been a stewardess
In the air or out at sea.
But if I’d done all of this
I wouldn’t now be me…
I wish I had a fancy house
In which to roam around.
I wish I’d been a teacher
Or worked in a dog pound.
I wish I could do cartwheels
I’d be flexible and free.
But if I’d done all of this
I wouldn’t now be me…
I wish that I was taller
I wish that I was thinner
I wish my hair was red,
That I could cook a fancy dinner.
I wish I had green fingers;
It just wasn’t meant to be.
Because if I had all of this
I wouldn’t now be me…
Well, “Me” may not be perfect
And “Me” may not be great,
But I would never change a thing…
Not much at any rate!
Only a Dream
“It’s all right, sweetheart; it was only a dream,” my mother had told me so many times when I was a child. And she was right; most of the time, at least. All those dreams of monsters and aliens and being chased by witches at Halloween, those I knew were “only a dream”. It was the other ones that bothered me.
The thing was, I couldn’t tell them apart from the ordinary dreams in which everyday things happened; outings to the seaside, birthday parties, arguments with friends at school, falling over in the playground. In fact they could be about any of these things, or any other ordinary thing.
I was only five years old when I realised. I’d had a dream that I’d almost forgotten, about a man who came and knocked on our front door. Not a scary dream, nor even an exciting one; he just came and knocked on the door and asked my mother if she wanted to buy some dusters or calendars. His face was distinctive to me because he had terrible acne that made his skin look like it had boiled and then dried that way, and he stuttered as he spoke softly and nervously to my mother. In the dream.
Then, probably three or four days later, there had been a knock on the door and my mother had answered it. I stood behind her in the living room doorway and an odd, uncomfortable feeling came over me. I looked past my mother and there he was – the man I had dreamt about. He was only at the door for about a minute before my mother said that she wasn’t interested in buying anything from him and she shut the door as he turned away to try our neighbour.
I didn’t tell mother about the dream because it seemed so trivial: just a man at the door selling dusters. It bothered me for a while, but after a couple of days I had moved on to thinking about more exciting things like my upcoming birthday and my party.
But then it happened again. Another fairly ordinary event; my friend Tom fell over in the playground at school and cut his bottom lip. He cried and cried as blood dripped relentlessly off his chin. A teacher, armed with wet tissues, sat him down on the low playground wall and tried to calm him down whilst cleaning up his face and his uniform.
It was only a few days later that this event played itself out for real. I watched Tom and Mrs Piper doing exactly what I knew they would do, and it felt like I was watching the repeat of a TV show that I’d already seen. I probably should have been comforting Tom, but I just stood there with my arms limp at my sides because I knew he’d be all right.
After a while, I started to get used to it; sometimes things would happen that I’d seen in dreams, and it seemed ‘cool’ that I knew how things would play out.
Then, when I was seven, I dreamt that my grandfather died. The dream started with Mum, Dad and me in the car; Mum and Dad were in the front, not speaking at all as Dad impatiently drove the couple of miles between our house and the hospital. We went inside and Mum asked at the front desk where we could find Mr Pettifer, who had been in a car accident and brought in by ambulance. The woman at the desk had checked on her computer and told Mum that we needed to go to the Intensive Care Unit. My parents looked at each other with expressions of panic on their faces.
When we found the Intensive Care Unit, a nurse took me off for ‘a little walk along the corridor,’ while the Doctor spoke to my mum and dad. I heard my mother sob loudly, and I tried to run back to her, but the nurse held my hand firmly and kept on walking. A few minutes later, I was sitting on a blue chair in the waiting room and my dad was telling me that Grandpa had died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.
I woke up crying, and Mum was standing next to my bed. “It’s all right,” she said, “It’s only a dream.”
What if it isn’t? I thought, but I kept my fears to myself as I didn’t want to scare my mother, or make her think I was crazy.
Two days later, it happened. It played out exactly as it had in my dream and afterwards, I berated myself for not having done something to stop it from happening: I could have warned Grandpa not to go out in his car. Logic told me that this was stupid; firstly, I never knew which dreams were going to come true, secondly I didn’t know when it was going to happen and thirdly Grandpa would most likely have said I was barmy and ignored my warnings anyway. But that one stays with me more than any of the earlier ones, because it was the first dream I had about a real tragedy.
Sadly it was not the last.
By the time I was a teenager, I had foreseen many events that affected my family and friends. Dreaming of injury, death and illness was always the worst. There were still the dreams about insignificant events, and sometimes I would dream about horrible accidents and wake up in a sweat only to eventually come to the conclusion (after a week had passed without it playing out – a week was the upper time limit, it seemed) that this one really had been only a dream. So I was never really sure what was going to happen and what was just in my imagination; perhaps paranoia was setting in, I pondered.
Once, when I was about sixteen, I’d dreamt that my girlfriend Sarah’s little brother had fallen off a swing in the park and broken his leg. I tried to warn her, but she said I shouldn’t believe my dreams and laughed at me. I told her that I’d dreamt things that had come true before, but she just gave me a look that told me I was being weird and changed the subject.
When the fall happened, just three days later, she couldn’t look me in the eye. After that, it wasn’t long before she told me that she didn’t want to see me anymore because I was ‘creepy’. I was put off trying to warn people after that, deciding that my dream would probably play out however hard I tried to stop it.
I had dreaded, for a long time, the possibility that I would dream about some truly devastating event and one night it finally happened. A terrorist bomb in Westminster Abbey. In my dream I saw the outside of the familiar building itself looking as grand and stately as it always had. But surrounding the entrance were about half a dozen ambulances, three fire engines and several police cars. As I watched from the safety of my mind, two more police cars screeched to a halt with their blue lights flashing and sirens wailing, the men inside piling out and running as fast as the growing crowd of onlookers would allow towards the carnage. Going by the sirens in the distance, more help was coming – it must have only happened a few minutes ago.
As I continued to watch, people stumbled out of the huge entrance doors with blood pouring down their faces, clinging onto one another and sobbing hysterically.
A man carrying a young boy of about three shouted at those in front of him to get out of his way as the boy clung to his neck, one of his legs twisted into an unnatural position and blood soaking through his jeans. A paramedic ran up to the man, carefully taking the boy from his arms and striding back in the direction of one of the ambulances.
I wanted either to run and help or look away, but neither was possible in these dreams – I was forced to watch for as long as the horror I was witnessing allowed me to continue sleeping.
As more and more people either found their own way out of the abbey or were carried out by paramedics, police and fire crew, I could see several inert bodies l
ying in a line on the ground covered with green sheets.
I woke up with a start, breathing hard and turning abruptly over onto my side in an effort to look away from the carnage in my dream.
The darkness in my room enveloped me like a shroud and I had to sit up and turn on my bedside light. Then I forced myself to take several long, deep breaths to calm myself and eventually my heart rate slowed back to normal.
Lying back down, I shook my head. The dream was over, but I was utterly convinced that this event was going to happen. I tried telling myself that this one was only a dream: a product of a stressful week at work and the ever-present terrorist threat to innocent people. But in my heart I knew that this atrocity would happen.
As soon as I got out of bed the next morning, I rushed downstairs and turned on the television. Part of me hoped that the bomb blast would be in the news so that there was no way I could feel as though I might have prevented it from happening if only I’d told someone. But no. Nothing.
At work, other people kept asking me if I was all right – saying I looked distracted; worried.
Back at home that afternoon, I went straight to the television again, but this time feeling that no news was good news. Having toyed with the idea of going to London and trying to find the bomb myself before it went off, I realised how foolish that was and knew I was going to have to tell someone. What kind of person would I be if I let that happen without trying to stop it?
So I went to a telephone box and