Six years ago, I began dreaming about the street lamps of Southside.
These recurring dreams began shortly after the return visit to Kinloss over the Scotland holiday of 2005, when I revisited old childhood haunts; Southside (the sergeants married quarters) Burnside (the officers married quarters) Forres, and our house there at the base of the Black Woods.
The dreams began shortly after I returned, and recur every few months or so. The dreams are startlingly similar. In them I am entering the Southside housing estate in the first hour of darkness. I am often coming from the direction of Abbeylands Primary School and Burnside. The street lamps are tall and elegant. I am euphoric to be back in Southside as darkness falls and with the street lamps on. I am also worried in case I am not meant to be here. Often in these dreams I am searching for something, some mythical 'heart' of the estate. There are changes too - there is a cafe in the centre, a river runs between the houses, or the houses are surrounded by sand dunes. The sense of euphoria and anxiety is superseded by an even stronger feeling, that of of implacable and over whelming mystery.
I'm not sure why the return visit to Scotland would have triggered off these surprisingly invariable dreams. Before the visit to Scotland, I would dream most of the nearby Burnside housing estate, where I lived from 1981 - 1982 (the Burnside dreams took place mostly on briught summer days) Street lamps, in my own personal mythos iconography are, of course, incredibly important... Look at how many times I have drawn them over the past god-knows-how-many-years. They are heralds of the night, scions of mystery and atmosphere, twilight made manifest in technology. Even now, the sight of a street lamp at dusk, in certain locations and kinds of day can hold a near hypnotic thrall over me. It was in Southside that I was first allowed to play outside when the lights came on. I remember that joy, that freedom, and in that first night playing outside, a sense of overwhelming and incredible mystery. The essence of the night itself distilled into the playground our house in Abbey Crescent looked out upon.
Yesterday I was at work and typed in 'houses in Southside Kinloss'. The above photograph came up (it was on an estate agent website). The houses under that leaden sky, that street lamp, dull glow in muted light, and scattered over the ground those fallen leaves... It was an odd experience. Time seemed to falter. It was rather like having deja-vu but knowing I had been there before, because, contained in that photograph was all the resonance of the mysteries of autumn afternoons. A fragment of a feeling from childhood, a stone thrown into a still pool, rippling with a kind of pleasant violence. What I was experiencing was, of course, what Proust referred to in 'Remembrance of Things Past' when he tasted the Madeline cake. In this case, it wasn't a taste that sent me back into my own history but a photograph. My feeling, at the time of looking at the photograph (and the feeling only lasted a few seconds) was one of something being explained -as if something had come to light, as if I, through viewing this photograph could now understand something. This sense of revelation did not last though, but now, a day later, I can still almost taste that sense of ghost-story mystery inherent in the autumnal afternoons of childhood, and this encapsulated in a photograph of a terraced house under a grey sky behind a broken street light shining in the day.
