Dream worlds

As a young man - probably still in my teens or maybe very early twenties - one of my favourite authors was Dennis Wheatley. Many of his books, if not all of them, (and I was surprised to find they are still in print) involved the supernatural and I recall that one of the central tenets was that a person's spirit, or ka, left the body during sleep and travelled on different levels of astral planes. Dreams, it would seem, are the subconscious result of the mind recognising what is happening to the ka. It all seemed quite possible to me in those days, but I never did really believe it.

I know I do dream although when I wake all I have is a vague recollection of having dreamed. I can very seldom recall the substance of the dream. Indeed, it's not often that I can even recall in the morning having dreamed during the night although I do know I had a dream a few nights ago. When I woke I was surprised that fragments of the dream were still in my memory, although they have gone now.

There are just two dreams that I can still remember. They both occurred on the same night about fifty years ago. Perhaps I am wrong to call them dreams as I am pretty certain they were the result of delirium during the onset of pneumonia. One of them was more nightmare than dream, although I suppose that a nightmare is a dream, albeit a "horror" dream.

The bedroom in which my brother and I slept was at the back of the house and had a view over the neighbouring gardens to the corrugated asbestos roof of a garage. This was not the sort of garage to be found nestling alongside a suburban semi in which the family car is parked: it was an altogether larger building in which cars were repaired. In my dream the garage had grown to even larger proportions. But it was not the size of the building that caused my terror. It was the cowboys and Indians clambering over the garage roof waving their six-shooters and tomahawks in an alarming fashion as they came for me. Just why they should have been coming for me I really couldn't say, but I knew that they were. I assume that I must have screamed fit to bring the house down as my father spent the rest of the night in my bed and my mother moved me into their bed with her in the front bedroom.

The comfort of my mother beside me didn't stop me dreaming, although the next dream was altogether less terrifying. Somehow our house had been relocated to the far end of the road, about as far from the bottom as it was, in reality, from the top. There was a street light outside, shining into the bedroom, and it was by the light of this lamp that I could see rather small men and women in strange garb climbing through the window and mounting two or three steps onto a sort of minstrels' gallery that ran round two sides of the room.

I haven't the faintest idea how the dream ended and I have not been able to remember a dream since then - a fact for which I am actually very grateful.