In everyday life we belong to groups – most closely, our immediate family, fanning out to our extended family, our region, our nation, our continent, our culture; ultimately all of humanity. On the dreaming level of consciousness we have access to the collective experience and archetypal symbols of all our dreaming tribes.
My friend and fellow-author, Katherine Langrish, told me the extraordinary story of her family dream over dinner at a conference some years ago, and I’m delighted she has agreed to share it here.
Roughs and smooths, by Katherine Langrish
Katherine LangrishWhen I was a child, I used to have a recurrent dream – or nightmare – in which I would be lying in bed, apparently awake, and see a thing like a stone or boulder come rolling from one corner of the ceiling (and yet as if from a million miles away) – and as it came, everything went crumpled. It would roll and roll across the ceiling, and with it came a sickening sensation as if I was seeing the skin of the world pulled off and chaos underneath. Then it would roll back again and everything would go smooth, but the feeling remained, because I knew that underneath the appearance of smoothness, the sickening crumples were still there.
It was a dream that was often repeated, and the feeling often heralded it, so that it was possible to say to myself, Oh, it’s coming. As I grew older the feeling would sometimes come without the dream, and after the age of about 11 or 12, it vanished for ever.
While I was still having them, I told my mother about them, and she said, “Oh, do you get those too? I used to have them, and so did my father; he called them roughs and smooths.” My mother’s and grandfather’s versions were slightly different. I think she said my grandfather saw ‘it’ as something like a barrel. For herself she said, “something came towards me rolling, and everything broke up. But you stop getting them when you’re about twelve.” I remember feeling a mild but real relief that she knew what I was talking about.
I never told my own children about the dream, because I didn’t want them to have it, and I didn’t want to suggest anything to them which might influence them into having it, but they both did get variants after all, and one daughter in particular was prone to them. Aged about seven, having woken upset, she told me, “I see squiggly lines” – she drew one in the air with a finger, “squiggly lines, and it all goes wrong.” Asked next morning, she said she’d be half asleep, half awake, and see “squiggly lines, jagged lines, calm lines. They come and go. There’s a horrible feeling with them.”
I reassured her that she’d simply got the family dream, and it wasn’t anything to worry about, and would take itself off when she was about twelve. And it did. I don’t know if anyone else has ever had an inherited dream, and I feel it’s got to be something to do with brain patterns, but I’m happy to leave it at that and not know anything more about it. I hope it doesn’t get handed down any further – as a family heirloom, it’s one we could well do without.
‘Forsaken’ by Katherine LangrishKatherine’s blog, Seven Miles of Steel Thistles, dips deep into the realm of myths and fairy-tales, and her books likewise have a wonderfully mythic feel. You can see a brilliant trailer for her new book, ‘Forsaken’ onher website
I’ve had so much interesting feedback after last week’s post about depression, dreams and the creative life that I’ve decided to make a diversion from my usual themes of dreaming and writing, and talk about my own black dog.
Children can have depression too
He first showed up when I was a child and, by the time I was eight, I had a secret collection of things I could use to kill myself with. I couldn’t, of course, keep my depression secret. It involved whole days of crying, hiding or refusing to get out of bed.
The doctor decided the problem must be hormonal, so at the age of eleven I was put on the pill, to try and regulate my hormones. It didn’t help. I graduated to antidepressants in my mid teens, and a psychiatrist I saw briefly at nineteen added sleeping pills to the mix.
Nothing helped, and I didn’t doubt for one moment that sooner or later my black dog was going to kill me. Maybe he would have, if my big sister’s black dog hadn’t killed her first.
When someone close to you commits suicide, suddenly it isn’t abstract any more. You can’t tell yourself that nobody will care, or that they’d be better off without you. You properly understand the concept of never coming back.
My sister killed herself with prescription drugs washed down by wine – a fact that seemed proof positive of what I already suspected – the drugs were not the cure. I stopped taking them.
Then things got really scary.
Hiding in the dead planet – how I pictured my depression as a young adult
I was in therapy with a psychiatrist for three years. It was a holding-space. The black dog hadn’t killed me, but he might as well have, because all that time focusing hard on every bad thing that had ever happened in my life, mysteriously failed to lift the darkness.
So there I was, clear of chemicals and all talked out with the talking cure; just me, all on my own, with this big black dog.
What happened next might surprise you – it surprised me. I discovered American self-help. It was all American in those days – here in Britain, the idea of self-help was eyed with suspicion as flakey, self-indulgent and unscientific.
What it boiled down to was observing your mind, understanding its behaviour and modifying it. And taming the mind turned out to be taming the black dog.
Now that science has caught up, these ideas have become mainstream, wrapped up in shiny new Cognitive Behavioural Therapy packaging. I’ve written a number of children’s self-help books based on CBT, because there’s nothing complicated about it; it’s mostly a question of awareness.
My black dog still shows up from time to time, but not very often and never for very long. I think that’s what happens with any dark thing in the soul – when you embrace the darkness, it becomes less dark.
I wish I’d been kinder and more patient with my black dog from the start but then maybe I simply wasn’t able to be – patience may be one of the gifts he has brought me.
This is just my story, of course. Other people will find prescription drugs and psychotherapy more helpful than I did, although both can have serious side-effects. I would add that, although my years in therapy didn’t help me handle the black dog, they did bring me benefits and insights for which I am grateful.
How a Dream Became a Fairy Tale – by Juanita Havill
I’ve kept dream journals for years and they provide inspiration, characters, and plots. One in particular, about a glass bed, led easily into a story…
The boy I was babysitting didn’t want to go to sleep. “I’m afraid,” he protested. He balked. I insisted. Still he wouldn’t move. So naturally I turned to an alternate bed, that is, a glass bed. I don’t recall exactly why I had the glass bed with me, but what a relief!
As soon as I rolled the heavy glass bed into his bedroom, he lay on it, stretched out, and fell asleep without the comfort of sheets, pillow, or blanket.
The headboard of the bed impressed me mightily. Thick glass, it was carved with images of children, youths, deer, rabbits, and foxes. I watched him snooze for a while to make sure that he was not feigning sleep. The warm glow from the little boy’s night light illuminated the glass carvings. Satisfied, I woke up.
I don’t always wake up from dreams satisfied. Often times I’m anxious, puzzled, or fearful, but not this time. I wrote a quick account of the dream in my journal, and a few years later I turned the dream into a short tale for a children’s magazine and “The Glass Bed” was published.
Such is the waking mind that the story became a fairy tale in which a young prince refuses to go to bed at night and neither king nor queen nor princess nor court wizard can come up with a solution.
Although the court jester’s idea of a glass bed is scoffed at, finally the transparent bed with its solid glass headboard is installed in the prince’s room.
The prince continues to have frightening dreams, but because he is no longer alone, he is able to sleep. Why isn’t he alone? Because everyone at court crowds into his bedroom to watch the prince’s scary dreams projected across the glass headboard.
I’m permitting myself a wayhay today because my agent has read my manuscript… and she says ‘Writing in the House of Dreams’ is a remarkable book!
*happy dance*
So while my dream book is winging its way onto editors’ desks, I’ve decided to celebrate by sharing a short extract here, about what every five-year-old knows about dreams.
Life is resonant. Small events set up vibrations in the soul which still reverberate long after the event itself is forgotten. So it was with the ants on a hot summer day in 1955 which, two years later, were to bring me my first understanding of dreams.
I was making mud pies on the back step, scraping the dry earth into my bucket, adding water from the dribbling outdoor tap and stirring the mixture like my mother did when she made fairy cakes for tea. I spooned it out in sloppy dollops onto the hot concrete and by the time I had found enough small stones for cherries my mud pies were already drying out, going hard and pale at the edges.
My mother was at the kitchen sink doing the washing. The hankies were boiling on the stove and she had the back door open to let the steam out. My father was mowing the grass. I could hear the whirr-whirr of the blades behind me as he pushed the mower up and down. My big sister Susan was riding her bike, bumping and rattling along the path that ran down the side of the garden to the wooden gate at the bottom.
Our garden was a large patch of scrubby grass, featureless except for a washing-line and a compost heap in the far corner comprised entirely of grass cuttings. On one side, a chain-link fence separated the garden from next door’s identical one, and then another chain-link fence, and another, all the way to the main road. On the other side, a tall hedge hid the flower-beds and orchards that surrounded the big bungalow at the end of the close.
We heard Monica calling but we couldn’t see her over the hedge. Susan ran down to the gate. I ran after her. I always followed although Susan never asked me to and sometimes I ended up wishing I hadn’t. I hoped Monica wouldn’t have her doctor’s set with her because if she did, they would make me be the patient. They would take me to secret places and hold me down. Susan would wield the syringe, of course – she was the expert when it came to injections.
We went out the gate and clambered over the stile into the woods, where Monica was waiting impatiently.
‘I’ve found something!’ she said to Susan. ‘Come and see.’
I followed them along the dirt path under the trees. Monica was pulling a plank of wood along the ground behind her, tied to a piece of string. I didn’t know what it was for, and I didn’t like not knowing. Suddenly, Monica stopped.
There was a dead animal lying under the long grass at the side of the path. It had a dribble of dried blood stuck to its face where its eye should be.
‘What is it?’ Susan said.
‘I don’t know,’ said Monica. ‘But we’re going to pick it up and put it on my sledge.’
They both looked at me.
I was frightened of Monica. She wasn’t as big as Susan, but she had bright ginger hair, and her pale face was covered in freckles. She claimed she could eat the skin of oranges, and I had seen her mother do it, her bright red lipstick lips drawn back from her teeth. When I tried to do it myself, I couldn’t. Even the fleshy pith was too bitter.
I looked at the animal. I didn’t ask why we had to put it on the plank, or where we were going to take it. There were fat flies buzzing around it and ants crawling in and out of its fur. I wanted to run back along the path, but I couldn’t see the house from there and I wasn’t sure of the way.
My sister flicked at the flies with a bit of bracken.
‘Go on then,’ she said.
Monica put her hand on her hip, her orange hair gleaming dangerously. Susan’s hair was black, in thick curls around her face. They were both much bigger than me. I could feel the ants crawling in the rat’s wiry fur as I picked it up.
No-one knew about the rat, but here’s a photo our mother took at the seaside of me holding another dead animal that Susan and Monica found
The ants crawled out of the rat and surfaced again soon after when I was watching a film on television with my father. The Indians buried the cowboys up to their necks and smeared honey on their faces.
‘Why have they given them honey?’ I asked my dad. ‘Is it to tease them because they can’t reach to lick it up?’
Before he could answer, the ants came and everything became horribly clear.
So the ants crawled out of the rat bringing fear and revulsion on their backs, and they came to the honey, and they hurt the cowboys, and then with fear and revulsion and cruelty they marched on. They caught up with me two years later, when my family had moved to a suburban street far, far away from the woods.
I was lying in a shallow ditch. I had no idea how I had got there. The earth underneath me felt warm and grainy, and the sun on my bare arms and legs made my skin tingle. I raised my head and looked down at my body. There was an ant on my leg. I stiffened. Suddenly, the ants were everywhere. I wanted to brush them off but I found I couldn’t move. I started to scream.
My mother came rushing into the bedroom.
‘Get them off me!’ I shouted. ‘Make them go away!’
‘What? Get what off you? What’s the matter?’
I couldn’t tell whether my mother was angry or scared, like me.
‘The ants! Get them off me!’
My mother said, ‘There aren’t any ants here. You must have been having a dream.’
What did she mean, there weren’t any ants? I could see them. I could feel them crawling all over me. I started to scream again.
My mother ran out and came back with my dad. He stood in the doorway in his pyjamas, bleary with sleep.
‘Get them off me!’ I yelled.
The ants were everywhere. They were nibbling at my skin. They were eating right through to my bones.
‘What’s going on?’ my father asked – my mother, not me.
‘Just tell her there aren’t any ants.’
He nodded, and pulled back the blankets. He said, ‘Look, Jennifer. No ants. There aren’t any ants.’
I couldn’t see them now, but I knew what I had seen, and I knew what I had felt. I knew what every five-year-old knows – that dreams are real. The only difference between the ants on the rat and the ants in the ditch was that nobody else could see the ants in the ditch. In dreams, you were on your own.
After my mother and father had gone back to bed, I lay there rigid, not daring to move in case the ants came back. Then I did what every child eventually does – I turned my face away from the dream towards the light streaming in from the landing.
I looked away and my dreams disappeared, as dreams will.
Jenny Alexander's blog: Writing in the House of Dreams 