Bad dreams in the night...

Wednesday, March 5th, 2014

Me. Exactly me.

I had a bad dream last night. I don't have them very often - or at least I very rarely remember them - and neither do I like having them. Dreams, good or bad, unsettle me, because it demonstrates to me that the unconscious mind has a power over me, that my mind does things I cannot control, and I don't like that thought.
When I was a child I used to have a recurring nightmare which makes little sense to me now, and I've always wondered what it meant. I was in a vast empty black void, but standing on a train track which crisscrossed many other tracks shooting off into the inky nothingness in lots of different directions.
Then, thundering towards me along one track came a giant ball of what I can only describe as Plasticine or clay, intent on crushing me. I would shout "Press the button! Turn the switch!" out loud in my sleep, prompting my mum or dad to rush in and wake me up to stop the nightmare.
I had this quite often for a period of time, always ending, like a Doctor Who cliffhanger, with me shouting to press the button and make it stop. Weird.
Last night's bad dream really did feed into something buried deep in my psyche from childhood. When I was a schoolboy in the 1980s they used to show us schools programmes on the TV - Look and Read, Middle English, that kind of stuff - and they used to have a serialised story called Interference, which absolutely terrified me as a nine-year-old.
It was about a family which went away to stay in a cottage for the summer holidays but discovered that there were problems with the electricity and at night the power would go off. It transpired there was a ghost in the generator in the cellar, and it would manifest in different ways, most pant-wettingly of all as a scarcely-glimpsed crying face of an old woman through the interference on the television screen (even though there was no power to the TV!).
Last night's bad dream involved Gareth and I going to a cottage in the countryside to visit what I seem to recall from the dream were supposed to be quite an odd couple, a man and his wife.
Then the dream started twisting and changing, as they do, until people and situations changed and the cottage became my mum and dad's house, and the odd couple became my parents (I think - even as I type it's fading!).
For some reason I then tried to discover if my mum and dad's house was haunted by asking out loud if there was any spirit in the room, and we established that there was the spirit of a young boy.
I asked whether the ghost boy had been haunting my mum for some time, and then a scratchy moving image of a young boy's face came up on the portable TV, in and out of a haze of interference, and it answered each of my questions my making the interference hiss loudly.
I asked: "Have you been with my mum for a year or more?"
The TV hissed.
"Have you been with her for two years or more?"
It hissed again. My mum was now getting quite hysterical with fear, with the though that she'd been followed by the ghost of a little boy for all this time.
I asked: "Have you been with her for three years or more?"
It hissed again. At this point we all got really spooked because, in the dream at least, it was a fact that my parents hadn't been in this house that long, so the ghost had obviously followed them there from somewhere else!
It was at this point that I was woken from my bad dream by Gareth moaning loudly in his sleep, obviously having a bad dream of his own. I nudged him to disturb him from his nightmare, and when we both woke properly a few hours later I asked him if he remembered having a nightmare. Sadly, he didn't, but I do wonder whether he was "sharing" my bad dream in some way.
Needless to say I won't be telling my mum about this incident, but it demonstrates the reason why I really don't like dreams and nightmares. They are uncontrollable within us, like demons of the mind.