I had a very weird incident recently, whereupon I instantly recalled a series of locations that I had visited in my dreams. It was quite disconcerting to say the least, one minute I was in the moment with Jake, having a little play, the next I was drifting around a water fountain in Japan in a yellow Ferrari with Keith Flint in the passenger seat. See – I’d been there before, but only in a dream, and as far as I can recall, I had that dream a long, long time ago, and I had ever thought of it since I had originally dreamt it. A few seconds of that dream was all I had though, because my mind was transported to another place I had dreamt about maybe five or six years ago: a tight crawl-space that lead from the store-room of my first job to my Religious Education classroom from secondary school.
I thought it was odd to be taken back to a couple of places I created in my mind but had long forgotten. But it got stranger. Before long I was taken back to the park behind my Mum’s house, which was recognisable, but transformed into a black and white, multi-platform grassy car park. I had dreamt about that before too. Then I was on the road again, driving along the motorway, a strange route that linked two far-away places in a very short amount of time. Then I was skiing down the hill to my Mum’s house. Then I was wriggling down through the “staff entrance” to my job at Game in the Cascades Centre in Portsmouth – a trapdoor in the ceiling of the premises. From there it was a semi-logical step to a warped version of the train-ride I used to take to get to Portsmouth – with a fleeting memory of hanging out of a train window whilst going through a tunnel, duelling with people in the train travelling alongside us, exchanging bursts of red laser from a Storm-Troopers rifle.
There were more as well, but this happened yesterday now, and as we all know, memories of dreams are slippery. I would say that the most recent one was from about a year ago, but I recalled each one with startling clarity, as if I had dreamt them the previous night. The one about the crawl-space linking those two disparate locations was especially old – I had that dream at least ten years ago, maybe even fifteen.
Most odd.
But fascinating.
