The Difference between Daydreams and Day Dreams

Perhaps I made too much of a point of endorsing the cliché that the weather forecasters always get it wrong because I had recently had a break-up (and not of the “but we’ll still be friends” variety) with a man who pedantically pointed out that in fact the opposite was true with great regularity. The trouble is, on this matter, if on few others, Bruce was right. And I, along with many others, was wrong.

     Bruce’s daily paper of choice was one that went in for dramatic front covers about imminent weather events. That wasn’t the main reason for it not being MY paper of choice, but let’s just say it didn’t help. 

     To this day I’m not quite sure if that particular paper was the actual creator of the phrase “beast from the East”, but it certainly didn’t hesitate to make full use of it. Still, sober BBC forecasters with no political axe to grind weren’t that far behind in the melodramatic predictions stake.

     It was just silly, I told myself. It was spring, or as good as, the days were lengthening apace, and snowdrops had already yielded to crocuses and were beginning to yield to the first daffodils. Pardon me while I wax poetic. I was prepared to believe that there might be a “cold snap”, as there often is at this time of year as if the winter likes to make one last defiant gesture, like a naughty child slamming the door en route to being temporarily banished to the bedroom. There might be a bit of sleet, and I might need to give my winter boots one last outing, but it wouldn’t amount to anything. It certainly wasn’t going to stop me visiting Vera.

     Now I’m not a complete pain in the neck and just occasionally I do something right. I’m not going to deny that I might well not have cancelled a shopping trip either, but Vera was a former neighbour of mine who was recovering from an operation in the “next town down the coast”, as we liked to say. It had been touch and go, but now she was well on the way to recovery. Vera had always been good to me. When I was missing my Mum terribly after she passed away, she never made any kind of effort to be a surrogate mother, and never fed me any platitudes, but her quiet kindness and her realisation that I DID want to talk about it helped me through. I had planned to visit her in hospital, and that was just what I was going to do. Of course, she’d heard the forecasts too, and she phoned me, worriedly, saying, “If I were you, I wouldn’t risk it today, Dinah. With the Beast from the East and all that.”

     “Oh, you know how they exaggerate,” I said. “You don’t get rid of me that easily!”

     It was a good visit, and she definitely was more like her old self, though still with an air of fragility about her. As I left the hospital, the snow as beginning to fall. At that point, I could have booked into a hotel or guest house. Some were still closed for the winter, but others were not, and it would have been easy enough to get a room. But I told myself it would be plain stupid to book a hotel room in a town that was only fifteen miles from home. 

     That, to put it (inappropriate choice of words!) mildly was a mistake. The fluttering flakes turned into a biting blizzard and the sky had that heavy, off-yellow tinge that never exactly bodes well. The trouble with the roads where I live on the East Coast is that they really ARE as bad as people make out, and even that old chestnut about a main road there being a cattle track anywhere else was not without some truth in it. Which might not matter quite so much on a lovely day, but certainly does when the Beast from the East has come to call.

     The snow drifted and formed into banks with alarming speed. Conditions were becoming treacherous. But I still didn’t quite believe it when the emergency road and traffic report on local radio told me that the road I was on was closed, and unpassable. Well, at first I told myself I’d misheard and he’d said “impossible” and thought, mate, the roads round here are ALWAYS impossible, then my own pedantic side wondered if there were really such a word as “unpassable”. I bet that would get red-squiggled on Word, I thought (by the way, it does!). 

     It took about two minutes for it to dawn on me that actually the situation wasn’t funny at all, and that I didn’t have a blanket or a hot drink or any of the other things that you’re supposed to have in your car in such conditions. I hadn’t even charged my phone and I was in potential deep doo-dah. 

     I tried to keep calm, telling myself that I certainly wasn’t the only person in that situation and for goodness’ sake, it was Lincolnshire, not the Arctic Circle, Beast from the East or not. It also dawned on me that it was only a couple of miles to the next village, I hadn’t hit the road closure yet, and I was pretty sure they had a pub there which did rooms.

     There was, the Ship Inn, and they did. In the eerie off-white half light I could see the arrays of hanging baskets on their walls (they hoped to be a winner in the Eastern Counties in Bloom contest) looking like miniature winter gardens suspended in space. The only trouble is, the rooms were all taken.   There’d been a wedding party. Not the best of conditions to start your married life, I thought, but to be honest, my sympathy was reserved for myself. At that point the rather lumpy looking couch in the residents’ lounge seemed like a very welcome port in a very cold storm.

     “Wait,” the friendly lady behind the bar said, “You could stay in one of the cabins! They’re not officially open until Easter, but they’re furnished, and there’s a time to bend the rules. They’ve not got a central heating supply yet, but they are hooked up to the electricity, and I can lend you a heater.”

     I didn’t hug her, but I could have done. “Only – I don’t have much cash on me,” I said, regretting my honesty the minute I’d said it. “I have my card …..”

     “Our card reader works when it feels like it,” she smiled. “But we’ll see to that tomorrow, or the day after if need be. You have an honest face, and this weather can’t be here for that long. I’m certainly not turning anyone away when I CAN accommodate them on a night like this. Let me get my coat and I’ll take you over – oh, don’t worry, they’re only just across the car park!”

     But it was the sort of night when “just across the car park” seemed like a long way! She returned with her coat and boots on and with a little toiletries pack. “I can’t run to a nightie, but I reckon that’s no huge deal!” She was right, of course. “Help yourself to some reading matter, if you like!” She indicated a shelf in the bar room where a “small donation” to local charities was requested. I had a roof over my head, and my own personal Good Samaritan, and apparently even reading matter. The Beast from the East was becoming, I thought, less beastly by the moment!

     I suppose that in the few minutes I had to process the word “cabin” I had imagined either one of those pseudo-Scandinavian romantic log (even if the logs were plastic!) constructions, or a corrugated iron structure. It was neither. Basically – well, like a mobile home, but not mobile! And with a bed, and walls, and a little heater that would soon warm it up. “We start serving food at 7,” the friendly lady (whose name, she had told me, was Louise) said, “But if you’re hungry, I can make you a sandwich.”

     “No, you’ve been more than kind enough already!” That was undeniably true, but I also just wanted to sink down on the bed or a chair, and get warm. There was something I had to do first, of course – call Vera. “Oh, thank Goodness,” she said, shakily, “I’ve just heard on the news about the road being closed and was so worried for you, and feeling so guilty about you visiting me!”

     “No need for that,” I said, ruefully, “You’re far too nice a person to ever say I told you so but you did warn me and I thought I knew better, like I usually do. Still, I’ve got away with it.”

     As the little cabin warmed up, I made myself a hot drink – the kettle was already there, and Louise had brought over supplies for the refreshment tray. I was suddenly rather weary – perhaps the reaction of suddenly not being in danger any more, and of stress unravelling. I thought I would just lie down for a couple of minutes – and promptly fell asleep. 

     This time it’s not just grammatical pedantry when I say there’s a definite difference between a daydream and a day dream. I don’t have the latter very often, as I’m not a daytime napper. If you were to ask me if I knew I were dreaming – one of those so-called lucid dreams – I don’t know. In the dream I was in a little cabin very much like the one where I had fallen asleep, my coffee untouched on the bedside table. But when I looked out of the window, I did not see the driving snow and the drifts and crusts that had already accumulated on the pub car park. I was looking out to sea, and it was warm, though a little breeze put white caps on the ripples of the sea. This was not the North Sea that was only a few miles up the road and often cold and grey even in summer, but vivid blue, forming into a little cove, though if I looked further out I could see boats and another coastline. There was that strange light that comes when the moon is full and the summer dawn not far from breaking, so bright, in its way, that it made the waters of the cove more vivid blue than they would be in the midday sun. There were people on the beach, and I sensed that it was not just silver because of the moonlight. Children were playing and making sandcastles, and adults had spread out blankets. Something made me look upwards, and, so I thought, a realistic, if beautiful, landscape, seemed to take on a surreal and strange nature. I would have sworn that up in that moonlit, small hours sky, above the silver sands and the sparkling waters, and the children playing, there were all manner of flying things – often things quite prosaic in themselves – there were a couple of cars!

     I woke up feeling both rested and still weary. I’m not generally the kind of people who talks about my dreams, though how much of that is because either I don’t remember them or they’re pretty boring and/or embarrassing, I don’t know! But something prompted me to tell Louise about this one after I had carefully picked my way across the car park (someone had considerately cleared a path, but it was still treacherous). I suppose I was expecting some bland and polite comment about “what a lovely dream”, but only as I came towards the end of my telling did I realise that she looked thoughtful and as if something had both been explained and puzzled her even more. “I – don’t know if I should tell you this, Dinah,” she said, “But I think you have a right to know. We had some workers from Croatia helping us build the cabins. We got on well with all of them, but had an especial soft spot for a guy called Novak. He told us all about the little village where he lived – and it sounded idyllic.” She paused. “It’s a coastal village, on a cove. Every year, in summer, they have a special festival at the nearest full moon to midsummer day. It has a name meaning – well, day in the night. As if that one day had not just day and night, but an extra time. And in the hour before dawn, they let off balloons into the sky – not just regular ones, but more like – inflated sculptures. “

     “And – some of them were cars!” I exclaimed.

     “Yes. They were. He told me his little nephew especially loved the flying cars. That’s – ironic really. Only two months after he got back home, Novak was killed in a car crash – a drunk driver.” She sighed. “We’ve thought of putting up a memorial plaque to him, but I think he’d hate it – he’d much sooner think of families on holiday and people having a good time. He sent me a postcard of his village.”

     She took it out from underneath the counter. And for the second time that day, as outside and all around us the Beast from the East filled the nearly spring with its icy breath, I looked upon a sparkling cove, gloriously moonlit and soon to be bathed in the light of the early rising midsummer sun.

     Without any need for further conversation about it, Louise poured us both a glass of plum brandy – as she admitted, not the original one that Novak had brought back as a present from a visit home, but one that didn’t taste too different, and as we clinked glasses, she said, “To you, Novak.” I repeated it, and silently, but no less vehemently and with tears in my eyes that weren’t really tears of sorrow, though the story was sad, I said, “And thank you for bringing me to warmth and safety!”

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The “Beast from the East” that drove into the East of England in 2018 is historical fact (as are people, like me, who chose not to believe the forecasts!). The “Ship Inn” is an amalgam of several local establishments. To the best of my knowledge, none of them has reported instances of strange dreams or friendly ghosts …… yet!