Читать книгу Animals - Keith Ridgway - Страница 6

The mouse’s corpse was washed away by the rain, I suppose. All the gutters were raging when I left the café. But a few streets away they were calmer, and when I got to the place where I’d seen the mouse, the ground was almost dry. I don’t know if that meant that the rain had been very localised or that the sun was very hot. It didn’t feel very hot.

I was feeling, by this time, if I’m honest, a little perplexed. I know that when I list the things that happened that day, they don’t seem to amount to very much. And they don’t. But nevertheless, I was, even by the time I left Michael after lunch, feeling somewhat rattled – on edge. Stress had crept into me. Even stepping out of the café I moved very slowly, nervously, afraid that the dog might still be around. So much so that I think Michael had to nudge me in the back to get me into the street. I think it was mostly the dog. The rain and the dog. They had, both of them, unsettled me slightly, but I wasn’t sure why, and maybe I was simply, unconsciously, the victim of various automatic associations that had no relevance to me personally. Michael was going to the left, and it made sense for me to go to the left as well, as there was a bus stop in that direction from where I could catch a bus home. But it was also the way the dog had gone. I can’t remember what I told Michael now – that I wanted to look in some shops or something – but I made an excuse, said my goodbyes and walked instead to the right.

I wonder now why I didn’t tell Michael about the mouse. Perhaps because I knew that he’d have wanted to look at the photographs stored on my camera, and that he would have had some wry way of making the whole thing seem a lot less strange, a lot more unremarkable. He would have been quick to puncture what would have seemed to him a typically inflated sense of significance and drama which I had attached, not for the first time, to something banal. I regret it now. Because that is probably exactly what I needed just then, and it may have proved useful later on. Delete the photographs if they bother you. Forget all about it. Put it out of your mind. But of course, as you know, I kept it to myself. Which is typical and predictable. But I shouldn’t make the mistake now of believing that my failure to talk to Michael – and the consequent failure to be convinced of the insignificance of the mouse – was in itself significant. There’s no point is replacing the ridiculous Oh my God a dead mouse with the equally ridiculous Oh my God I didn’t tell Michael about the dead mouse.

In any case, I have no way of knowing that telling Michael would have made any difference anyway. He might have had the same reaction as me. He might have been moved by the same odd mechanism and been knocked off balance – reinforcing my sense of peculiarity and low-level but elaborate menace. I was stuck with my weird mouse reaction. Nothing had defused it. And if you add to it my reawakened worries for Rachel and the slightly disconcerting talk of building ghosts (though, to be honest, Michael’s story hadn’t really made its full impact on me at that point), plus the rather biblical rain and the demon dog, then I think it’s fair to say that I had a head full of negative thoughts. I felt a little queasy.

I decided to go for a swim.

I took a bus home, dropped off my bag (I left it on a chair in the kitchen), changed out of my shoes into some trainers, picked up my swimming things, and walked to the quiet end of our street and through the park to the sports centre. It’s a brand new centre, and the local council has spent a lot of money on it, but it has been very badly designed, or perhaps very badly built (Michael suggests a little of both) and already it looks somewhat dilapidated. Most days when I go, some part of the changing rooms, or the reception, or the gym, is inevitably cordoned off – due to leaks or problems with ceiling tiles falling down or the floor buckling or otherwise giving way. One day I was in the communal shower area when a large tile fell from the wall, coming away as neatly as if it had been pushed out from the other side, and it shattered on the floor in a cloud of dust and fragments. Luckily, no one had been standing close to it at the time. Despite all these problems, and the huge controversy which they have engendered, I still love going to the pool. You don’t have to be a member or anything, you just have to pay a small per-use fee. You have to be careful with timing of course. Sometimes it’s not open access, it’s booked up by clubs or schools. Or some days, especially on warm days, it can be very busy, and after-school hours can be filled with noisy kids. This time of day, though, is usually perfect, and when I got there I was cheered up greatly by the fact that there were only a handful of people in the changing room, and all of them seemed to be getting dressed, having finished their swims.

I love to swim. I always have. It calms me, soothes me. I don’t really know what it is about it that has such a positive effect on me, but it’s not unusual I suppose. It’s sensual of course – being almost naked, surrounded by warm water; and it’s exercise, the only exercise I get really; and it’s also the only physical activity that I do relatively well. Perhaps it was for all these fairly mundane but sensible reasons that I decided to go for a swim. But I remember wondering, as I undressed, whether it wasn’t something as well to do with the rain I’d seen from the café during lunch with Michael. I wondered whether what I was actually doing was attempting to reassert myself over the element. As if I needed to reassure myself that I had the measure of it, that I had it tamed, that I could be a master of water – that it was, after all, only water, and that it was there for me to use and enjoy and not to fear. The thought made me laugh as I stepped beneath the lukewarm shower and slipped my goggles over my head. Then I made my way carefully through to the poolside, thinking that mine is a daft psychology, and that I would make K laugh later that evening with an account of my redemptive exorcism down at the sports centre.

There was a middle-aged woman swimming slow, sedate lengths, and a young girl and her father, clinging to the side, chatting. They were all in the slow lane, and there was no one else. I had never known the pool to be so empty. I think I probably grinned as I walked to the middle lane at the deep end. I nodded to the bored-looking lifeguard slumped in his high chair and asked him if it was all right if I dived in. He nodded, unconcerned. Normally I ease myself into the pool, most of the time I use one of the ladders at the sides, and then swim to the middle lane. But I felt today that the more exuberantly I took the opportunity to enjoy myself, the better I would be able to clear my head of all my concerns and my worries.

I dived. I’m not a great diver, but still, I dived this dive well, and my body went into the water as it should do – hands, arms, shoulders, head, chest, and then the rest of me, slicing into the water neatly, quickly, cleanly. It was a good dive. Something has to go through your mind at a moment like that. It is like a moment of violence almost – like a knife into skin, or the moment of an accident. It is heightened. I mean, things go through our minds all the time, endlessly, but there are certain moments when the thought gets caught, amplified, recorded. It’s like someone takes a photograph. And always, after that, you remember what it was you were thinking when whatever happened happened. When your car hit the kerb; when you lost your footing; when you heard the news; when you heard the bang; the moment you jumped; the moment you dived. I’m not saying that anything other than the dive happened. I just mean that a dive into a swimming pool, as you force your body to trust your brain – if you’re not used to doing it – is just such a moment. As with a trauma moment, the shock, or the adrenalin, or whatever it is, captures your thought and shows it to you in rare clarity, and stores it with those other heightened moments and their associated thoughts. And when I dived into the swimming pool that day, the thought I caught myself thinking was this one: the stain was shaped like Australia.

It was what Michael had said, when he told me about the building ghost. That there was a stain on the carpet of the fourth floor and it wouldn’t go away and it was shaped like Australia. I couldn’t remember really what emphasis he’d given it, if any, and didn’t even know whether it was accurate or something he’d added himself as an evocative phrase, not knowing in truth what the stain looked like at all, thinking that it would assist me in visualising something. And perhaps he’d chosen Australia just because it has a distinctive shape, and also because it suggests something of considerable scale. You don’t really think of something shaped like Australia as being small. At least, I don’t. If it was something that someone had actually said to him, that had been reported to him as an accurate description, and which he had in turn reported accurately to me, did that mean that it was accurate in fact? That the stain really did look like Australia? Perhaps someone earlier in the reporting chain had added it as an embellishment, Chinese-whisper-style, and it had stuck. It might have been the person who told the story to Michael, or it might have been the person before that; it could in fact have been anyone at all in the chain, at any point, close to the original source or not. Even if it had been applied by one of the people who had actually been in the building, who had been to the fourth floor and had seen the stain on the carpet there – even then, how accurate was it? Shapes are fairly objective things, once you get past circles and squares and triangles. One person can look at a cloud and see the outline of a face. A second person can look at the same cloud and see the shape of a sailboat. A third person can look at the same cloud and see nothing but a cloud – shapeless, meaningless and fleeting. Even if you were to assume that several people had seen the stain and that they had all agreed that its shape resembled that of Australia, could it not be said that all stains, almost inevitably, look like Australia? It’s something about the large irregular blob-ness of it, with the single separate smaller blob underneath, Tasmania. Knock your cup of coffee and have a look at the resulting mess. From some angle, somehow, it will look a little like Australia.

I don’t know why all of this suddenly seemed so important, but it did. I realised it with a sort of annoyance, a kind of underwater sigh of impatience, and a slight tilting of the head and a brief rolling of the eyes, as I dived down into the deep brightness of the pool, which felt to me less warm than I thought it should have, but which was, nevertheless, wonderfully refreshing. I knew that I’d have to call Michael and find out whether it was true, whether it was definitely the case that the stain on the fourth-floor carpet of the BOX building was shaped like Australia. I felt it was vital that I find this out, and I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t asked him at the time. My body was fully immersed by then. I was pointing downwards, head first, towards the bottom of the pool, still moving, and all the water seemed to panic around me, as if I was a catastrophe here. It seemed terribly significant – the matter of Australia, I mean. Significant in terms of what, I had no idea, and why it should occur to me that it was significant I had no idea either. But there was something in the notion of Australia. It wasn’t about the stain per se, or the idea that it remained, despite constant attempts to remove it. What was significant, if it was true, was its shape. I’ve never been to Australia. I know some Australians of course – it’s inevitable – but it’s not a country I know very much about or have very much interest in. And I did not know at that time, I think, what I could or would do with the knowledge – if it was forthcoming from Michael – that the stain was indeed, definitely and clearly and objectively, shaped like Australia. But I knew I had to find out.

My momentum slowed. I kicked my legs briefly and did a quick breaststroke to keep myself going down. Why did I want to keep going down? I suppose I was exhilarated by the water, by being out of the world for a moment, by being so completely and alertly elsewhere. But really – the bottom of a swimming pool is a terrible place. There are tricks and corners there. There are hidden catches. There is the noise. The pool in the sports centre is white-tiled. It has black lane markers – elongated Is that attempt a kind of orientation, and fail, or fail me at least, providing only a mild sense of vertigo and a vague disappointment at the impossibility of falling. There is a slope in the middle somewhere, as the deep end becomes the shallow end. There are randomly spaced plastic covers over drains or filters or some such. There are the shadows of the lane ropes and their measured-out floaters, bobbing. There is the water: bubbles and distortions, glints of light, minute clouds of particles, debris, human dust, debris. We are disintegrating. Sometimes the sparkle of an earring or an unmissed bracelet or an unreachable delicate chain with cross or locket or twist. I don’t think I had been to the bottom of the sports centre pool before. And I think it was only when I reached it, my hands spreading out to brush the tiles, my body contracting, my feet tucking in, my eyes all around me, that I remembered how terrifying such a place is. My fingers touched grout. My hands pressed down on the strangely warm tiles. What were they made of, exactly? How did they not break? Leak? If they leaked would they leak inwards or outwards? How heavy is water? Why was I not crushed? Everything was above me. The shimmering surface, the lane ropes, the legs – kicking and still – the light. All of it above me. And the bubbles that came from my mouth fled upwards. And my hair lifted upwards. Everything natural wanted out of there. I glanced at a nearby drain or filter cover, whatever it was – an ugly sinister thing where you could easily trap a finger or a toe. The brightness was awful, the clarity utterly deceptive. I could see everything, and yet I suddenly expected a tap on the shoulder, a face in front of mine, a hand on my ankle – unseen before I saw it. I was swimming in a flooded hospital ward, a submerged asylum, a sunken abattoir, a place so full of ghosts that they touched every inch of my skin with their half-cold own.

Perhaps the fear is about sound. Sounds there are so hideously distorted. It is an inverted silence – all unidentified roaring and the thump of your own heart. It’s a muffling that suggests being buried alive; the prolonged, strangulated fade-out of dying.

Perhaps I watch too many films. Perhaps my fear isn’t my own at all but has been gifted to me by Hollywood. I’m sure my mind is full of a lifetime of images of trouble underwater. Of murder in the swimming pool. Of course, now that I try I can’t actually think of any. At all. Nothing specific. I can think of several celluloid underwater terrors at sea. But nothing in a swimming pool. I’m sure that they exist. They must. The relaxed swimmer, the pristine white, the lap of the water, the brightness. And then the underwater shot, the sudden odd angle, all sounds grotesquely altered, the light refracted, split and cutting, concentrated and threatening. The whiteness calling out for red. The sensual skin turned to vain vulnerability, the supporting water gone deep and thick and complicit. Everything suddenly stops.

My worries about dreams came back to me then, as my body came upright in the water and my feet sought out the tiles below me. For weeks I had puzzled over this. I think I’ve mentioned it. I had not been able to find a way of thinking about it that did not disturb and confuse me. It had started very simply over coffee one morning, as K and I sat in the kitchen with the radio on, not long out of bed. We talked about dreams. That isn’t unusual, but that morning I remember that our conversation had been prompted by a story on the news. The security forces all over Europe were reported to be very concerned about the theft from an Italian laboratory of various poisons and toxins and that kind of thing. Vials of anthrax or botulinum or ricin or something. And of course, their concern was that the theft had been carried out by terrorists who would seek to use these toxins in an attack. As we listened, K looked up at me and frowned.

—That’s very strange.

—What is? I asked.

—A lab, vials, all that.

—Oh, it’ll just be another false alarm. It’ll all turn up somewhere, or they’ll arrest another cell because of it. It’s the stuff that doesn’t make the news that worries me.

—No, that’s not what I mean. I mean it’s strange because I dreamed about it. Or something very like it. I think.

I said nothing. K often relates dreams to me. I’m used to it. It’s a regular thing. I don’t really like it – I never have. Something in me clams up slightly when someone, anyone – not just K – tells me their dreams. I seem to have an instinctual resistance to it. I sipped my coffee, and my mind focused more on the radio than on K.

—I was in a hospital, I think. All white and clean, and it had that disinfectant sort of smell.

—You can smell in your dreams?

—Apparently. In this one anyway. I was looking for someone. I’d come to visit someone, I’m not sure who. The place seemed deserted, there was no one around at all and there wasn’t a sound. It was all very creepy.

K smiled a little and squinted, trying to remember the details.

—Then this little boy appeared out of nowhere, wearing pale blue pyjamas, a real cute little kid, sleepy-eyed, straight out of a television ad for cough bottle or fabric conditioner or something, the only thing missing was the clutched teddy bear. And I asked him, could he tell me where I could find the Research Centre. I was very specific. And the boy told me that I would have to go and see Dr Harkin for my tests. And he took me by the hand, very solemnly, and led me down the corridor. The next thing I know is that I’m in a garden, outside the same building, and the little boy is gone, and there’s an elderly man leaning out of a window, on the same level as me, talking to me, and I know that this is Dr Harkin, and he gives me this long elaborate spiel about my tests not being very good, and that I may have to have my insides recounted, that there may have been some error in the counting.

K laughed at this point. Although I was hearing the account, and remembering it obviously, I had the definite sensation of not wanting to hear about the content of the dream, of wishing that K would shut up, that the recollection was profoundly uninteresting to me, at the very least.

—He told me to come in, and I had to find my way out of the garden into his surgery, but I couldn’t seem to find a door into the building. In the garden there were several people strolling and sitting around, and as I searched for the way back into the building, I realised that they, and I, were all naked. That didn’t seem to bother me, and nor did the fact that I couldn’t find a way back into the building.

Then the door was right there in front of me – obvious – but I couldn’t get in because it was cordoned off by the police. I approached a policeman and asked him, could I go in. He said no. He said that there had been a robbery and that all the diseases had been stolen. He said, Everyone is a suspect. Then he looked me up and down and said, The naked people are obviously not suspects as they have no pockets in which to hide the vials. And that was it. That’s all I remember. I am not a suspect.

—Good for you.

—Yes.

—Of course, all that means is that while you were dreaming about little boys and doctors and being nude in the garden, the radio alarm clock went off, and the news came on, and you heard the report about the Italian thing and you incorporated it into your dream.

K considered this and nodded, impressed.

—Very possibly.

I put my feet flat on the bottom of the swimming pool and pushed off. There was a rushing sensation, not unpleasant, although I could feel some kind of discomfort in my right ear, brought on by pressure no doubt. I reached out my hands for the surface and looked along the line of my arms. There was a horrible confusion of noise – a combination of my progress through the water, and changing pressures in my ears, and the general sonorous bellowing of underwater ambience. Well, that’s what I thought.

As I said, K telling me a dream was not an unusual thing, and given the fact that its similarity to the news report had been explained, it didn’t really stay in my mind. Other people’s dreams never do. I imagine that if you had asked me later that day, even an hour or so later, what K had dreamed of the night before, I would have been hard pressed to tell you. The only reason I now remember it so well is that, two nights later, I had the very same dream myself.

It was not exactly the same. The hospital I went to was not deserted, it was busy, and it was the same hospital in which my mother had a minor operation last year. In fact, in my dream it was my mother I was looking for, not the Research Centre. But, like K, I couldn’t find my way, until a small boy in pale blue pyjamas appeared and took me to see Dr Harkin. I too stood in a garden while the doctor spoke through a window. I’m not sure what he said to me, but it seemed to be about my own health rather than my mother’s. Like K, I could not find the door back into the building. Unlike K, I remained fully clothed. My garden was deserted. When I did eventually find the door, my re-entry was blocked not by a policeman but by the same small boy, except this time he was naked. He told me that someone had stolen the diseases. At that point I became aware that my pockets were filled with vials. I woke up.

Unsurprisingly, I think, I found this dream quite disturbing. I remember when I awoke from it that I awoke completely – I was immediately fully conscious and alert, and every detail of the dream remained as vivid as reality. I knew that I had had a dream that had left a huge impression on me, but for those first few moments I was not sure why. I lay there in bed, staring at the ceiling, going through it several times, confirming to myself that I remembered everything – that there were no parts of it which had evaded me. It was after dawn – the room was filled with a soft grey light – but the alarm had not woken me, the dream had. I turned to look at the alarm clock, and despite the fact that the radio alarm clock sits at K’s side of the bed and that therefore, by turning my head, I saw K directly for the first time since waking up, I honestly believe that it wasn’t seeing K that made me realise the significance of the dream, but rather the actual physical movement of my head which somehow realigned my thoughts, so that I recognised that what I had just dreamed was, largely speaking, not my dream at all. It belonged to K. The time on the clock was 06:13.

I couldn’t get back to sleep that morning. It didn’t even occur to me to try in fact. I got up, as quietly as I could, and I went into my office and sat at my desk and wrote out, quickly, the details of my dream. I also drew rough sketches of what I had seen, recreating, as faithfully as I could, the boy in the blue pyjamas as he led me towards Dr Harkin; Dr Harkin himself, leaning from the window as he talked to me about my health; the garden, from several different angles, with its paths and flower beds and the small fountain at its centre; and finally the door back into the building, and my way blocked by the boy. All of this I did in a kind of daze, determined that I would record it all before it left my mind, as it inevitably would. Strangely, it never has left my mind. But perhaps the simple act of putting it all down on paper ensured that.

When K finally got up – astonished to find me at my desk so early – I made some coffee, and while we drank it I recounted the dream. As I related each detail in turn I watched K’s face for the signs of recognition, surprise, even shock. But there was no such reaction. There was nothing. Nothing at all but a sleepy shrug. I was dumbfounded.

—Does none of that ring a bell?

—Ring a bell? No. Should it?

—Are you serious? Have you forgotten?

—Forgotten what?

—Just the other day, at this exact time, you sat there, where you’re sitting now, just like that, drinking coffee, in your dressing gown, and you told me the same dream.

K considered me, bewildered.

—I did?

—Yes you did! Jesus! I don’t believe you’ve forgotten.

—I can’t, well … I do remember telling you about a dream … I do remember that. But I don’t … Really? Tell me what you dreamed again.

So I did. I went through the details once more. K was silent, but this time I was sure that there was some recognition, that I was not mad, that something odd had indeed happened.

—God. That’s a bit creepy. I do remember. It seems very like my dream. Yes. The doctor at the window. The little boy. The policeman.

—There was no policeman in mine though.

—No. But still.

We went through the details of K’s dream and the details of mine, and we sought out the similarities and the differences. The differences were all fairly plain, obvious, matters of stark contrast, such as the atmosphere in the hospital at the beginning and, of course, the different endings. But the similarities – or more than that, the identicals – of everything else struck us both as peculiar in the extreme. We stared at each other, baffled, at a loss to explain it. What did it mean? Then I went to my desk and got the sketches I had made. K went through them one by one, examining each for several seconds before commenting.

—No. This isn’t the boy I dreamed of. Mine was a bit chubby. He had curly hair, freckles. Yours is a bit, what, blond and blue-eyed?

—Yes. He was thin too. A bit spectral, I suppose.

—Well. Who’s this? Is this the doctor? Mine had no beard. Mine had glasses and no beard. And you have yours wearing a doctor’s jacket, is it? I can’t remember what mine was wearing. I suppose he would have been. I can’t remember. The window looks about right. The brickwork on the wall looks right. I think I remember ivy though. Or do I? Ivy, or high bushes or something.

—Look at the garden ones.

K looked at them, and immediately frowned.

—No. Mine was completely different. Yours is all neat and tidy. I didn’t have paths, or a fountain. It was just a lawn, with bushes around the edges, maybe some in the middle, not well kept, high grass. I wouldn’t have recognised this at all.

The final sketch was the door back into the building. Again, this was different.

—You have the boy there again. And he’s naked. Well. I was naked in mine, and there was a policeman. And you have the door open, but in mine it was closed, although it looks like the same door, to tell you the truth. Same arched thing, heavy wooden old-fashioned thing like a church door. There was police tape in front of mine. He wouldn’t let me in.

K put down my sketches and smiled at me.

—Also, in my dream I was innocent. In yours you’re guilty. Guilty of theft as well, you notice. Theft of my dream.

—Seems that way.

—Are you freaked out?

—A little.

—Well, I would have been as well if the sketches had matched my dream. But they don’t. So. You didn’t dream what I dreamed. You had my dream in your head and you dreamed about it. And you didn’t know what anything looked like so you made it up. I wouldn’t worry about it. It probably means you’re jealous of my life or something.

K regarded it as a peculiar but really quite explicable coincidence, and I remember that although we did at that stage laugh about it a little bit, and the conversation veered off into mutual teasing, I was still troubled by it, and remained so. But my thoughts were at that stage limited to what had happened to us, nothing more.

Before K left for work that morning, we had moved the conversation on to the original source for the first dream – the news report about the break-in at the laboratory in Italy.

—It just goes to show, said K, that the most infectious thing of all is not anthrax or the plague or whatever, it’s paranoia, and they’ve already released that. It’s in all our conversations, in our private thoughts and our worries and our secret fears and our horror stories. And now it’s in our dreams. It’s contagious.

That final word stayed with me. For the rest of that day I got no work done. Contagious. If it was as easy as it seemed for one person’s dreams to infect another’s, then surely it must have happened to me before? I tried to remember dreams. I found that I could remember very few. One horrible nightmare from my childhood stood out, as did one extremely erotic dream from some months previously. But of my recent dreams I could remember very little. There were a few peculiar, isolated images – a coach on a winding, perilous mountain road; a bridge made entirely of broken glass; a black river; a tangle of snakes knotted together in a laundry basket; sheets of yellow paper blowing down a hillside. But I could recall no contexts, no stories, no sense of where I was or if I was there at all, nothing that I could reasonably think of as a proper dream, such as the one I had stolen from K. I knew, though, that I had dreamed many such dreams. It was simply that I had forgotten them. It made me wonder whether there was something about dreams which did not allow them to be easily remembered. Did they contain some sort of self-destruct mechanism? It was hard to remember them when you first woke up; harder still, as K had demonstrated, just a few days later; almost impossible, as I now found, after any length of time more than that. Perhaps there was a reason for it.

I remembered too how something inside me recoils from hearing someone else’s dream. My mind shies away from it in the same way that my body shies away from a height or a dog. Perhaps there was a reason for that too, and perhaps they were the same reason.

I moved through the water and the muffled, riotous noise, towards the surface and the moving light. My feet kicked.

There would be nothing at all to worry about if dreams were unimportant. But I don’t know that they’re unimportant. I mean, they may well be unimportant, and if they are then I’m being stupid, and if you believe they’re unimportant then this is going to make you very impatient. But the fact is – and I’ve done a little research – nobody really knows what dreams are. The scientists and the doctors and the psychiatrists have their various theories of course, but they are various, and no one really agrees about anything. So, imagine for a moment that dreams are important. Imagine that in some fundamental way they enable us to function. It’s not unreasonable, is it? Maybe dreams are the way our mind makes sense of itself. Maybe it’s in our dreams that we arrive at conclusions and make decisions which in our waking life take on the nature of givens, of truths, which we do not seek to explain. Maybe dreams are the way we develop our conscience, our morality, our personality. Maybe that’s how, and where, we allocate priorities and sort through aspects of ourselves and arrive at an understanding of how best to proceed. Maybe dreams make us wiser and better and more human. Maybe they make us ourselves.

And imagine as well that what we remember of dreams is just the smallest part of what has gone on while we slept. It is highlights, and it is remembered as images and sounds and emotions and sensations because that is the language that our waking mind uses, while in fact, in dreams, the language is very different – something strange and irreducible, inexpressible in words or signs. So, dreams tumble through us, and only small pieces of them are remembered, and then only in translation as it were, recalled in a way that allows them to be recalled.

When I realised that I had dreamed K’s dream, I realised too that this could not have been the first time that this had happened. It may have been the first time I had noticed it, but K has been recalling dreams over breakfast for years. And K is not of course the only person who tells me about their dreams. Rachel often does it, though I suspect she makes a lot of hers up, and another friend of mine, David, tells me regularly about his – complicated things that seemed to go on for ever. In the average week I will hear of strange images, unlikely circumstances, embarrassing situations, mysterious words and gestures and signs – all taken from the dreams of others. And all of this is fed into my subconscious and stays there somewhere, along with all the other things I hear and see in the course of my life. Inevitably, some of it will resurface in my own dreams. It goes into the mix. It is improbable to think that it wouldn’t. And I have the clear evidence of K’s dream to prove it.

When I first thought this through, it took a little while for me to work out the implications. But what nagged at me was the sensation I have whenever someone tells me their dream. I feel, as I’ve said, a definite reticence, almost distaste. As if I know innately that hearing the details of someone else’s dream is bad for me. And of course, I eventually realised, if dreams really are evidence of a nocturnal, deeply unconscious process by which we become ourselves, then taking the translated highlights of one person’s dreams and inserting them into the dreams of another might well be bad for all concerned. It might well be very damaging. For what are we processing then? Certainly nothing that is entirely our own. We’re working on the detritus of a different consciousness. Someone else’s stuff. We’re taking in orphan manifestations of another inner life. We’re dealing in interference, static, muddied waters, a polluted stream, a mess of mixed metaphors, a heap of confusion. There are false reports in the dispatches. In among your bad day at work, your difficult relationship with your mother, father, husband, wife, your financial problems and the threat of terrorism, is the bicycle ride along the cliff edge that your daughter dreamed of last Thursday; and the man with the sombrero who followed your work colleague around a cathedral in a dream she had last night and told you about this morning. How will these be processed? Will they be dismissed? Will they be confused with your own reality? Are they translations of very specific subconscious conclusions or switches or trips, which, when redreamed by you, will affect, alter or stall your own sleeping deliberations? Is that why we find it difficult to remember dreams? Because our minds are naturally wary of contagion? Is that why I feel so uncomfortable hearing someone else’s dream? Because I know it is infecting my own?

I voiced my theory to K. It would be wrong to say that the response was entirely dismissive. But my impression was that K was amused by it, thought it an entertaining conceit, a nicely ridiculous notion, and did not for a moment take it seriously.

—Dreams are not for sharing then?

—Well, no, they’re not. I don’t think so.

—Because they interfere with other dreams?

—Yes. I mean, I’m trying to think of an example. Imagine waking up in the middle of surgery and offering to help the surgeon.

—Yes?

—Well, it wouldn’t be good, would it?

—Why? Was I dreaming?

—No, surgery is the dreaming, is the process you go through while asleep, while dreaming, and then, in the middle of that, you interfere, or someone else interferes, in the process. It’s not a good example.

—No.

—OK, have you ever used one of those online translation services? You enter a web page in French or German or whatever and it gives you an instant rough translation?

—Yeah.

—OK, well, imagine that what you remember from a dream is like one of those translations. You know it’s not accurate, sometimes the inaccuracies are quite funny, but it’ll do, it gives you a rough idea.

—OK.

—Then imagine that you pass that translation on to someone else who then translates it again. Their translation will not only be an additional step away from the original, but it won’t even be their original that it’s one more step away from, it’s someone else’s.

—Why do they translate it again though?

—It’s an example.

—You need to work on your examples.

—But don’t you get it? Dreams are like your own personal, bear with me, your own personal essence.

—Oh dear.

—And telling other people about them risks, I don’t know. You exhale your essence and they inhale it and then their essence is compromised by your essence.

—Jesus.

—Well, it’s not an easy thing to get your head around.

—No. I get it. There is too much telling of dreams going on. Too much exhaling of essences. We need a reduction in global levels of essence. We need a new Kyoto Accord, except for dreams. Less dreams in the atmosphere. The Americans will want a derogation, you know. What with Hollywood and all. I mean, the American Dream for God’s sake. You can’t tell them to stop exhaling that.

—And that’s another thing. The use of the word ‘dream’ in all kinds of stupid ways. Hollywood ways. Aspirational. My dream house; my dream job; my dream girlfriend, boyfriend. These are not dreams. Or, dreams are not these. Dreams are not good things. Or, they’re not fluffy harmless diversionary things. They’re the motors of self-awareness. They construct our individuality. If we share them we cease to be ourselves. We merge into a banal gloop of similarities. We get stuck. As human beings, we get stuck at this aggressive, self-obsessed, materialistic stage of our development.

K looked at me for quite a long time without saying anything, half smiling, but trying to work out as well, I think, how much of this I actually believed.

—Motors of self-awareness?

—Well, why not?

—OK. I won’t tell you my dreams any more.

My concern about dreams did not diminish over the next number of weeks, but I didn’t mention it again. I realised that it was a difficult idea to voice, and I realise it still. But it has preyed upon me considerably. I have had to stop people, a couple of times, as they began to tell me about a dream. I’m relieved when I wake and can remember nothing. I become agitated and nervous when details do get through. And all the time, my mind struggles with the notion of a polluted pool of dreams from which we are all drinking, oblivious, trapping ourselves in a dead end of shared, second-hand signs.

All this talk of dreaming. I rose through the water, fingers first, propelling myself towards the unmediated light, towards breathing. With the things that had been going through my mind you would think that breaking the surface and re-emerging into the air, into the direct sound of the world, would have seemed like waking from a dream, like coming from an unreal place into a real one. But it was not like that. Something had happened. In the tiny space of time during which I had been underwater, something had happened.

The first indication of it was sound. I had thought that the roaring in my ears, the drumming and the crashing and the jumble of noise that I had been hearing, was the water – the water going past me; my disturbance of it; the filling of my ears and my nose; the press of it against my head and my body; the echo of my inner spaces, suddenly surrounded. But as my head cleared the surface and I drew my first breath, the roaring continued. And it was more, it immediately seemed to me, than a matter of water. I had surfaced facing down the pool towards the shallow end. I caught a blur of the small girl, and her father, whom I’d seen earlier. She was climbing out of the pool, and her father seemed to be almost pushing her, while his head was turned towards me, or rather, past me, towards the deep end, with an expression which suggested some not inconsiderable alarm.