Wednesday 16 December 2009

Another Dream of my Grandfather's House

Fell asleep last night, without meaning too, watching the old Doctor Who story 'The Hand of Fear' (I didn't even get past episode two). I woke up at 12:30am, strangely relieved. I had had another nightmare in my 'Grandfather's House' series of dreams. Of course, I should have made the effort then, got up, found a notebook (I have a plague of notebooks around) and written the dream down, but, I turned off the light (and the television) and went back to sleep.
It wasn't just my Grandfather's house, but my Grandmother's house too (Nanny and Grandad Stone, -Stone from the name of the village they lived in- to differentiate them from my paternal grandparents, Nanny and Grandad Mole). My grandmother, Nanny Stone died in 1983 when I was ten, while Grandad Stone died in 1994, hence why I tend to refer to it as my Grandfather's house. We lived there for a year in 1977, when we had just returned from Malta, and I was five. It was there that I saw -or thought I saw- a ghost - a cowled monk figure stood at the end of the bed. I always found the house, a nondescript semi-detached council house in a small Worcestershire village, to be possessed of a dreaming, eerie quality. I was not alone in thinking this; my Aunt, talking a few years ago said that, when she was a child, she always found upstairs frightening, and said that her daughter, my cousin Anne, had 'seen things too'.
I say all this because perhaps it is a contributing factor to its recurrent appearance in my dreams; secret attic rooms, hidden stairways, always that haunting unnerving atmosphere.
My dream last night was typical. Though it was undeniably my Grandfather's house, it also bore no relation to the house in waking life. There was a low kitchen, attached to a long living room. It was night, and outside the windows, an urban street. I had to stay alone in the house, which I was not pleased about. I think our old dog, an orange mongrel called Bruno, was with me at this point. I tried getting other people to stay but to no avail. I thought that the only way I could cope with staying in the house on my own was by getting drunk. The next point in the dream i remember was waking up in the sitting room. I had managed to fall asleep after all. There was a quarter empty bottle of something called 'Drinking Alcohol' on the table. I started drinking again. There was a woman with me now. I can't remember who she was (a silver dress, blonde almost white hair) but I knew her in my dream. Stood at the open door looking into the street. I said to her 'Shenstone is haunted', some kind of statement whose importance now escapes me. In waking life, my Grandfather;s house was in Stone, though there was a nearby village called Shenstone. I stood with the woman at the windows. A procession of people passing by. They looked like teenagers, or students. Somehow, they got into the house, began to hold some kind of party, though the party was moderate and well behaved. I started to become concerned that there were people I didn't know in my Grandfather's house, particularly when I saw some of them start to go upstairs, up into the depths of the house. I said to someone that perhaps it was time for them to leave.
That's it. That's all I can remember. A particularly uninteresting dream, compared to some I've had, but it's that atmosphere that stays with me; that haunting, invisible presence of something unseen that permeates the atmosphere.
An atmosphere, of course, that I remember in the house in life.