Nightmares, by Ruth Franklin

GRANTA 101  MEMOIR 

We’re on vacation somewhere in the country, by a lake. The light is hazy, green, as if I were looking at the sky from underwater; the lake, too, is green, surrounded by dense weeds and brambles. My husband and son are playing nearby, shouting to each other. Suddenly I realize – what have I been doing all this time? Why wasn’t I watching? – that I can’t see my little girl. And I know, with the certainty one has in dreams, that she has fallen in the lake. Shock has rooted me, but I scream for my husband. I know he will be able to do what I can’t, to jump in and save her, if only he gets there in time.

For almost as long as I can remember, I’ve suffered from nightmares. Sometimes they strike regularly, once a week or so; or months of uneventful sleep will pass and then I’ll have a blizzard of them, every night for weeks. The first one I recall, at the age of about five, was a single image: a bulldozer digging an enormous hole in the basement of our house, with a sign that read DANGER blocking the way in. I remember little of the precise circumstances around the dream: we were moving to a different house, and my parents’ marriage was soon to break up, but I didn’t know that at the time. What I do remember is the sickening dread, so overpowering that I could not bear to look down the basement stairs for fear of seeing that gaping hole.

We tend to dismiss dreams as unimportant – as no more than random misfirings of brain circuitry,meaningful only if we believe them to be. ‘It was just a dream,’ we tell children who awaken screaming in the night.As for the word ‘nightmare’, it has been debased through careless use, applied indiscriminately to long lines at the grocery store or packed subway cars. But for someone in the grip of a nightmare, it’s not ‘just a dream’: he or she experiences the terror of the dream as if it were real.

‘The person awakes panic-struck from some hideous vision,’ wrote the nineteenth-century physician Robert Macnish, ‘and even after reason returns and convinces him of the unreal nature of his apprehensions, the panic for some time continues, his heart throbs violently, he is covered with cold perspiration, and hides his head beneath the bedclothes, afraid to look around him.’

The terror of the nightmare, unlike the terror of a ghost story or a horror film, can be experienced only in isolation. Another person can appreciate that it must be frightening to dream of one’s child drowning, but no one else can feel the waves of fear that reverberate long after one wakes to find the baby sleeping peacefully. We know that nightmares are unreal, yet they torment us all the same.

There have always been two theories about the interpretation of dreams: either they look forward or they look back. Before the age of psychoanalysis, the former was dominant. Dreams were commonly held to prefigure future events: in the Bible, Pharaoh’s nightmares about the cows and ears of grain foretell the years of famine in Egypt. In Greek mythology, Hecuba, the mother of Paris, dreams of giving birth to a firebrand. Gustavus Hindman Miller’s arcane 1901 manual 10,000 Dreams Interpreted lists, encyclopedia-style, various dream symbols and their meaning in the cryptic, oracular language of fortune cookies: ‘To see mosquitoes in your dreams [means that] you will strive in vain to remain impregnable to the sly attacks of secret enemies.’

Physician-philosophers from Robert Burton onward (‘fearful dreams’ were among his symptoms of melancholy) have conducted investigations into the causes of nightmares, often inspired by their own suffering. Nightmares have been said to be a sign of a creative personality, of an elongated uvula, or of
‘congestion in the brain’. They are brought on by eating any number of foods: cabbage, legumes, cucumbers. John Bond, the author of the first book written in English on the subject – An Essay on the Incubus, or Nightmare (1753) – believed that nightmares came from sleeping on one’s back. His response was to sleep, miserably, in a chair in an attempt to ward off his ‘attacks’. The Victorian physician John Waller thought that undigested food
remaining in the stomach at bedtime produced ‘impulses’ in the nervous system ‘which on reaching the brain are transformed into feelings of terror’ (hence the modern-day injunction not to eat pizza before bed). Even so supremely rational a thinker as Kant had an original theory of nightmares: he believed they were the body’s own built-in alarm system, designed to awaken a sleeper whose safety was compromised by poor circulation.

With the advent of psychoanalysis, nightmares came to be understood as a particularly perverse twist on Freud’s famous theory of the dream as wish-fulfilment: namely, the nightmare expresses a repressed wish so taboo that even its distortion in the dream state suffices to terrify the dreamer. Ernest Jones, a follower of Freud who wrote a series of psychoanalytic studies of nightmares, argued that they are always ‘an expression of a mental conflict over an incestuous desire’. This seems about as plausible as the ancient myth Jones finds at the root of his theory, which held that nightmares were brought on by a mythological being who sat on people’s chests as they slept – hence the shortness of breath one often experiences on awakening. (In Old English, this creature was known as a mare.) A synonym for nightmare is ‘incubus’, the term for another supernatural nocturnal visitor said to have sex with women while they sleep. In Henry Fuseli’s painting The Nightmare (1781), which Freud is said to have displayed in his study, a woman in a suggestively draping nightgown lies supine on a bed, eyes tightly shut and mouth agape, in what could be a vision of ecstasy were it not for the hairy demon crouched on her breast.

The psychological roots of my own dreams have always been so obvious as to render their analysis pointless, a puzzle so easy it’s not worth the effort. My parents divorced when I was young: I dreamed of abandonment, of losing things, of becoming lost. (Did my bulldozer dream foretell the divorce?That would be the ancient interpretation; it seems more likely that my childhood self internalized some sign of the impending break – quarrels, coldness – and spun it into a fantasy of danger in the home.)When I was an adolescent, a close friend attempted suicide: for years afterwards my dreams killed off all the people close to me and, when the supply of loved ones ran out,my mind invented new ones. And, like all mothers, I dream about disaster befalling my children.

But what’s common among my diverse nightmares – and I’ve come to understand that this is different from the way many people dream – is that they follow a classic narrative arc: beginning, middle, dénouement. They have resolution. My nightmares, over the years, have become my own private library of stories, with a roster of favourites that I return to in my waking thoughts from time to time, to see how well they’ve held up or whether I might be able to coax some new meaning out of them. I’ve come to treasure this secret storehouse of anxieties and disturbances. For nightmares, not unlike works of literature or indeed any art, are an investigation into the deepest,most primary forces that drive us. Not only that, but they even conform to one of the classic theories of literature: the defamiliarization of the familiar. Like ghost stories or Greek tragedies, nightmares allow us to confront our fears from a safe distance, and the catharsis that results is as powerful as any that I’ve experienced through literature. It seems no accident that the same word, ‘haunting’, is used for both nightmares and particularly affecting works of art. And so I’ve come to see my nightmares as less a burden than a gift, a private theatre for the safe staging of my personal melodramas, where the bombs detonated during the night won’t shatter the peace of my waking life.

I’ve watched my children closely for signs of nightmares. My son, at age four, is a sound sleeper who rarely articulates his dreams. (Men are said to experience fewer nightmares than women.)

But not long ago my little girl awoke during the night with a shriek unlike any I’d ever heard from her. I ran to her crib and found her sobbing.

‘Did something happen?’ I asked, and she nodded.

‘What?’

She took a shuddering breath. ‘Lion take me,’ she said.

I rocked her, trying to imagine what she might have seen. The sleeping lions at the zoo she had visited that day, risen up, claws bared, to grab the toddler watching from above? The lion night light in her room, transformed by some trick of shadow or imagination into a live, frothing beast? ‘To dream of a lion,’ Gustavus Miller tells us with his typical combination of absurdity and gravitas, ‘signifies that a great force is driving you’ – a statement at which every parent of a two-year-old will nod knowingly. As she drowsed back to sleep, I imagined that lion standing at the gatepost of her own personal mythology, guarding the gulf that separates reality and imagination, and perhaps someday extending its paw to help her across.