Author: Ellen Bell

Another dream that I thought I’d lost on waking but one that came back to me about half an hour later in the bath. I was staying in a house, a stone cottage and several of M.’s sons were there. Water started to come in, it wasn’t clear from where, but it began pouring out of the fridge and cupboards. As sanguine as ever M.’s tall sons were unfazed. I started trying to save things, clothes, objects and so on. But I was calm. Calmed by their calm. I went around the outside of the house and from there nothing was awry. No water, no flooding. Had it stopped? Was the interior now dry? I woke without finding the answer.

I dream of journeys. Journeys on trains, on escalators, in cars and on foot. Last night I woke from one in which I was walking along a narrow isthmus. A sea haar hung heavy above and around it. My way wasn’t clear. I came to a house. It had been my mother’s. It was empty now and though I had been intending to stay there, I couldn’t bring myself to. The windows were too dark, too exposed to the elements. So I kept on walking.

A cat came and sat by me this morning as I draw in the Castle Park. I’d heard a noise, and thinking that it was some distant voices on the Prom, ignored it. The noise came again, louder this time. I looked down and saw the cat. I couldn’t see her very well in the still dark. I saw the white ruff of her chest, (I assumed she was a her, she was slight, too slight for a tom) and the dabs of light on her paws, but that was it. She mewed and miaowed at me. I spoke back to her and she stopped. And began cleaning herself. When I finished by drawing I called to her. She followed me up the hill for a while but stopped and sat down staring at a gate in the wall.

It’s a wall. A wall of fear, even panic at times. I want to get to the other side, give my work an opportunity to flourish and be experienced in unusual ways, but the wall stops me. I cannot visualise myself using the software necessary to make these, what are to me, huge technological leaps. What am I so scared of? Being seen as foolish, stupid even? Of failure, of messing-up? And if that is all, so what? So what? That is what I should be saying to myself. Who was the American president that the journalist was quoting yesterday, in the piece that he read out to me as I prepared supper? He was the one who set up the New Deal in the 30s – Roosevelt? Anyway, he spoke of trying something, anything, in order to find a solution. And, that if it fails, admit to it, and try something else. It sounds simple. I come a long way. Remember that. And be brave. If you can.

I lost last night’s dream but the one from the night before has stayed with me. I worked at remembering it, willing myself to catch it in my mind’s eye for those first few moments of waking. There were lots of elements to it, that fact that he and I had been living in someone else’s house and, on leaving, and packing all our things together I kept finding objects I knew in their cupboards, like my little white milk jug. Then we were on some sort of train that had no roof. We could see the sky. It was light, though we were going under a kind of tunnel. No, it was an arch, an arch of art. Anthony Gormley’s art. I even managed to just about find his name in the dream. I could see the Angel in the distance but overhead were zinc-coloured clouds with cherubim-like figures within them. As we sped by I saw the artist himself, on show, in a tableau, crouching and wearing a khaki army coat. I pointed him out to P. On arriving at a depot we were travelling down an escalator when I woke.

The town’s students’ windows are a mass of plastic cobwebs, ghouls, witches and ghosts. Pumpkins with their hacked-out smiles litter every step and front garden. One house’s various entrances has quasi Police Aware tape, stretched across each door, blocking entry and warning of what’s within. I like it. All of it. It makes me smile. Setting off on my walk this morning I encountered a pair evidently walking home after a pre-halloween club night. He was in a suit, though was jacketless. She wore a black corset with a skirt hitched up at the hips. On her feet were a pair of Doc Marten’s. I remember such dressing-up. Halcyon days.

They disappear too quickly. I wake from them and I have them and then another, living thought comes in and they are gone. Vanished. Vanquished by a lesser, existing reality. I rue the loss of them. I like to try to unpick them, to relive the hyper-reality of their landscapes and vistas. Perhaps they will return in those flickers of something other that mist through my thoughts from time to time, unbidden and unfamiliar. I hope so.

After two dry days, the rain has returned. It’s an autumnal rain that drizzles down the windows. And it comes with the murk of darker mornings. Not yet November it feels like it. So be it. Down into the tunnel we go to wait for Spring. My desire to sleep, to hide, to hibernate is strong. Sometimes, it’s overwhelming.

I’ve always been, or at least, felt cowardly. I am not brave. I sense my fear daily. Life is too big for me. It always has been. And probably, always will be. But nevertheless, I do face my fears. Like now, sitting here at my desk getting ready to return to the article I began yesterday. It was a hacking-out piece of writing. I hated it. Today, after hours of mulling, I am ready to begin again, with, I hope, more authenticity, more openness. I may fail. But I will try to succeed. Is that courageous?

What can we do in the face of it? The early morning news speaks of Irael bombing Iran. Where will it end? War upon war. Such belligerence. Have we learnt nothing?