I suffered from nightmares when I was a child and believed in ghosts until I was well into my twenties. I had some justification: I would "see" apparitions from time to time-people who were there, then suddenly not there, or be followed by shadows with nothing observable to cause them. I would "hear" noises in the night, where no noise ought to be. When I was 18 I dreamt my grandmother came to see me in the middle of the night. She told me, "I'm dying, I'm dying," and then said goodbye to me and smiled. As it happened she had had a heart attack at the time I had the dream and had thought she was dying, but lived to discuss the dream with me. Telepathy more than a haunting, certainly, and that was a "good" dream-at least she was smiling-and useful, because I called home the next day. But other dreams could bring terror with them and the apparitions discouraged one from going where one was obliged to go. Premonitions of disaster sometimes came with these dubious perceptions, as they do with a total eclipse of the sun in India. As for the nightmares, I started with the notion that they came from outside me, that they were invasions of pure evil which happened when one was asleep, defenceless and unable to fight back: the dreamer pure victim. Poor me, frightened me.
Nightmares happen, I now believe, to people who think they are good, and fail to acknowledge their own dreadfulness. Children are always the heroes of their own lives: as one grows older one comes to realise one is villain, too.
In my late twenties I was cured of nightmares. This is how it happened. I had had a recurring bad dream for years, in which I was making my way up a mountain in a place which looked like Transyl-vania-certainly vampire country. Night was falling. We-a vague group-stopped at a country inn. I would be given a room off an upper corridor, and go to bed and try to sleep. But moonlit forest branches scrabbled against the window; and eventually claws too, and the window would crack, and howling, demented creatures spring at me-and I would wake, and the terror would last for hours.
Then one night reality caught up with the dream. I went on a touring holiday in Austria with my then husband, 25 years older than my-self, my small child and a "girl to help." We had a small sedate blue Ford Anglia car, but super-charged so my husband could overtake dramatically where no safe overtaking seemed possible, missing death by inches, leaving pale and terrified faces behind him. For some reason I took this pastime for granted-perhaps because I was so grateful for a roof over my head I did not like to argue.
Night was falling as we took the mountain road out of Innsbruck, in the cramped, alarming little car. To my terror, I recognised the road as the one in my dream. With every curve the place became more familiar. Trees bending in over the road, bare slabs of rock gleaming in the moonlight. We stopped at the first auberge we came to-thank God it was not at all like the one in the dream. I remember my relief. But then it turned out the inn was full. Staff led us to an annexe-and there the nightmare house stood, in all its gabled, steep-roofed detail. Up the familiar stairs with the carved oak banisters, along the upstairs corridor; the white-aproned maid showed us our two rooms facing each other. In the room to the right moonlit branches scrabbled against the pane, just so-the one to the left looked out over the valley, calm, benign and still. I put the girl and my child in the haunted room, and chose the other for myself and my husband. I am not proud of it. Mothers should not behave like this. They should give up their lives and sanity for their children. I knew the better way, but chose the worse. I was not a good person.
All passed a quiet night. I even slept, for once dreamlessly. I had survived the night but my relief was short lived-I spent the next few days in terror, waiting for nemesis: for the car crash, for the fatal accident to me and my family. It did not come.
I never had the dream again. I do not think I have had a nightmare since. There was no way I could pretend any longer that I was so nice and good that evil must come from outside me, not inside me. I realised I was responsible for my own nightmares. They were self-generated. The fact of the matter was that I was as cowardly and self-interested as anyone else. Nor could I hide from myself that my husband's overtaking habits scared me to bits and would kill us all sooner or later, child included. I ran away soon after and restarted my life.
If dreams are how we tell ourselves what we need to know, mine were just having to shake me very hard indeed-I was being so obtuse. Nightmares are desperate things.
