A Dream Too Far - a short story

As we do each year, we left London for our annual holiday in North Wales stopping off en route in the Derbyshire village of D_______, where lives my brother with his family. With the children all fast asleep upstairs, my brother, his wife and I were sitting up late drinking organic cider and home-made wine, tucking into cheese and crackers and discussing ever-more metaphysical subjects, the mysteries of the universe and such. I was telling him about my latest thinking about the human spirit and precognition, and he fetched me down an old book that he’d bought over 25 years ago while still a student living in Leamington Spa. It was entitled Experimenting with Time by D. W. Joad (3rd edition, Faber & Faber, 1934).

It was written by an early British pioneer of flight who had had many amazing dreams of precognition that came true, dreams of death, dreams of chance meetings, dreams of disasters. After many years of such dreaming such dreams, he committed them to paper along with a theory of how (in light of the latest theories of Einstein) it was possible to see into the future. The second part of the book deals with an experiment carried out by Joad in the late 1920s in which he put together a team of ‘dreamers’ and each morning systematically logged their dreams, searching their content for meaningful coincidences. His aim was to give his own experiences a quantitative, theoretical and analysis.

On holiday in North Wales, I’d spend the August drizzly days reading Joad’s book. The more I read, the more I felt that I should contact him from the here and now. By turning up as a character in one of his frequent precognitive dreams, I could offer him a briefing into how the rest of the 20th Century had unfolded. Every night, I’d drop off to sleep and attempt to dream myself back to Joad’s time, England in the mid-1930s. Yet it would not be easy; his book gave no biographical detail as to where he lived, nor had my research at the local internet café yielded me more information about his life (other than the scarce availability of Experimenting with Time and his earlier book Parallel Universes in the occasional online bookshop).

Night after night I’d drift off to sleep to dream. Once, I was in 19th century Paris (where I’d built a new but ultimately unprofitable Metro system), or in Cairo (featuring my mother blackening her face with mud, head in a shawl, while an English pie-seller and her bedraggled children begged for alms), the Humber Bridge (a typical fear-of-heights dream), Warsaw – (a tram crashing into a police van) – then, one night I’d finally got to London, but on the wrong side of the river – Sydenham, Penge… (I was exploring back alleyways looking for an empty property to squat in – to be finally chased off by a swarm of angry wasps!). Another night I found myself in West London, where a cricket pitch had bisected a number of long gardens along the back of Ealing’s Gordon Road. I’d wake each morning and make some notes. By day I’d be continuing to read this fascinating book, each evening I'd persevere in dreaming myself into Joad’s life and times.

Finally, on the last night of the holiday, I finally found myself where I wanted to be: right place, right time. I dreamt that I was standing on the parapet of the railway viaduct overlooking the Great Western Railway line at Greenford. I glanced down and saw two steam locomotives. I knew that if I were to follow that line, I’d eventually reach Paddington Station. I found myself hovering about a yard above the railway track, travelling forward, with neither engine before me nor carriages behind, at 80 miles an hour through the suburbs, through the Ealings and Actons, past the soot-blackened backs of houses overlooking the line at Westbourne Park and Royal Oak, hurtling inexorably towards the buffers at Platform 1, where I smoothly drew up to a halt. Stepping off the platform, I joined a bowler-hatted throng of City gents making their way up the cobbled ramp towards Praed Street; I continued on foot.

My destination was 24 Russell Square London, W.C.1, Faber & Faber’s offices, as mentioned on the flyleaf of the book. Soon I found myself walking down Devonshire Street. Navigating London’s imperious throroughfares, I soon made it to Russell Square. This was Christmas Eve! No doubt stirred by a memory of a Christmas lunch that I'd attended many years ago at a Russell Square hotel – but this could not be more fortuitous! For as soon as I’d located Number 24 did I realise that the publishers were seasonally entertaining their authors and editors, and immediately I found D. W. Joad. ‘Don’t go to town wearing brown’ the saying went; yet this short man with his pointed grey goatee beard, looking dapper for his years in a brown three-piece tweed suit was evidently up for the day rather than an employee of the publisher.

Mr Joad was holding forth to a small group of inquistive editors when I approached him. I immediately introduced myself as a reader of his books – from 75 years into the future. This led to a titter from his listeners, but Joad at least pretended to take me seriously. I decided not to talk about World War 2, the atomic bomb, the Communist Menace, etc – but rather about advances in science – evolutionary biology, sub-atomic physics (how Schroedinger’s cat was simultaneously both alive and dead until an observer looked). Joad was impressed. The other listeners drifited away, glasses in hand, to less intense chit-chat.

No doubt under the influence of the seasonal cheer, he had found the courage to ask me the one question I felt he’d ask. “What, Sir, do you know of the time and circumstances of my death?” I replied that I had been anticipating this question and that my internet searches (“a collection of powerful computing machines around the world, linked together by telephone lines to form a giant network, searching vast banks of electronic data”) had informed me only of his books, indeed of those bookshops dotted around the English-speaking world holding second-hand copies in stock. I told him, truthfully, that I could find no biographical notes other than a few brief mentions of his pioneering aeronautical work. He showed himself to be at once flattered and relieved.

The dream began to change...

The concluding Part II of this short story will be posted tomorrow night...

This time last year:
Compositions in white, blue and gold

This time two years ago:
Dobra and The Road

This time three years ago:
Plane full of Polish VIPs crashes in forest