A Dream Pattern
By BEATA BISHOP THE basic situation is always the same, the woman said. I dream I am back in B, and I can't get out again. Something goes wrong, I suddenly find I've lost my passport or my ticket, or the train pulls out the very minute I get to the station and there will be no other train, not for a long time anyway. What makes it worse is that I am always alone in the dream. There's no one can ask for help because I don't know anybody, and to ask a stranger would mean drawing atten- tion to myself. So I am high and dry, struggling and straining like a fish out of water, and scared. So terribly scared it wakes me up in the end. Never in time, though. Not before the dream has turned into a nightmare and it takes me a little while to realise that I am in my bedroom in Kensington and all is well.
Ohs I know it's not original, she added. Lots of people I know suffer from it, too. It's a sort of basic refugee dream, rather like an occupational disease. Funny thing is, it never wears off. The only difference is in the props—you know, same play, different production. A man I know who is a pre-1938 arrival dreams about Nazi uniforms and notices in German. With me it's a different uniform and Cyrillic posters.
Time doesn't help. I mean, take my own case, ten years should have cured me. After all, one changes so much in a decade . . . if that old theory is true, every cell of the body changes in seven years, so that would make one and a half complete regenerations for me, but it doesn't make the slightest difference. I suppose the dreams be- long to a deeper layer than the changes.
Granted, there are slight variations in the pat- tern. At first the dream background is precise. You walk down a street you used to know well and everything is as clear and accurate as in a photo- graph: shops, buildings, trams, trees, every tiny detail is right. You see crowds of people and they all talk with a familiar intonation, and the whole thing is so genuine that for a while you are quite happy to be back again (no, it's completely realistic, you don't know you're only dreaming). Until you suddenly remember you shouldn't be there at all. And then the panic begins, because you had let yourself submerge in that homely scene and to get out seems as impossible as it had appeared in reality before your escape.
In later dreams the scene changes. This takes a year or two. Incidentally, 1 know a man who claims that by listening to an exile's latest dream he can roughly tell how long the dreamer has been living abroad—it's rather like rings in a tree trunk, he says. Anyhow, the next phase begins when your memories grow fainter and your mind can't re- produce the scene so accurately. You still recog- nise the city or the street, but there are no shops, no traffic, no liveliness—with me the early dreams were in full colour, the next lot in black and white —and the people have no faces. That's terrible. They go about with blank ovals under their hair, like people in newspaper photographs who for some reason had their faces blotted out. Nobody knows you but you still feel sure they'll pick you out by your clothes, your face—you've got one, unlike all the others—or by the simple fact that you keep walking about with nowhere to go. You can't even have a meal because you've no local currency. These practical details always sneak into the worst nightmares. Once I was fleeing down a dark street, trying to read the timetable I was clutching, but it was only a British Railways time- table for the Southern Region. . . .
The next phase is the mixture dream. It begins quite innocently. In one I was walking down Regent Street, slowing down outside Liberty's to look at the shop windows, when two unknown men stopped me. One said, 'We're from the political police. You're under arrest.' I said, 'Oh no, you can't do that, we're in England, this is Regent Street, Liberty's,' and one man said, 'CA no, it isn't, this is Vorosmarty Ter, look!' I looked, and Regent Street had vanished, just like a carpel being pulled from under one's feet, and we were in Vorosmarty Ter, with the statue in the middle, and no Liberty's—I must say my subconscious had chosen the location rather well; it's about the only store that reminds one to argue about human rights. Not that I argued. I felt defeated.
Eventually the mixture grows even crazier. YOU dream you are in the main street of a typical Eastern European village, with single-storey houses, acacia trees and a statue of St. John Nepe' muk—the one who wears a halo of stars and always bends his head to one side—but everybody speaks English and the tobacconist sells English cigarettes and briar pipes. All of which is comfort- ing but doesn't change the final scare. You rush to the station with one minute to go—no passport, ee exit permit, the train whistles, you are rooted in the platform, they won't let you board the Vain, it leaves, fast and empty, and you are left behind.
I can't even begin to tell you what it feels like, It's a cold, clammy fear, a kind of total paralysis when you realise that they have got you at last and nothing can save you. You curse yourself for having been fool enough to go back (but then of course you didn't go back, it had simply happened to you), and you think of Britain as a remote mirage you'll never see again. As a touch of supreme irony you feel a wild pang of homesick- ness for this country—you, the exile, back in the land of your birth, feel desperately homesick for Britain as the only place where you had ever had peace and where the smog may kill you but the police certainly won't.
Yes, it's all very odd.
No, she said, I don't think it will ever come to an end. Not even if one is very brave. One fellow- sufferer, a Pole, found in one dream that he had a gun, and he simply shot his way to the border and escaped. He woke up happily, thinking he'd been cured. It was a great victory. He kept boasting about it and I felt mildly envious. Poor man. He had no nightmares for six months. Then they came back, worse than ever. He kept dreaming he was back, and they had got him because of the shoot- ing, 'There's a maniac at the doo.. Shall 1 tell him we have one?'
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