Dream Snatcher

Here are a few dream adaptations that I have been working on...
Dreams have always intrigued and mystified me so I thought it would be interesting to 'collect' dreams- write down my own and ask others to write down theirs-and re-write them as half stories/soliloquies.
(if you have any interesting dreams please share..!)


'I dream, and who is dreaming me?'

Vermin

I thought, so this is the new way of doing it then? Go through years of trying to sell your house and then be expected to clear it out yourself?

In fairness, I had volunteered. I like to feel useful. But walking around the bare rooms I realised I was not up for the job. Something in me couldn’t say goodbye.

What a dump, I thought. How did it get like this? The house showed its age, I wondered how I’d managed to live in a derelict building for so long. Sentiment, I suppose…

I walked to the bathroom, a big gaping room now, stark and ugly. The only thing left was a cast iron bath. I grappled at possibilities of trying to move it, and got frustrated. At closer inspection, it was in two halves. Even harder to move! Leaning against one half was a crumbling washing machine, the sort you see in skips. Inside it was hollow- a metal carcass- something had gotten to it. Termites? Metal termites?

On account of the new owner’s renovation, the walls had been stripped to their foundations, showing the wooden boards that held them up. I was perplexed to see little white dots on the remains of the walls. It looked like someone had gone round squeezing tubes of decorating icing. An ancient way of plastering, perhaps? Don’t be silly, I thought. And yet there was no explanation.

What I saw next threw me sideways. A blue and purple lizard, huge and dazzling, crawled up the wall. I had never seen such a thing! I was taken aback. The colours were so vivid, deep amethyst and sapphire, it looked exquisite. I was almost scared, such a rare, special thing could not be dealt with lightly.

In shock, I looked down to find the floor crawling with these strange lizards. A chill came over me as I remembered the eaten washing machine. Did these lizards have a taste for metal? It could explain the bath in two pieces…

My first thought was to stamp on them, but then I became conflicted. Were they dangerous? Did they need to be destroyed? They slithered at my feet, a whole sea of them, and a part of me wanted to collect them, to protect them.

Those creatures, I wondered why they had appeared so suddenly. It didn’t fit with my logic but they existed all the same.

The White Cage/The Wave

We had been caught. I don’t know how. We hadn’t even planned on killing anyone, it wasn’t an outcome we had hoped for. I look at Margaret and a panicky wave sloshes through me, infecting me. A poisonous injection of Shit What Have We Done.

Oh shit, he’s dead!

I look at Margaret, she knows our fate just as well as I. How did it come to this? Murderers! I keep thinking, I don’t want to go to jail. It’s always been a fear of mine, the big unthinkable. Locked up in your own mind.

Next thing we’re on a train. It feels like we’re on our way to a concentration camp. We are on our way to be questioned and doom glows around us like some perverse halo.

We walk into the interrogation room which must have been borrowed from a film. Dingy, basic, spotlight on desk. Our mothers are there. I feel ashamed. There is a point of pure desperation where I try to get myself out of it, conjure up excuses like a magic trick. Too  late.

We are taken to a prison, Margaret and I. It is in Japan, a new state of the art, high-tech young person’s prison. Fairly pleasant as prisons go. Everything is white- the exterior is cubic with many different levels and pathways. It is maze-like. No matter how minimalist and modern it looks, I still can’t contemplate being stuck in here. We know it will be for seven years. I stab in the dark to find something hopeful about the situation.

It is visiting hours. I’m outside on the prison grounds, a big field like a football pitch. My family are there, the mood is forlorn. I look up and gasp- a huge wave, a tsunami, is opening its big wet mouth, ready to gulp us all. Everyone screams and runs. It’s terrifying, one of those do or die moments. The tsunami goes straight over the prison, straight over us. We get soaked.

I scan the devastation for my family, I find my father and sister. I am hysterical by this point. We look everywhere for my mother and brother and eventually, thank God, we find them. We are all together, all safe. The family is completed. Nothing better, is there?

Reality’s ugly penny drops. Not such a happy ending after all. I have to go back to prison, serve my time for a crime I didn’t even know how I’d committed. That bastard wave hadn’t even managed to destroy the prison. And you call yourself a tsunami? Tshhh…

As I am walked to my cell a determination comes over me, a steely survival instinct that convinces me I will get through this, that I should make a lemonade, however bitter, from all these lemons that life has suddenly thrown at me.

I vow to make friends- they can’t all be bad, can they? I have been branded a ‘criminal’ but I’m not a bad person…And what about all those books I hadn’t read? The greats, the classics? Maybe I could turn this to my advantage, these seven years in this white cage.

The Brown Line

The tube had changed since the last time I’d been on it. It was all over-ground, and London had become a rural, coastal stretch of wind and sleepy houses. I was on the brown line, Bakerloo, on the way to a new gallery that had just opened. I enjoyed this sort of time to myself, solitary travelling always gives me a welcome window of contemplation.

I was sitting there, in the quiet, when I noticed what was sitting in front of me.

He was the strangest looking man I had ever seen. He was enormous, about the size of two people, so he must have been taking up two seats. His head, especially, looked as if it might topple off it was so big. He reminded me of a sumo wrestler. He was certainly foreign (if not alien) and had a friendly, serene face, with dark hair tied up in one of those buns. I realised with some unease that he was not fully dressed. His sloppy belly was hanging over him, yet he didn’t seem embarrassed or apologetic. In fact he was talking amicably to the nervous Englishman sat next to him. That always made me angry, the cold arrogance of the English…He clearly didn’t want to be next to the sumo man- at first I deplored his reluctance to chat along.

Then, my eyes travelled downwards. The sumo man was wearing a nappy type contraption. I could see that his arse hole was on show, and a huge wedge of shit was stuck on the way out of it. It was rectangular in shape, and revolted me. I forgave the Englishman in one swift second, as I too would try and avert my eyes elsewhere to avoid conversation with the strange naked man, who had such rectal dysfunction. I was glad that my stop was near- I was getting off in ‘Bath’- which was in London now. I told you the tube had changed.

Four Moons

I understand now the vividness of paintings.

I was in a field, it was a late dusk, and we were camping. It was a high up field on the foothills of some mountains, and in front of us laid a great vista. It was similar to Barcelona because it was by the sea, and bore the same sandy orange coloured buildings.

I was astonished by the sight, humbled by it. The sky had never looked so real yet so far from reality. It was a rich midnight blue, a velvety texture, royal in its depth. Placed in a row towards the bottom of the horizon were four yellow moons- full and beaming. Thin, wavy clouds weaved in and out behind the moons, confusing night with day.

I rushed into our tent and exclaimed-

“Quick, come and look at the sky! It looks like a Dali painting!”

I was excited, it felt like a solar eclipse level of occasion.

As we came out to see, a huge zig-zagging lightning bolt cracked through the sky. It was godly, profound. It hit into a large satellite pole which then immediately caught alight- a big burning Christmas tree. In one swooping action, the fire spread to the whole left hand side of the city that I had so admired. It took a second.

Such destruction in a heartbeat. At first I was scared that we might be in danger, and then I realised we were on the right side, the safe side. All we could do was watch the four moons and the orange glow beneath.

Some Poems

Recognition

To turn off a light

Takes a courage unseen

To delve into darkness

And all shades between

Makes it hard to recognise

The form you took first

A vague sense instead

Prolonging the thirst

I looked in a mirror

I suspected it lied

A reflection, a stranger

My heart strings were tied

I frantically searched

All the corners that hide

For me, as I began

For the first time I cried

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Dreamland

Goodnight, ladybirds

It’s time to rest

Let all that sparkles

Fade

To sleepy sand

There comes a time

When even beauty dies

And all that’s left

Avoids the eyes

Tread carefully on your road

To dreams untold

Let your hair unfold

Undressed and bold

Messy with gold

Rolling in a decadence

Made wealthy by stars

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That Feeling

Oh fuck!

There it goes!

I’ve been on my toes since the moment we froze

In time- one second

Is vast

All logic a mask

I don’t want to cry

For no reason why

I want to wake up

And fly fly fly

Out of the grey

And bastarding ways

Of making me heard-

Where’s the fun in excess?

Meaningless sex

No respect

I expect

Fortunate ways

Of getting a raise

Bask in the praise

My pretty young bird

I once heard a song

It set me free just that once

Play it again, let it run

Through my veins

Run over my curves

Vanish my pains

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Silence

I heard that silence...

It came over you like a mask

Porous and seeping

Falling from the ceiling

White and exotic

A noise so still

At caterpillar pace

Exhausting

Forbidding- don't cross

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The Haunting

Why are you still here?

You cackling reminder

Your nose as large as my fear

Your feet planted stubbornly

Pig-strength you remain

The star of my dreams

I fear you the most

I love you the least

Clawing at my mind

A ghost of a ghost

A shadow of an illusion

An optical illusion

A coronary illusion

All of it-

Illusion

But its just a word.

You still glow as bright as pain.

_________________________________________________________________

Provide me with evidence

From the last providence

Festering with guilt

This shoe doesn’t fit

Provide me with diaries

Left over from fairies

Reason left and right

Until the centre does fit

Plead and tilt

Wear me like silk

Forever and free

Effortlessly me

_________________________________________________________________

Spanning

Languid lovers in a foreign light

Head lamps searching

Lost love in gutters

Pressing charges, funny umbrellas

Suitable windows, an angel’s delight

Sparkling nonsense, candied tounges

Purposefully licking

Twisting my words

Preoccupied with truth

Resisting feeling

The road forks twice

And I linger below

Any map that could show

Could not bend

As far away

As it goes

_________________________________________________________________

Sparkly new

Brush off the dust

Venture, discover

Personify lust

For a bigger meaning

To rid of the rust

Neither Here nor There: memoir

Neither Here nor There

I’ve always thought of my roots as hot and cold- red and blue. My body a mix of blood, a Petri dish of conflicting cells. My beginnings a union of different cultures, the clash of them. Much like a frog who hops in and out of a pond, I too have different homes. My birth place, Croesor, in the wild Welsh landscape, holds my physical memories, cups my childhood in its green hands. It is as familiar to me as my own face; the valley that bore me nineteen years ago is an old friend. My family place, however, where my Mama was born, where her roots first grew, is far away towards the East.

When I think of Serbia- my mothering country- I think of a place in the psyche, built of memories, vague notions, secret words. A place from the photos- exotic, chaotic. When I go there I almost feel a part of it, like I belong. It’s as if there’s a pull, a gravitational attraction towards the ancestral pool. And how easy it is to dive in. There is always a fiery warm welcome, family there means everything. We were forever to be greeted with open arms- even though we are “Engleski”- by our relatives and their surrounding orbit of friends and neighbours. How memory works in such a blending of the senses. Like watercolours, images, sounds and smells swim into each other creating a distinct flavour, the splutters of car engines, a haze of heat, husky voices, those deep booming vowels of the language, vibrating your heartstrings. Always the smoke, a constant blanket of hot smoke wherever you go.

I remember the excitement of ‘going back home’, my home away from home, a borrowed home. Walking off the plane in Belgrade, I would feel a drunken giddiness, the excitement of airports that seems to get lost with age. The heat would always come over me like a lick of crimson paint, and as we collected our suitcases and scanned the crowd for familiar faces, I would get sticky with sweat, and I knew we had arrived. Someone would always meet us, usually an aunt or an uncle. It would be a jubilant reunion, a generous spatter of kisses, the European way. Walking out to the car, the enduring smell of the country would greet us, hugging our nostrils with pollution and cigarettes. If I paint an unsavoury picture, it is not my intention. The halcyon nature of childhood memories means everything becomes a patchwork of nostalgia and innocence. Perhaps had I visited Serbia only in my adult years, I would have wrinkled my nose at the foggy atmosphere, but my seven year old self thought it was a wonderful place, any smell a new smell, and therefore to be treasured. Instead of being dirty or stifling, the sometimes run-down surroundings were transformed by their unfamiliarity. Wow, look at those towers of flats! I’ve never seen anything like them in Wales! And everything here is covered in dust instead of grass!

Relativity was a curious factor in our visits. As part of our pentagonal family I felt privileged, rich, BRITISH. I would sometimes feel oddly ashamed of how Mama would always pay the bill, or how our clothes always seemed newer and trendier than the other kids’. Instead of being a cause of pride, our wealthiness there was a flashing light bulb, drawing attention to our Western advantages. Seeing the poverty there was a frightening education. Gypsy kids, street urchins of sorts, would drag their feet forlornly along the street, begging for money or asking the street vendors for food and water. They looked very foreign, like little Mowglis. Walking past I would feel incredibly white, not only in appearance but in culture, and I would get a wave of unease, embarrassed by my own luck.

There were sadder sights still. In Bosnia, especially, there were leftovers from the war. A confused aftertaste of destruction hung in the air. We would go there to visit my grandmother Baba Rosa, who lived there for a while working as a doctor. It was a small, rural village, almost a wasteland of bare brick buildings and rickety roads. I remember seeing a sign outside a school there, it read something like ‘Donated by the American Charitable Society’ and I thought, it must be poor here if other countries are helping them out. That really shocked me. Old women dressed in mourning black would beg in the streets, frail and wrinkly, they looked like chicken bones in headscarves. Mama would always give them money, saying her grandmother could have turned out like that. Grief and hardship seemed to seep from every crevice. But loyally, the art of childhood memory manages to gloss over these ugly scars, I still saw beauty in the cracks, if only because I had never seen them before. The family atmosphere still ran strong, many times we would visit the houses in the village, meeting the neighbours and eating big tropical smiles of watermelon, the sweet juice sticking like glue. Even though there were ruins, and a basic feel to everything that we were not used to back at home, I never felt superior. We left that British arrogance at customs. In fact I deplored being an outsider, I wanted in.

Back in North Wales, we were not especially privileged. That air of having it all faded with our tans. This accentuated how little some people had over there, and still, they lived in a culture where glamour and materialism ruled all. Brought up in a down to earth middle class family, I had never been exposed to flash displays of wealth. In Serbia people would wear clothes screaming misspelt designer names and show off their new phones. It was a curious swap of roles- we were usually seen as the rich British relatives and yet everyone made fun of our country bumpkin ways, lacking in gadgets and gizmos. The attitudes towards sex and sex appeal over there are also a much brasher, overt affair compared to what I was used to back home. The women all seemed beautifully made up- bright make up, curvaceous bodies with tight clothes to show them off- exuding glamour I had only seen in films. My aunties Sandra and Irena were like real life twin Barbie dolls. I would reach the height of luxury when they painted my nails or plucked my eyebrows. They were so different to Mama, who rarely shaved her legs or wore lipstick, my aunties were real women. I suppose, not that real, as both of them have gone on to have excessive plastic surgery. The ingrained female sexualisation there seemed almost aggressive.

My aunties would always say that I looked like them, that I was a proper Serb, my dark eyes given to me from Mama, my high cheekbones echoing a Slavic femininity. My skin also tanned well. I was proud of this, it seemed to show that I was more Serbian than my brother and sister, who glowed an Anglo-Saxon pink, and hid blue eyes behind their sunglasses. Our blood, on the other hand, would measure out equally, a perfect half of Serbian red, the rest a cold British blue. But appearances meant more to me, my competitive side strived to be the most exotic. I even had an advantage with the language as Mama had spoken Serbian to me as a child (which I eventually rejected as ‘weird’, ‘different’- how the tables turn!) so I could understand snippets of conversation.

“Aide bre!”- “Lets go!”

“Kako je lepa”- “Isn’t she pretty”

“Ja hocu pivo”- “I want beer”

I revelled in the deep notes and cutting consonants, yet all the while we remained in our bubble of English. The words sounded familiar, they would dance around my ears with their bobbing rhythms, never to be fully understood. I envied Mama talking fluidly, laughing to jokes I could never grasp, the punch line would always get lost in translation. Even though we were accepted because of our family ties, it would bug me that there was such a gauze of misunderstanding between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Yet that is the linguistic side of the coin, flip over and love transcends verbs and nouns- generosity reads the same in any language.

The evenings there were the most magical of all. Those husky dusks, the sun setting with a long kiss goodnight. We would walk along the bustling streets, in Novi Sad or Belgrade, and I would invite the chatter and smell of popcorn gladly. Group outings with the whole family were common; we would sit at the outside tables of cafes that were sprawled across the city quarters. I would guzzle up fizzy drinks and ice cream, sponging the atmosphere until I was heavy and dazed with it.

One of my favourite places was our great aunt Tetka Mira’s balcony in Belgrade. She lived in an apartment block that was one of many on a long street following on to a shady leafed park. The main road was not far, we would climb up a row of steps, passing all the old women selling bric a brac, to the buses and cars and the roadside watermelon stalls. This balcony though, felt like a little square box of paradise. Whether it was a hazy morning with sleepy eyes and the smell of Turkish coffee (thick and syrupy, with the grains left at the bottom) or a midnight hour where the heat became bearable, sitting at the table, looking at the city’s vastness was transporting. We were transported! It was otherworldly. Coming from the sticks and stones of our little Welsh village, the contrast was mind boggling. Sand coloured apartments, high and repetitive, stood tall and proud instead of mountains. The sound of sheep and twittering birds was replaced by far off sirens, connoting mayhem and a constant flux of events. We would sit at the balcony and look down on the passing pedestrians, walking along the pathway towards the park. We felt so high up and to prove this we would spit watermelon pips off the edge to watch how long they would take to hit the ground, which seemed miles away. It was like those games of ‘pooh sticks’ we would play at the rivers around Croesor, throwing sticks into the water, just to watch them come out at the other side of the bridge. There was fun in throwing things into the oblivion.

In Serbia the climate is sticky and humid like a stewed peach. Dust and sand seem a part of everything, lending my mind’s eye a filter of yellowy brown. There are not many mountains or hills; everything seems to be on the same plane. Instead of beaches, the coastless country offers its wide, murky rivers as places to swim and sunbathe. The water is grey and uncertain, with a bed of waterweeds which can twist around your ankles as you swim.

Back in my birthplace I admire the levels of the countryside, there seems to be more clarity. From the peaks of the mountains to the earthy underground, I can sense the creatures high and low, living in their element much as we live in our four walls. I can scan the bumps and curves of the mountainside, finding surprises of purples and yellows in the textured quilt of grass and stone. My surroundings feel like a multi coloured canvas you can paint with your feet. Growing up in the V shaped valley, in our old farmhouse Croesor Fawr- Big Croesor, one notices the timeless quality of the untamed. If you were to watch a sped up video of the last fifty years, you would see a flurry of the seasons: white, green, grey, sunset pinks. No new roads built, no upheavals of architecture, no growing fog of pollution. The changes of nature remain unchanged.

Growing up in the open air was a free and happy affair. I was allowed to roam the fields as I pleased, finding spots to play in, an abandoned, crumbling barn where I encountered my first game of Truth or Dare, or at the river bed, sunbathing and paddling in beneath the canopy of trees. It was much easier to believe in fairies in a place like this. Croesor is a village placed beneath the mountain Cnicht, allegedly named after the English word ‘knight’. It has a protective quality, I always thought it looked like a gorilla. It has always attracted a variety of characters, people from all around the world, and once housed the ‘Orange People’ in the 60’s, a hippie commune who wore orange robes and must have stuck out amongst the Welsh farmers. I attended the primary school that used to run in the village, which only had two rooms and had thirty students at most, meaning we all knew each other as family.

Even though I was born in a tiny cottage at the foot of Cnicht, it was hard to place my finger on where exactly I had come from. Other children of the village were part of a long generation of Croesor inhabitants, with grandparents next door and a solid sense of national pride. Where were my aunties and uncles and cousins? Where did I grow out of? It didn’t seem to matter that I had gasped my first breath on Croesor soil, while my school mates had been born in the local city hospital, because they had family here, they had it in their blood. This feeling of one foot in, one foot out, carried through into my family life. My parents split up when I was a few months old, so I have always lived with Mama, my stepdad and my half brother and sister. I was always slightly out of focus at home, a full figure, yes, but blurred around the edges. Visiting my dad on the weekends meant an ongoing upheaval, not quite belonging with him either. Now he has his own family, I am even more of a floating cloud. It is the same when I question my identity, which part of me is British? My bones? My hands? Are my lungs of a Serbian origin? My lips? I suppose I should count myself lucky, not many people can claim such duality.

What contradictions, what opposite poles, these places I call home. I have always found a beauty in that, the differences, the feminine and masculine, the yin and yang blending of darkness and light. There is beauty in this mix of flavours- the sweet and savoury of family trees and childhood roots. I bask in this mixing bowl of memories and mismatched cultures, celebrating this distant place where I also belong. My blood has travelled far from the Adriatic Sea, which is neither here nor there, but remains in me.