Last night I had a recurring dream I haven’t had for ages, years. It’s the one where I have committed a murder and the police are gradually closing in. It not a horrific dream, the details (or even the broad outline) of the actual murder or any clue as to the identity of the victim are absent. The dream is just about the inevitability of the net closing and, unlike most of my recurring dreams, has different plots on the same theme. Last night it mostly involved sneaking in and out of a church, moving things around in a car, two different leather motorbike jackets and a packet of cigarettes which for some reason had to be in the correct leather jacket’s pocket. Finally I emerged from the choir stalls, hoping I’d fooled the police, and got arrested. Its not even frightening just a sense of calm inevitability.
That’s not a particularly common one. My most common is to do with water and recurred throughout most of my late teens and twenties and periodically up until now. There are two of them both locations, one a beach with huge waves crashing into a corner where I dive in and swim through the waves or get washed up onto the beach again. The second is a bend in a stream in the countryside with a bridge and a small weir, occasionally I swim round the bend.
And there’s a building with a circular tower on the corner. Winding round inside the double wall of this tower is a staircase, it leads from a landing into the room inside the tower. Sometimes I go further and climb out through the window onto the roof or the gable windows. The whole building is very big, it has a large central room downstairs with rooms all round and an almost separate side wing with lots more rooms downstairs and upstairs. Sometimes there are people I know living in the rooms or parts of the building subdivided as flats. There’s always somewhere for me to live and to put other people up. I don’t think the house is ever mine, but I always want it to be.
The worst dream is the neglected gerbil one. I have a gerbil in a cage which I keep forgetting about and have to retrieve from the bottom of the wardrobe where it’s got full of bedding. I dig through the bedding in terror of finding the gerbil dead, but it’s always alive, I’ve always got away with it again. This is the only one that disturbs me, I used to have it a lot when I was worried about mum. Since her death 16 months ago I haven’t had it at all.
