Pebbles from a Northern Shore

SUNSET

  The dream comes seldom now, although it was once frequent, and there is some variation, but always the valley; broad, running roughly east-west, under autumn sunshine, with cattle grazing calmly in neatly-hedged fields, a curl of smoke from some of the farmhouse chimneys, and a scent of wood fires in the air. On the northern slope is an inn, to which I have come after a long and tiring journey. It is an old, rambling house, formed in a past century by linking separate buildings with passages and stairs; not a place of special beauty or interest, but comfortable and welcoming.

  This is nothing like the recurrent nightmares that used to haunt me. I found many years ago how to disarm and banish those by equipping myself mentally, in an interlude of semi-wakefulness, with whatever might serve to defeat the imagined peril - a parachute, for instance, with which to descend from the shaking bridge or the crumbling tower. Nevertheless, peaceful though the valley setting is, there is still a vague sense of danger, or at least of unease; I must not stay for long at the inn as something is approaching that I do not wish to meet. I cannot leave by the front without the likelihood of running into it, and the only possible alternative is through a small door where the back of the building is cut into the hillside. Beyond the door is an unlit tunnel leading steeply upwards, and no one can tell me where it goes. Without that knowledge, or at least an inkling of it, I am reluctant to go on unless the need becomes more pressing; and there the dream ends.

  I cannot tell exactly where the valley is. The setting suggests my uncle's home looking across the Cumbrian Derwent to Lorton Vale, but I am aware that the one in my dream is far away to the south, possibly in the Cotswolds, certainly in the southern part of the country. Whether the valley exists in reality I do not know, nor do I consciously recall ever being in such a place; it may be so, or it could be a composite of various memories, or perhaps as in other dreams a place that once I knew transfigured by pure imagination.

  The journey to it has started in the north, along the main thoroughfare of a large town, none that I can identify in reality. Something interesting can be glimpsed away to the left through side streets leading to a dockland district that I have visited in the past, now an area of decay and ruin where I have no business to return. My road goes forward. Somehow, many miles on and in a quite different direction, it reaches a region of industrial dereliction, littered with abandoned buildings, rusty rail tracks and broken vehicles. Beyond, a broad, hard-surfaced road heads away straight towards the south-east, but it repels me; I have no intention of returning to the midland town of my birth, and now what remains of the family is scattered, there is no cause in either duty or inclination. Instead my way is along a smaller, gentler, winding road to the south, for some unknown reason turning aside to follow the coast of North Wales as far as Conwy or thereabouts and thence veering south again across the mountains until I come weary to the valley of the inn.

  There have been other journeys. One starts from a different city and again heads south, past tall, eroded pillars of sandstone to a cliff face that it crosses steeply aslant, with an arched viaduct over a gully. I could avoid the climb by taking a more inviting side path leading from the start of the bridge down through sunlit open woodland to the foot of the cliff, although I know that if I follow this path there will be no getting back to the main road. But that is in a different dream, a different land, a different myth.

  Curious things, dreams. They must surely reflect something going on in the mind, but the mirror is so cracked, clouded and distorted that the original can scarcely be discerned. Long before I ever visited the north coast of Scotland I dreamed of travelling there, by a route and over terrain quite unlike reality, and even now the dream recurs from time to time. In fact the dream road is clearer in my mind than the one actually taken. The first stage ends at a walled city on the border, where I may be detained, as usual with no idea why; the diversion seems somehow connected with a village through which I passed regularly during a period of my youth, but what the connection may be I cannot tell.

  Past the city, the road goes straight northwards, following a ridge of utterly desolate heathland bearing no resemblance to either southern uplands or central highlands, more like parts of the Pennines. Towards the end is a crossroads where again I may be deflected either way. To the east is a small, attractive fishing village; more often I go, through choice or necessity, to the left towards a cove that indeed feels sinister although for no apparent reason. It may perhaps recall a far from welcoming inn found on the west coast of Ireland, where something nefarious was evidently afoot, possibly a smuggling operation.

  Sometimes the origin of a dream image is obvious. Futile attempts at shaping a mass of iron as apprentice to a blacksmith (nothing to do with Great Expectations!) clearly derive from watching a cutler making heavy weather of forging a knife at a "mediaeval" fair in Avignon, while the warren of alleys and run-down dwellings through which I have found a way to the smithy could have been an idea of that city's back streets in an earlier and less salubrious age. Other possibilities are Old Jerusalem or a place in north Africa such as Algiers or Fez.

  These are fairly straightforward connections, echoing real experience, even if ambiguous and pressed into service only as linking concepts. Other dreams, memorable decades later for their sheer oddity, have impenetrably obscure origins. Nothing I can bring to mind from the past accounts for imagining myself stranded at a bus station in Tashkent, a part of the world that I had never then studied or visited, with a newly-met Irishman I do not entirely trust offering to show me round the town; or still more fantastically acting as driver for a band of terrorists commanded by a pair of budgerigars (why two?).

  In contrast, the symbolism of the valley dream ought to have been perfectly transparent, although recognition has come quite recently and as a complete surprise. I know at last what the valley is - not where but when - and that since the last occurrence of the dream it has become my present habitation. The dark tunnel is still mysterious, but no longer troubles me; evening is advancing, the pursuit drawing closer, and sooner or later I must leave the comfort of the inn to pass through that small door. I am ready, and feel that the time is not far off.

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