Pillow Talk

I've always had a problem knowing what day of the week it is. I'm not talking about just being a bit absent-minded. I really have experienced considerable difficulty with this all my life.

It was an absolute nightmare when I was at school because you were liable to get beaten if you failed to hand in your homework on the day it was due. Even now, I regularly have to get my wife to tell me what day it is. Anxiety about this is something that often features in my dreams. However, the dream I had two nights ago was something else.

I found myself in a city I did not recognise and yet I knew exactly where I was going: I was going to see the wife of my cousin. I entered a house by the back door and in the kitchen were a young woman and a girl about four years old. They were both extremely alike with the same jet black hair and there was something subtly unusual about their features, though I could not say what.

The woman greeted me and I thought at first that her accent was Irish but after a while I began to doubt this. I felt quite sure I had never met her before yet she seemed to know me well enough.

She introduced her daughter and I talked to the little girl for some time. I remember nothing of our conversation except that she seemed far too intelligent for her years.

Then the woman told me I should stop worrying about the days of the week. Those were not the real days, she said, and the reason I could not fix them in my mind was simply that the shadow of the true days lay underneath them.

After saying this, she told me I should go now because her husband would be home soon and he would not like to find her talking to me. I knew then that she was no relation of mine.

A moment later I found myself out in the street once more, and a moment after that I awoke. Lying in my bed, recalling the dream, I was immediately filled with the conviction that the woman I had spoken to was a fairy.

The Blue-Green Demon

I have the most riotous dream life. I've mentioned it in this blog before. Some of my dreams are very enjoyable. Some of them are absolutely horrendous. The night before last was one of the horrendous variety.

I woke up in the early hours unable to breathe. At the same time I felt an incredible tension in my solar plexus, as if that was where the seat of my consciousness was located rather than in my brain. Why could I not breathe? Panic flooded my system as I became convinced that I was dying. Then suddenly the sensation was over. I sat up, drawing in great lungfuls of air and feeling incredibly grateful that I had not died.

I lay down again and fell back to sleep but what seemed only moments later exactly the same thing happened. This time I got out of bed and made my way to the bathroom. I washed my face and stared at myself in the mirror. I felt very disconnected from the image that gazed back at me. On my way back to the bedroom, it seemed to me that the atmosphere in my house had been altered in some way that I could not quite put my finger on.

I got back into bed and fell asleep for the third time, except that now my dream was merely a continuation of my anxiety. In the dream I picked up the torch beside my bed (perhaps I really did pick it up) and shone it on the window frame. It seemed to me that there was something not right about it. The edges had become blurred, and they shifted as I gazed at them.

Now I was certain that something was badly wrong and it came to me that I had to concentrate very hard to keep things from getting worse. I focused all my attention on the window frame, willing it to behave like a proper, solid object instead of this shifting, devious simulacrum. I felt that by doing so I was behaving like the boy who put his finger in the dyke to plug the leak and hold back the sea.

But the sea would not be thwarted. Suddenly there was a blinding flash of light and a creature leapt into the room from nowhere. It was about four feet high, looked more or less human but it was blue-green in colour and glowing with hypnagogic intensity. Its features were coarser than a human being's and they radiated malice. I had not the slightest doubt what it was doing here. It had come to kill me. Or possibly worse. Utter terror consumed me. I sat up in bed, yelling at the top of my voice.

Gradually I became aware that my wife had her arms around me. 'It's only a dream, Brian,' she was saying as I continued to stare into the corner of the room, hyperventilating, mumbling incoherently and refusing to accept that the creature had gone.

I know it sounds ludicrous - a four foot high blue-green demon. But at the time it was utterly real. More real, in fact, than anything that has happened since.

The Neo-Platonist And The Flour

The other night I dreamt I was in some sort of official building with a friend whom I cannot subsequently identify. I strongly suspect that I have never seen him before yet I feel as if I have always known him.

We had not been there for very long before we were challenged by some minor official who demanded to know our business.

‘My friend,’ I told the official, ‘is a Neo-Platonist.’ For some reason I seemed to think that this would satisfy him.

The official looked entirely unimpressed. ‘And what precisely does that mean?’ he asked.

From somewhere about his person my friend produced a paper bag of flour such as you might buy in any store or supermarket. He opened it and, with a rather theatrical gesture, emptied it onto the floor. Then he stooped down and ran the fingers of both hands through the little pile of flour. Suddenly there seemed to be at least twice as much flour.

‘Where did all that flour come from?’ asked the bewildered official.

By way of answer, my friend once again ran his fingers through the flour. This time the pile of flour became many, many times larger. He looked up, smiled and teasingly repeated the official’s own question. ‘Where did all that flour come from?’

The official frowned. ‘Enough of this!’ he cried and began looking around urgently for assistance.

Unperturbed, my friend ran his fingers through the flour once more and this time the heap of flour grew so large that the official was buried beneath it.

Standing up, my friend turned to me and raised one eyebrow. ‘Where did all that flour come from?’ he asked.

Before I could consider what answer I ought to make, I awoke.

(I have no idea what it means either.)

Don't You Get It?

In a dream last night I made up a joke. What is grey and looks like a stone? A dorfst.

Don’t bother to look it up. There is no such word as dorfst. Nevertheless, in my dream it made perfect sense and was, moreover, extremely witty. Surprisingly, when I told my wife about it this morning she laughed out loud. But of course she was really laughing at the silliness that makes up so much of the inside of my head.

Some people write narratives like my dorfst joke. To them, these narratives are beautifully constructed, intriguingly clever, and just waiting for the world to recognise their merit. To everybody else they are incomprehensible, pointless, or just plain silly.

It’s an easy enough mistake to make. I’ve made it myself plenty of times. It’s the reason why I don’t have a very high opinion of self-publishing. I think you need someone else other than yourself and your partner or friend to tell you whether the narrative has universality or whether it’s really nothing more than a dorfst.

On Fire

The following conversation, which apparently took place in the middle of the night, was reported to me by my wife, Rosie, this morning.

Me: Are you awake?
Rosie: What? Well, yes I am now? What is it?
Me: What the hell is happening with the top of my head?
Rosie: I don’t know. What do you think is happening with the top of your head?
Me: I thought there was a flame on it.
Rosie: Oh God, you’re not even really awake. Go back to sleep!

I did vaguely remember something about it when she reminded me. I think I imagined there was a blue flame, like the kind you see on gas cookers, coming out of the top of my head.

Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was because I am storming along with my First Draft.

Don’t you just love it when the writing is going well? When you can’t type quickly enough because it’s pouring out of you like you’re a tap that’s been turned on?

That’s when you know you’ve got it absolutely right. Because you’re not even writing it; it’s writing itself; you’re just hitting the keyboard.

The Perils Of Writing Fantasy

Last night my wife woke me in the middle of the night. I had been sitting up in bed yelling in terror. Even after she woke me, it took a long time for me to understand where I was and to be convinced that I really wasn’t in any danger. I sat there, trying not to hyperventilate while she told me over and over again in the voice one might use to calm a bewildered infant that it was all right, that I’d just been dreaming.

When I tried to describe my dream it sounded comical, ridiculous; but to me it had been simply horrific. I had dreamed that a demon had come into the room and was standing beside my bed. It was bottle green in colour and its skin was leathery, like a lizard’s. It wasn’t a conventional devil with horns and tail. It looked more or less like a man though it was smaller, but not as small as a child, and it radiated malice. I had no doubt that it had come to kill me or worse. I also knew that it was my fault that it was there. Somehow or other I had summoned it.

I wish my mind was not so leaky. Then all this stuff would stay in the part of my imagination that is reserved for writing books.

A Hand-Made Cart

A few nights ago I dreamed I was pushing a wooden cart festooned with ballons through a crowded street. It was a rather makeshift cart. I’d obviously knocked it together myself and it rattled precariously along the cobbled streets. But it stayed in one piece. Unfortunately, everybody else seemed to be going in the opposite direction so it was very difficult to make progress. I had to be polite but very determined.

I was asked to give a talk to some aspiring authors recently about making a career as a writer. I was tempted to tell them about my dream because that’s exactly what being a professional writer can seem like sometimes. But in the end I didn’t because I thought it might be too discouraging.

Instead, I stuck to practical stuff. I tried to emphasise that writing is a long game. A lot of first time authors get absolutely stuck on their first manuscript. They have spent so long slaving away at it that they become fixated with it. They reach a point where, instead of changing their manuscript so that publishers will want to buy it, they want publishers to change so that they will recognises the brilliance of their manuscript.

When that doesn’t happen they become embittered and an embittered author is an ugly thing. Consequently agents, editors, even friends shy away and the embittered author becomes isolated. He comforts himself by repeating commonly held myths about publishing such as, you have to know people to get published.

But it isn’t true. You don’t have to know someone. What you have to do to get published is write a book that people will want to read. And if you don’t achieve that with your first manuscript, then forget it and start on another. Remember, even if that first manuscript had got published, you would still have to write another. You are always going to have to write another. That’s what being an author is all about.

The Unexpected Wedding Guest

This blog is supposed to be about writing but you can’t help life sneaking in sometimes. Like now, for example when all real writing has become impossible because I am suffering from what I can only describe as a wedding-related virus.

Just before my elder daughter’s wedding last September I came down with something similar which meant that on the day itself I looked like death warmed up and, after delivering my speech, was unable to speak again in anything above a whisper for days.

Now it’s happened again. I was in bed for most of the last two days while an invisible demon kept driving a nail into my skull just above my right temple, filling my mouth with sand and shoving a rotten tomato up my nose. At the same time one of his associates seemed to have extracted rather a lot of blood from my body so that it has become like a badly inflated air-mattress.

Everybody is sympathetic but I think they also can’t help laughing at me. Just a little. And in the nicest possible way. And who can blame them? It looks like a huge attempt to steal the limelight. However, I am determined to recover and rebound in time for a week next Saturday when I will have two married daughters.

In the meantime I am having regular draughts of Lemsip. If you are reading this in a country where Lemsip is an unknown quantity let me put you in the picture. It is a remedy for colds and influenza that comes in powdered form. You add hot water and get a hideous luminous yellow concoction that tastes and smells like low-level radio-active waste. But it does seem to do the trick better than most.

Recently I’ve learned that among the guest list at the wedding will be at least one unexpected name. Both my daughters seem to have inherited the family tendency to receive messages from beyond the grave in their dreams. Recently Emily announced that she had seen her maternal grandfather (long since dead) in a dream and he told her he was very pleased to have a chance to talk to her, that he was delighted about the wedding and that he would most certainly be there.

I know this steadfast belief in an after-life seems like so much puerile self-delusion to those like Richard Dawkins who zealously insist that there is nothing but what you see in front of you. To them I say, with all the careful consideration that their arguments deserve – ‘Yeah, whatever…’

Tyger, Tyger

I heard it said once that in the subconscious it is always now and that seems true to me. Some experiences are so vivid that even years later we have only to close our eyes and we are right back there re-living those moments in all their intensity. They wait for us like tigers stalking the borders of our consciousness.

The night before last, for example, I found myself sitting up in bed, disorientated and panting, adrenalin rushing through my system, as a nightmare subsided, not once, not twice but five separate times.

I am a very happily married man. Indeed I may be the most happily married man in the history of happily married men. I have two grown up daughters whom I dote on and who are very kind to me. I own a nice house in London and I’ve even got an allotment* where I can lose myself in the natural world. Nevertheless, there have been plenty of dreadful moments in my life, as I’m sure there are in everyone’s.

One of the places I regularly return to in my dreams is the secondary school I attended as a teenager. Run by Jesuit priests who maintained discipline with a rubber strap, and policed by a system of organised bullying, it was seven years of sheer hell. My only escape was to lose myself in Latin poetry and English composition. I was never happier than the day I left . Yet when night falls, I regularly find myself transported there once again, walking its dusty corridors, inhaling the scent of male sweat, chalk dust, school dinners and fear.

But those corridors are also one of the first places I look when I need a new idea for a story. Not that my novels are all nightmarish. By no means. The one I’ve just finished is essentially a comedy. But you have to have a little sorrow to mix in with the laughter. It’s like salt. Without it, nothing tastes right.

Take a story like Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. It’s essentially a romp, an entertainment. Nevertheless, it begins with an orphaned boy shut in a cupboard by his adoptive parents, picked on, bullied and abused. Everything that follows – Hogwarts, Hagrid and the whole box of tricks, devolves its emotional charge from that initial situation.

In my opinion, to make a story work you have to put in some of your own tears. Even if you shed them years after the event sitting up in bed in the middle of the night.

That’s why I’m a children’s writer, I suppose. I never really recovered from my own childhood. I just put it in a hole in the ground and covered it up. But it keeps on digging its way out and finding its way back to me, decayed, rotten but horribly familiar.

* That’s a strip of land for growing vegetables for non-UK readers.

This Mortal Coil

Dreams run in my family. That’s a silly thing to say, of course, since everybody dreams. But what I mean is that my mother, and her mother too, believed they received messages in their dreams. For example when my mother was living in London in the nineteen fifties she dreamed three nights running that her own mother, back in Ireland had died. She saw the funeral and saw her self there. This was long before people in the rural West of Ireland had access to telephones so my mother could not just phone home to check that all was well. Then on the fourth morning she received a telegram to say that her mother had died.

I share my mother’s conviction about dreams However, the messages I receive are generally less direct, more open to interpretation – a sign of the times perhaps. In the dream about Time’s Workshop that I described in my last post there was one feature which has continued to intrigue me. At one point in the dream I came across a man working on a very peculiar object. Unlike all the other things in the workshop, it seemed to have no obvious use. It was a great coil of wood in the shape of a Catherine Wheel but larger than a table and it was studded with nails.

I knew right away that this uncertain artefact was something to do with me and as I watched the workman studiously pulling out the nails one by one with a pair of pliers, I realised that it did not bode well. With each nail that was withdrawn, I found myself wincing, not in pain exactly but in a kind of sympathy for the inarticulate thing that lay there at his mercy.

Since then I have pondered what the significance of the wooden coil might be and I have come to the conclusion that it was my life. After all, in Hamlet Shakespeare describes dying as ‘shuffling off this mortal coil’ and I have learned from a little research on the internet that the word coil was commonly used in the sixteenth century to mean tumults and troubles.

I’m reminded of that marvellous passage in A Christmas Carol when the ghost of Jacob Marley appears to Ebenezer Scrooge. Marley carries a great chain with him which is described as ‘wound about him like a tail’. It is made up of cash-boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses wrought in steel. When Scrooge asks him why he wears it, Marley replies, ‘I wear the chain I forged in life....I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it.’

It seems to me then that the strange wooden coil is something I have manufactured in the course of my everyday life. It is a symbol of all my successes and failures. And if it is not too literal an interpretation, I rather fancy that the nails the workman was so assiduously removing one by one were the novels I have written that have disappeared into the remaindered bin. If that is so, then I must try to make those nails a great deal harder to remove. They must be driven much deeper into the wood with all the hammering I can muster so that in the years to come Time’s busy workman will need more than just determination and a pair of pliers to remove them.

Time's Workshop

I emailed my First Draft to my editor yesterday and now I have no idea what to do with myself. I’ve been sitting down at my computer at a quarter to eight every morning for ages and pushing on with my novel. Now, suddenly, there’s no novel to work on. Fortunately, I’m contracted to write a sequel but I can’t start on that yet. There has to be a fallow period in between, otherwise you just find yourself writing the first novel all over again.

What I need to do is to lose myself in a good book and I’ve got a stack of those beside my desk. And there’s plenty of domestic administration that needs my attention. But I just keep wanting to write. It’s such a contrary business writing a novel. When you’re doing it, you’re always thinking about getting to the end. Once you’ve got to the end, you miss it terribly.

I remember meeting John Rowe Townsend when I had just started my career as a writer. He was the grand old man of UK children’s writing at that time. ‘What are you working on at the moment?’ he asked. I wasn’t working on anything as a matter of fact and I tried to tell him this but I was rather intimidated because he was a big cheese and I was no kind of cheese at all so I just mumbled incoherently. In return, he smiled knowingly as if he thought I was keeping some astonishingly brilliant idea under wraps. ‘A writer is always working on something,’ he said. And over the years I’ve discovered that he was right because even when you’re convinced you’re not working on something, you are really. It all goes on under the surface.

Last night I dreamed I was in a vast workshop filled with workers industriously damaging goods of every kind. They were tearing the pages of books, scratching the surface of tables, pulling the stitches in clothes. Some of them looked up from their work long enough to give me a hostile glare and I felt terribly guilty, though I had no idea what my crime was. At some point in the dream I became aware that these busy artisans were doing the work of Time. They were aging everything in the world and they resented my presence for I was engaged in the process of trying to salvage something from Time’s degradation.

Not that I really imagine my work will achieve immortality. My first nine books are already out of print and all the rest will no doubt follow in due course. But you still have to try, don’t you? As an author you have to dare to believe you may one day produce a gem that will outlast you.

So, I will make a start on my pile of unread books and I will get on with the tedious domestic stuff but all the while a little part of me that even I am not aware of will be sneaking around Time’s workshop trying to steal bits and pieces from under the noses of the workers. Anything will do. It might be as small as a pair of ladies’ leather gloves or as large as a double-decker bus. Size is not important. Significance is what I’m looking for. If I can just assemble enough significant details, I may find I have the makings of another story.

Saturation Point

There comes a time in the writing of any book when reality become porous and the narrative begins to invade my dreams. I call that moment Saturation Point. It happened recently with the novel I’m currently working on. (I won ‘t say the title of it because I never like to do so until it’s finished.)

There are two characters in my book who until the other night were not particularly important. They didn’t even have names. They were just a pair of minor thugs. Then I went to sleep and found myself standing somewhere unspecified (it was outdoors, that’s all I can remember) and in the distance were two men who seemed vaguely familiar. They were looking intently in my direction and when they saw me notice them, they began walking purposefully and with astonishing speed in my direction.

Suddenly it dawned on me who they were – the characters from my story, except that now it wasn’t a story at all; it was real. In my dream this ominous couple had names, or at least a nickname – the Lily White Boys, on account of the fact that they both had unnaturally blond hair.

As they drew closer I was gripped by terror because I understood with complete certainly that they were gong to kill me and that I hadn’t a chance against them. They were skilled in violence, took pleasure in it, and were utterly inured to its consequences.

Now, in one of those scene-changes that are achieved so effortlessly in dreams, I was no longer outside but lying in bed, though still asleep and they were standing over me. This was it, I realised. This was how I was going to die. I screamed with all the force of my lungs.

The next thing I knew, Rosie was shaking me and saying. ‘Brian, for God’s sake, what’s the matter?’ I gazed around the room in bewilderment and mumbled incoherently about the Lily White Boys until gradually I understood that none of it was real.

‘Poor Rosie!’ I said, when I had finally come to my senses, gone downstairs and brought up two cups of tea. ‘I’m so sorry about that. It must be dreadful living with me’.

‘It could be worse,’ she said, philosophically. ‘At least you don’t see them when you’re awake.’

The Poisoned Curtains

Arthur Miller said that a good play should have the economy of a dream. Nothing is unnecessary in a dream, he added. When I first heard this remark, I was puzzled since dreams often seem to be such a lot of nonsense when one remembers them the next morning. However, I think he was talking about the intensity with which the dreamer experiences the dream, and the way that levels of meaning are condensed into the dream imagery.

Recently, I dreamt that I was walking down the street and I saw a house with some velvet curtains hanging in the window. I thought to myself, ‘I’d like to eat those curtains. The next thing I knew I was inside the house and I’d just finished eating the curtains. (I can still remember what they tasted like!). Then, I went outside again and there was my wife. She said, ‘You haven’t just eaten those curtains, have you?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘What’s the problem?’

She pointed to a sign in the window which I had somehow missed previously. In large, bold letters it read, ‘Warning. Poisoned Curtains.’

What makes this dream significant for me is that when I was growing up my parents were fairly poor. Not destitute, just hard-working immigrants who struggled to make their place in the world. They sent me to a school run by Catholic priests which was very big on Latin and I developed a real taste for Latin poetry. But I’d never learned Greek and I suspected that this might be even more enjoyable. So when I was sixteen, I went to a Summer School to learn the language of Homer. Everyone else there came from very wealthy backgrounds. I soon began a relationship with another student and she invited me to her house. Frankly, I was shocked when I went there by how luxurious it was. In particular, I remember looking at the velvet curtains and thinking that when I grew up that was what I wanted. And indeed, I now have blue velvet curtains in my living room (although they were bought second hand).

I felt the dream was about my own death. It was telling me that when you achieve all your goals, there is only one thing left to do and that is to die. But obviously it’s open to a number of different interpretations. That’s the point that Arthur Miller was making, I believe. If I could write a story which has the same level of resonance for the audience as that dream has for me, then I would be a great writer. The question is: how much longer have I got before the curtains kill me?

My greatest fear

Well I’ve had my operation but I think they must have given me too much wake up juice after the anaesthetic because it’s three in the morning and I cannot sleep, no matter what I do. So I have given up trying and am writing this with my wounded leg up on the desk.

First of all I’d like to put this into context. One of the editors at my publishing house has just returned to work after treatment for breast cancer. She had the lot: surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy and there she was at the great heaving, champagne-guzzling swarm that is the Christmas party, a hat on her head to disguise her baldness (she told me it had taken her three quarters of an hour to choose it that morning), looking pale and fragile but coping admirably. So, by comparison, making a fuss about a minor operation on my foot seems about as self-obsessed as you can get. But the thing is, I am a writer. So what can I do but write?

I have to admit to a niggling little voice which began to sound in my head about twenty four hours before the operation. What if they overdid the anaesthetic? It does happen sometimes and I am particularly sensitive to drugs. Supposing I didn’t wake up? Don’t be so ridiculous, I kept telling myself, but the nearer I got to the operating theatre, the louder the voice became. Finally, it started coming out with its message plainly and simply: you might die, Brian.

After more than thirty years of marriage I am deeply and passionately in love with my wife and the idea of being separated from her was utterly appalling but I felt certain that she would probably cope better than I would without her. She is a capable and resourceful woman, after all. I was a little worried that she was not quite tall enough to open the trapdoor to the loft but I imagined that she would resolve that difficulty easily enough.

The very sound of my daughters’ voices on the telephone makes me want to dance with delight but I felt sure that they, too, would manage without me. They are both in long-tem relationships with lovely men, they both have fulfilling careers and plans for the future.

I was also not really worried about myself. I know it’s deeply unfashionable but I believe in the after life. I had a wonderful friend at university called Jim. We used to play guitar together and even made a record. Mercifully, all copies of it have long disappeared for the truth is that although Jim was a fine musician, I was absolutely hopeless. He was just too kind to point it out.

Anyway, a few years after we left university I was devastated to learn that Jim had drowned in a freak accident. Not long afterwards, however, I had a dream in which I was standing on the shore beside a mass of water wondering how I came to be there when I saw Jim walking towards me. ‘Jim!’ I said, ‘I thought you were dead.’

‘I am dead,’ he assured me, ‘but I’ve just come to tell you that it’s okay.’ And here he laughed his characteristic laugh. ‘Being dead is okay,’ he joked.

We talked a little more. Afterwards, I couldn’t remember this part of our conversation but then Jim announced that he had to go. He showed me a cave at the base of the cliffs. ‘I have to go in there,’ he said, ‘it’s going to close up shortly.’

‘But will I see you again?’ I asked.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘But not for a long time’ And then he went into the cave.

Now I don’t, obviously, believe in a literal underworld that is approached through a cave but I do think that my friend Jim was using the imagery of my dream to communicate with me. You may feel that this is just a kind of comforting process engendered by my own imagination and that’s fine by me. I haven’t the slightest wish to convert anyone to my point of view. I’m just explaining that this dream strengthened my already existing conviction that there is more to our great adventure than this life.

So I wasn’t really worried about my family, or about being permanently extinguished. Nevertheless, as they began injecting me with the anaesthetic the voice in my head rose to a shrill panic-stricken crescendo as it reminded me that I was half way through a novel and contracted to write another. ‘What about your stories?’ it demanded. ‘What about your stories? What about….