Ever since she was very little, Laura Brown’s bedtimes have been marked by the return of her dreams from the previous night. Not by recurring dreams, but by the arrival at her bedside, just at the point at which she has turned out the light and is sliding into sleep, of all the stories from the night before. They gather about, gentle shimmering presences, glimmering softly in the last traces of light, as if anxious to ensure her safe passage into a new night. Even the bad dreams are there, hovering politely, timidly, at the edge of the group, ready to apologise for any harm done, for the fear that jolted her awake and left her shaken, staring at the dark. Forgive us, they say, let us in, let us make it up to you.
For as long as she can remember, Laura Brown has looked forward to this moment. Hello dreams, she says. Hello Laura, they say, and their presence is as warm and comforting as the smooth coolness of the sheets, as safe as the pillow under her head and the duvet mounded in a cloudy heap about her shoulders. Goodnight Laura, sleep well. And she sleeps. And dreams again.
Childhood passes in a blur of stories, private worlds, and conversations with her dreams. She is the sort of girl who reads while she’s walking down the street and loses count of how often she is almost run over and shouted at by irate motorists. Little Laura-head-in-air, her parents say. Off in Dreamland again? Not yet, she thinks, just waiting.
She writes about her revenants in a Year 9 journaling assignment. Her English teacher marks her down. Too fanciful. Top marks go to Sylvie, who has written a tearjerker about her old cat getting hit by a car and having to be put down. The last lines go, ‘You were old and we knew we would have to say goodbye, some day. But not this way, not yet.’ The teacher reads Sylvie’s piece to the class, praising it as an excellent example of creative non-fiction using personal experience to explore a universal theme. Do you hear that, Laura? Non-fiction. Except that Laura knows Sylvie’s mother is asthmatic, has an almost pathological hatred of fleas, and the family has never had a pet. Laura hates her teacher. She thinks she might also hate Sylvie.
In Year 11, Laura joins the creative writing group. She writes a short piece about a girl revisited by her dreams, how the dreams gather at her bedside, a soft glow of phosphorescence, waiting to be resumed. It’s described as pretty but lacking in conflict. Falling asleep, says the teacher leading the group, can hardly be described as action. Aaron suggests turning it into a horror story: write about the nightmares, he urges, write about how afraid she is at night, how she hates going to sleep, and then how the nightmares come no matter what she does. There’s a kid from the school’s LGBT alliance who says dreams are rich territory for exploring identity: don’t hide in fables, Laura, face up to these issues. Annabel suggests the protagonist be recast as a writer of television serials: she’s inspired by her dreams and writes them up as the latest instalment, but one night she stops dreaming, loses her creativity. The teacher commends these suggestions as being full of possibility. But they’re not my story, says Laura. They’re someone else’s. The teacher says, listen Laura, when four out of four readers comment on an absence of conflict it might be a good idea to have another think. Laura briefly considers writing an action-horror-splatter piece about a misunderstood teenager who wreaks dreadful revenge upon certain of her peers and teachers. She suspects it has been done before.
At university and, later, at work Laura is surprised by how often people talk about their dreams and how similar some of these dreams are. The sitting-on-the-toilet-in-the-middle-of-the-office dreams, the naked-in-the-lecture-theatre dreams, and in her case, when she really didn’t know where her life was going, the sitting-naked-on-the-toilet-in-the-middle-of-the-office dream. Almost everyone she knows has stumbled through a blizzard and woken to find the blankets on the floor and the bedroom curtains billowing in the wind. Or the converse: they’ve left the electric blanket on and found themselves crawling across a fiery plain, their charred clothes falling from their limbs, the ground cracking around them. Others speak of being lost in their own city and desperately trying to get to an appointment.
These conversations always start late at night after too much wine. The following day people seem shy, embarrassed to have revealed their subconscious and its mess of anxiety to the world.
She asks if others experience the return. One friend says she has new dreams every night, but she’s always accompanied by the pet rat she owned when she was twelve. He sits in her pocket or on her shoulder, a small bundle of warmth, huddled against her neck, chittering in her ear, making her feel safe and loved, just as he did when he was alive. Another revisits the same places in multiple dreams; places which, so far as he knows, do not exist in real life. Most people are politely curious or sceptical and teasing. Stay off the drugs Laura, is a common response. Still others say they’d like what she’s taking.
It’s like a moment of reconciliation, of completion, she tells a boyfriend. And immediately wishes she hadn’t. Because, of course, he wants to know exactly what she means. Does it complete the day? Bring things full circle? Perhaps, she says, but not quite. It’s more like a reconciliation with all the selves she’s had or could have had and could yet have, she says. A reconciliation with consciousness and possibility. With fear too, she says. With everything you’ve found most frightening.
The boyfriend seizes on the idea of previous and multiple selves. He confesses himself shocked: is she talking about reincarnation? She’s got to admit it, it’s a bit weird. No, she says, no, that’s not what I said. Explain it then, he says, because that’s what it sounds like.
Laura pauses. She realises he won’t understand the shimmering, the presence, the safety she feels. Another time, she says. They do make love but a barrier, a chill, something is there, between them. The boyfriend thinks he’ll head back to his place. It’s closer to work. He has an early start in the morning. Laura does not argue. She pulls on her kimono, goes to the kitchen, packages the evening’s leftovers into a plastic box. Take them, she tells him. They’ll be good for lunch. Don’t worry about the container.
A colleague tells Laura that after the birth of her daughter she dreamt of a grey, featureless landscape. And this was the thing, she was immersed in it, the landscape was her and she was the landscape, the grey, sad nothing of it. A thick mist hung about and through her and a telephone rang. She answered and spoke to her own long dead father. But the connection was poor and the call was breaking up. She couldn’t hear him and remembers shouting, begging him to speak up. Please, I can’t hear you, please. And then came her child’s voice, clear as a bird, as a bell, as glass. That’s because you’re dead, Mummy. It was, her colleague says, the most harrowing, awful dream she’d ever had. She woke weeping.
Laura finds a new respect for this colleague who has shown herself so vulnerable, so afraid. She would like to return the confidence, to speak of her own most awful dream, but baulks, tells her something more recent: of dreaming she was at work in some vast, byzantine bureaucracy. She’d been trying to get an appointment with the country’s leading poet, just for a chat, and had finally secured one. But the vast bureaucracy was planning a major announcement. Whoever was in charge cancelled all leave and strongly advised staff to postpone all personal and social commitments. Laura-in-the-dream was afraid that, if she did so, she would never meet the leading poet and never talk about the creative life, so instead arranged to see him immediately after the announcement at a café close by. The day came, the announcement was made, but Laura-in-the-dream couldn’t leave: her colleagues kept giving her more and more to do. Eventually they relented but Laura-in the-dream couldn’t find her shoes and ran to the interview in stockinged, bleeding feet. She caught up with the leading poet as he was leaving the café, called his name, snatched at his sleeve, apologised profusely. He turned to her coldly, said it didn’t matter, she clearly belonged in that other world. She was doing well there, she should stay. And yes, Laura woke with tears streaming down her cheeks.
Another time, she says, she dreamt she was in Paris, in an apartment with a view of Sacré-Coeur. It was evening, the sun was setting, and the white dome was bathed in rose, gold, and orange against a glowing sky. It seemed so close, a street or two away, and she was looking directly at it, from the same height. The colours deepened, the sky was streaked with scarlet. A flock of pigeons flew past her window. She watched as their wings burst into flame and they fell to the earth. It was strangely, darkly beautiful, she says: it was seeing that beauty that made it so disturbing.
The pair smile. There’s an interesting kind of peace between them. Her colleague has to catch her train. Laura too is keen to get home.
That night, as she prepares for bed, Laura reproaches herself for her lack of candour. True, she gave two dreams to the colleague’s one, but kept her own moment of greatest fear hidden, closed. Hardly a fair exchange.
The previous night’s dreams gather around her. With a newcomer that she recognises as her colleague’s dream, and behind it, at the very edge of the group, an older, darker presence. It’s alright, Laura says to the newcomer, she’s shared it now, she’s freed herself. Laura lets the colleague’s dream in, hears a child’s voice: that’s because you’re dead, Mummy, but don’t worry, it’s going to be alright, I’m coming to get you, to bring you back.
Such a weird thing happened, her colleague says, at morning tea. I had that dream again, the one I told you about. But this time my baby said not to worry, she was coming to get me, to bring me back, everything would be alright. How strange is that? After all these years.
This is how Laura Brown becomes a reteller of dreams. It’s not a career option, of course. She thinks of it as covert voluntary work. Someone tells her about a particularly upsetting dream. She listens carefully and offers one or two in return. The burning pigeons go down well. She supposes her listeners are relieved that nothing so macabre has emerged from their own imagination. And her story about the leading poet elicits gasps. She mentions his name now, and the coldness she describes is so at odds with his manner and reputation that her listeners are as shocked as Laura-in-the-dream.
At night, after each of these exchanges, her dreams bring her the newcomer. Welcome, she says, tell me your story. The dream speaks, retells itself, as a better, kinder, happier version. Laura thinks this is a bit how we present ourselves to the world. But her dreams also bring her that other darker, older presence. It hovers at the back of the group, not timid, not nervous like the other nightmares, but patient, steady, taking its time. She recognises it now. Go away, she says, I’m not ready for you. She hears its quiet whisper: I know, but the day will come, I will wait.
The worst dream of Laura Brown’s life turned up when she was twenty-one. Even today, she cannot say exactly what or where it came from. It is true that she wasn’t particularly happy (who would be at the break-up of their first serious romance, when university is going belly-up and the flat is cold and damp?) but nonetheless it seemed, still seems, out of all proportion to her life at the time.
The dream was in black and white. She was part of a film crew, making a documentary about the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain. They trudged over a muddy, rutted landscape, boom mikes held aloft, filming a hand-to-hand battle. Laura provided the voiceover, with a calm authority so measured it seemed almost satirical. Leafless trees were etched in black ink against a leaden sky. A light rain began falling. The crew shivered. The action shifted. A sword flashed, sliced through Laura, head to toe, again and again, swift, clean, regular. A meat slicer through a side of bacon. She was falling away from herself in thin perfect slices. Her commentary continued, detached and professional, from somewhere in the trees or grey sky: Ladies and Gentlemen, we are now witnessing the total elimination of Laura Brown.
She remembers screaming herself awake, the flatmates running, holding her, recoiling as she recounted her nightmare. Remembers feeling that it wasn’t the dream that was pushing them away but something in her, that the horror she’d just seen had somehow marked her out, that she should never speak of this again.
The months pass. Laura uses her gift discreetly and gently. She does not seek or encourage disclosure, prefers to wait for others to volunteer their stories to her when the dreams themselves are ready to be retold. She brings peace to children who have dreamt of being lost in libraries and fairgrounds, to parents beset by visions of lost babies, and to colleagues who have woken exhausted by pointless, Sisyphean labours. She feels like a social worker, a therapist of the soul. Happily, none of her ‘clients’ connect the revised dream with anything Laura’s done. Must just have been on my mind, they say, putting it down to the strange workings of the subconscious.
Laura is at a spring wedding. She’s just been introduced to the bride’s cousin, a dermatologist. They chat about music, gardens, the country’s continued high rates of skin cancer. He compliments her on her silk shawl and paper parasol, so elegant and sensible. They sit together at dinner, in the shade of a walnut tree. It’s still warm. Laura is grateful for the shade, the opportunity it provides to remove the shawl. The dermatologist is attentive, runs a finger down Laura’s arm, turns her away from him, checks her shoulder, apologises. This is not what he normally does at weddings but she has a lot of moles, he hopes she’s keeping an eye on them. There’s one in particular, just there.
Promise, please, you’ll get it checked.
Laura makes light of her speckled skin, begins telling him about the boyfriend who liked to play join-the-dots. The dermatologist looks at her quietly, seriously. Laura abandons the story. She will make an appointment with her GP. As soon as she gets home.
She means it, really she does, but somehow it slips her mind. Months later, newly showered, she’s enjoying the sensation of the freshly laundered towel on her skin. Slightly scratchy still, softening in the damp of her skin, releasing the smell of fresh air and sunshine. The tip of a fingernail passes over the mole on her shoulder, raking the surface slightly. Laura winces. It’s oddly, sharply painful. With the aid of a hand mirror she manages to examine her shoulder. Everything looks normal to her. But yes, she will make that appointment. Soon.
The area remains tender, irritated by her clothing. She finds traces of blood on a blouse. And does see her doctor.
The mole is excised and analysed. The news is not good. An invasive cancer, which she imagines as a small blind creature burrowing purposefully into her flesh. Further investigation reveals that the creature has burrowed deep, tunnelled its way through her body, building nests and hides as it goes. The creature joins her in her dreams, curling up in a pocket or a hood, travelling with her, across the night’s uncharted landscapes.
Friends, family rally. There is baking, gardening, music. They share books and reminiscences, poetry and dreams. There is much, much laughter. Laura has never been so keenly aware of their love, of loving and being loved. It is a time of warmth and beauty, which somehow makes her decision easier.
And so it is that one night, in the moment before sleep, when her dreams return to her, as they always have, that the dark, patient presence steps forward. Hello Laura, the dreams say. Hello dreams, says Laura, hello you. I think it’s time.
The dream is in black and white. Laura is part of a film crew, making a documentary about the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain. They trudge over a muddy, rutted landscape, filming a hand-to-hand battle. Laura again provides the voiceover, a calm and authoritative account of the events leading up to the battle, the political and economic forces at play. Leafless trees are etched in black ink against a leaden sky. A light rain falls. The crew shivers. The action shifts. Laura turns away from the battlefield, towards a ruined wall and crumbling stones, the last vestiges of cottages overtaken by nature. She briefly outlines the massacre that was to follow, the looting, the pillaging, the destruction of a village. She walks away from the battlefield, towards the trees, describing patterns of future settlement and linguistic development, the future cultural significance, the coming prosperity of this small, bloodied field. The sky is clearing. The clash of weaponry fades. Colour returns to the world, a gentle wash, slowly deepening. Laura is walking, walking, walking. She feels like she could walk forever.