That such a sequence of events, with its particular names and places, should present itself to me in a dream, over 145 years later is not easy to account for with classical cause-and-effect physics.
My dream, which I had on the morning of Sunday 3 May, was unlike the run-of-the-mill dreams I'll have most nights. The three unities are preserved; time (1880), place (the City of London, Luxembourg) and action (a court case arising from an ambiguity in a telegram). The dream was vivid – the names 'Gormally' (who was Irish) and 'Kuhn' (who was Jewish) came through loud and clear; I could feel the atmosphere of their office in Victorian London; I could see them flicking through maroon-bound books of law in the courtroom. I felt that Gormally's career had taken off very suddenly, and that the commodity that these traders specialised in was salt. The dream also spoke of anarchists, whose actions may or may not have led to the issues that ended up in court.
I had the framework of a story; automatic writing. Not something I'd made up; something that had come to me in a dream. This is the fourth such case. Previous dream-inspired short stories have taken me back to London in 1964, London in the 1950s, Heathrow Airport in 2023 and Moscow in 1952. This phenomenon is fascinating. There is no effort required on my part to devise a story; all I needed to do was to have recognised the significance of the dream on waking.
So on Sunday morning (coffee first!) I sat down to write, making extensive use of AI (both ChatGPT and Google Gemini), cross-checking to avoid hallucinations or confabulations, grounding the basic points from the dream in historical facts. Yes, said the AIs – the places, the dates, the plot – all were historically plausible. My dream had got them right! I just had to beat the story into shape. I add some details; freemasonry, the Magic Flute.
But where from the dream? The setting – the City of London, Bricktorian Britain, 19th century railways, I can feel the atmosphere. I'm thinking of the opening pages of Erskine Childers' The Riddle of the Sands with its description of London as Imperial capital. The setting is familiar. But the narrative? Did it happen as I dreamt it?
And here I get metaphysical. In an infinite universe, yes, the events must have unfolded exactly as I described them in some parallel world. Mathematically, infinity would be able to encompass everything that happened.
Did something leak through to my consciousness as I slept?
One writes it down, and leaves it there.
This time four years ago:
Hills... I gotta have hills
Flashback to a Dream - subconsciousness and memory
This time 15 years ago:
'Old school' = pre-war
This time 16 years ago:
Britain chooses a coalition government
This time 17 years ago:
Landing over Ursynów
This time 18 years ago:
On being assertive in Poland
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