I’ve had a new recurring dream recently. My usual repertoire is as follows: running from someone trying to kill me, running from someone trying to arrest me, boarding up windows and locking doors in an attempt to make a safe place to rest in whatever building I’m in (most often a distortion of flat I haven’t lived in for many years) and of course, the classic, wobbling bloody loss of my teeth. My nights are typically permeated with anxiety and so waking was a relief, but not so much anymore.
In this new dream I find myself on the banks of the Thames under the hangman’s noose in Wapping. Instead of the river, I’m looking out at the sea, the actual sea, which is somehow transplanted to the middle of London. It’s still the Thames of course, but it’s also an entire ocean. Dream logic. Although, I guess it’s all the same water right? Leaking into the country through the crack in its side. But the dream starts there. Right under that same noose which hovered above me when I was 20. And I’m mudlarking.
Only it’s not pottery or old pipes or animal bones I’m discovering (like the ones me and Will found that time, which we sincerely thought were human), but the belongings of people I used to know. A silk scarf I recognise as Marion’s. The camera Amy always carried around. Dan’s watch. I’m pocketing it all because I’m thinking, obviously, they’ll want all of this back and of course I will dutifully return it to them. But at the same time at the back of my mind I’m telling myself: I haven’t seen them in so long. As I’m wondering how I feel about trying to seek everyone out, more and more of their belongings start washing up and despite my reservations, I’m collecting it all anyway. But only because I want to return it. I find some football cards that belong to Lukasz. I’m not even sure how I know they’re his, except that there’s the intuitive dream sense that is above any logic. It does begin to seem like every object I excavate from the between the stones and the driftwood radiates the person it belongs to. I feel like I’m holding them. So the objects feel vulnerable and delicate in my hands, it’s as if I’m cradling this persons shadow. I don’t want to miss anything but I’m carrying so much now. I start to cry. So I’m stumbling along the shore of the Thames, or the sea, sobbing, trying to pick up jackets, hats and glasses, lighters and cigarette packets and shadows when I wake up. Yet instead of relief I feel myself deposited into the worst emotional hangover. I want to go back into the dream and finish finding all the objects. Finish returning them. I lie back and I can feel the noose hanging over me in my bed. The front left part of my ribcage aches.
But all this sickly sweet sentimentality goes sour in the light of the morning. As the day goes on, I am increasingly aware that I was only missing a version of people that existed five years ago. Inevitably, all of us have moved on with our lives and are in some way all different people. I am reminded that some of them were perhaps never really who I thought they were anyway. But the dream hangover still hovers. I think about how a dream really is just a dream. It’s not some penetrating psychic question: Do you want this back? Is there a version of you I can return this to? I’m not reaching anyone. It’s just me splashing about in my own sea foam. It’s just the mind making shadow puppets.