex-Salford rugby league player. Jokes about this being the first game of running rugby in years because everyone places a tackling game only these days.
#8: Two sisters from a chav family who work on a steam railway. They want to drive locos but are always given jobs chipping away clinker in a smokebox. They cannot go on society trips as they have no money. Other female members — daughters of loco owners — get treated better. The chav girls volunteer on the steam railway because their great-grandmother worked on them during the war. In peacetime she returned to her housewife role. They spend their lives scrubbing with a wire brush, the sound of which echoes through the museum. In the dream I was composing this above story as a poem, part metered and part free verse. It is titled the Sisters of the Perpetual Smokebox.
#9: A dream involving Boris Johnson. I go out walking in the countryside. I see a calf being born (at first I mistake it for a vulture on a corpse). I’m invited by the vet to see the birth up close. I chat with Boris Johnson. Although a buffoon, he’s quite fun company. Like R (an old schoolfriend), he is obsessed with ogling women. Tom gets on with him.
#10: E (former amour) was there. We went for a walk into the fields, towards the Sinking Pond, to talk. As we walked, she laid her head on my breast. She had not aged and wore the same shirt that she has on in the picture with G that we took when we first met. She said that we had lost a lifetime. She said that she wished we had been together, and that her husband would not be happy if he knew she was here with me. She said that her marriage had not been successful, that he left her sometimes to sleep elsewhere. I asked if he hit her, and she said that he sometimes did. Wild white horses ran across the field below the Half Moon Tree. She said that she wanted us to be together. Then we were disturbed by dogs and there was a fox sheltering at my feet. I distracted the dogs so that the fox could escape. Two teenage fox hunters came and threw manure at me. I threw some back. Then I saw their mother and asked her to control them. She admitted that they were a problem and I said that I understood. Went back to E and then woke up.
01/04/22, Smallthorne, UK
There is a sequel to this article. After publishing this, I was contacted by Martin who had researched dreams in his youth. We met up and discussed the Freudian perspective and here is the result of our explorations: More on Dreams.
