Behind my bed is a panel of indented wall in which hangs a gift shop extract of the Bayeux Tapestry. It’s been there for as long as I can remember, for as long as I’ve been alive. Likely my mother picked it up from the actual gift shop during one of her long detours from England to the south of France and hung it there when they first moved to this house, at the beginning of the 1970’s. Last night a friend who’s staying here woke up from a dream of walking with her beloved dog who died earlier this year. Disorientated, she went down to the kitchen and heard children’s voices. She was half asleep and registered but didn’t question, it was only when she got back into bed that she thought hang on. There have been high winds here lately and all of us search for the door that keeps banging but none of us can find it. I’m getting to how these are connected. Bear with. A while ago, asleep in England, I dreamt of this house as I often do, and in the dream I too was walking through the kitchen. Leaning around the island deep in chat were a whole host of characters, some in trilby hats, I remember thinking they were Spanish. I was conscious that they could see me, a ghost like figure, pale and see-through, but that they weren’t the least bit interested. What’s more it was clear to me that this house was theirs, a feeling of home as deep and wide and certain as mine. I’m getting to the connection now. One night whilst actually here, I dreamt that the entire panel on which the gift shop Bayeux Tapestry hangs opened in a kind of sliding 1970’s spaceship fashion and behind it was a whole other world. I saw mountains and fields and colours that are not here. And from that place my father’s coffin slid into the room. The point is this. This place that we recognise as our house, the walls and floor of it, I imagine is a version of what else is here. I’m sure, convinced, quite certain that the people I saw leaning on the kitchen island talking, who could see me and were uninterested, are living here too, a dimension with more sides, they inhabit this space over and above us, our presence as normal as the wind. The dream that she was with her dog, my friend, the children’s voices she heard, the Bayeux Tapestry hiding a panel that slides and hides another world, the door that bangs but none of us can find it, I said to my friend, that’s the entrance. These people who watch me type, who move through me as I move through them, this tracing paper plane. I love the thought of this.
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I don't think science can always define what exactly dreaming is. Why are some dreams indistinguishable for reality in every single way? While most dreams are merely an unorganized collage of our subconscious.
I have a foldout copy of the Bayeux Tapestry on a bookshelf in the living room I bought when I saw the real thing in Normandy. It provoked then, 20+ years ago, a very different kind of thought. You may know that the understanding is that it was designed and stitched all by Anglo-Saxon artisans, though it tells the story of the conquest from the perspective of the Norman conquerors. So it's an example not only of that adage that history is written by the victors but also of an instance in which the victors compelled the defeated to be their scribes.