It’s true the recurring dreams slowed and eventually stopped as I got older, but there are two that I never forgot. I’m going to tell you about one of them – and the reason it’s stayed with me – here.
The one I remember almost vividly, even now, is the one I discussed with my mother one evening as we shepherded my children across a dark and rutted field on our way to a bonfire party.
I live in England and our fireworks celebration night is ‘Bonfire Night’ or ‘Guy Fawkes Night’ on November 5th. We celebrate with a rhyme:
Remember, remember,
The fifth of November,
Gunpowder, treason and plot.
I see no reason,
Why the gunpowder treason,
Should ever be forgot.
Guy Fawkes and his fellows tried to blow up Parliament and we celebrate the fact that he was caught, tried, found guilty and hanged, drawn and quartered as punishment for his part in the treasonous act. These facts have no bearing on the story, they are just there to explain to overseas readers that the night wasn’t warm and balmy as one would expect on July 4th as with the American Independence celebrations. It was a cold night (usually Bonfire Night is damp, if not raining) and we were all wrapped up in coats, hats, wellies and gloves. My children were excited to see the bonfire and fireworks and we both had to keep a close eye on them. As we chatted, the subject of recurring dreams came up (I don’t recall how we got onto that topic).
I told my mother I used to have lots of recurring dreams, the same dream over and over again. Some were terrifying – ‘Biscuit (cookie) people’ – for example, and others just puzzled me.
A little background is necessary at this point in my story.
When I was born, we lived in what were known as ‘pit houses’ – rows of houses built side by side, without a space between, known as ‘Terraced houses’ here in England. The pit houses were built when the coal mine was sunk in the village and were used to accommodate the miners and their families. Construction of these houses would be done as cheaply as possible, hence the houses all in rows. There were no bathrooms indoors and only two bedrooms, one at the front of the house and one at the back. The only bath we ever had in that house was a galvanised tin bath that hung on a nail in the back yard until Sunday night when it would be dragged inside and filled in front of the open fire.
On the street where I lived, Primrose Hill, we were in the middle of the second ‘top row’ and our number was 181 so you can imagine how many houses there were in the two rows.
Obviously things seemed bigger when I was a child, but looking back on it from an adult’s perspective, the houses were tiny, narrow and cramped. The staircase was exceptionally steep and it must have been daunting for a child to have to use (it was; I remember…)
If you looked from the bottom to the top of the staircase, the angle didn’t look so bad, but looking down from the top step scared me. I always ran or leaped across from the back bedroom to the front and vice-versa, and I clung onto the bannister with both hands as I descended.
The dream:
The dream always started kind of in the middle of the stairs. I would be on my back, sliding down. My knees would be tucked up onto my tummy and I slid down the staircase at about bannister height. It was always dark too… but not the nightmare dark you sometimes get in dreams.
That was the whole dream, me sliding down on my back, tucked up and safe – I never felt scared, unlike when I clung on for dear life as I walked down the stairs.
Not much of a dream, I grant you.
When I told my mother about that dream, she stopped and stared at me.
I stopped too, waiting for her to catch us up in the middle of the field.
The kids came back to us, wondering why mum and grandma were taking so long in getting them to their big adventure. We all stood looking at my mother.
“You can’t have dreamed that,” she said in a hushed voice.
“I did, I dreamed about it a lot. What’s wrong?” I asked.
“No, it’s not possible,” she said.
After a moment, she explained.
When she was pregnant with me, she was alone in the house, cleaning up etc. One of the less savoury tasks was to empty the commode that ‘lived’ under the bed. Because the toilet was outside, the urge to pee in the middle of the night had to be taken care of by peeing into a ceramic bowl which was emptied the next day.
My heavily pregnant mother was carrying the bucket of pee down the impossibly steep stairs and she missed her footing and slid all the way down, from the top to the bottom. She said she didn’t lose her grip on the bucket, but she was bruised from the fall. Of course she would be frantic with worry over her unborn baby, but the level of her ‘baby bump’ would have been right in line with the bannister – which is why my dream involved me sliding down the stairs at that height. I would have been tucked up in the foetal position, hence my tucked up position in my dream. I suppose I could go further and speculate that was the cause for my terror of those stairs, but they were so steep, I imagine it was only instinctive that I should fear them.
So, when asked what my earliest memory is, I can recount that one ‘memory’ from before I was even born.
Yeah, I know… I’m weird.