A Dream Near Tintagel

Back on Livejournal I used to have a "dreams" tag, in which I wrote down weird vivid dreams that felt important or startling or had some one image or feeling I wanted to remember right after waking. I woke from one such today and even though this isn't Livejournal and will never be I wanted to write about it, even though it is an oft-observed thing that there is nothing so boring as a person describing last night's dream. I don't think so, myself – I love when people talk about their dreams – but anyway that's what this is.

I dreamt that I was going to Tintagel with Stu and one other person, and Tintagel became a site of some other British legendarium specific to the dream, a place with stories fervently believed by people but that isn't history. There was a priest of some kind who was very jolly and loved to tease too-serious tourists, and a tall, beautiful man out of Brideshead Revisited, also laughing, charming, sweet, who reminded me of a long-lost friend.

The one other person was a woman, and she had long red hair, and as we spoke in this space that was like the space of the King Arthur Experience in Cornwall (never go to anything British that is called The ___ Experience, unless to laugh) we started talking about music, specifically O'Carolan tunes which I was surprised to find everyone present knowing, though different ones. I talked to the woman about playing the harp, and said I'd long wanted to learn to play Florence + the Machine songs on mine, especially Blinding. I realized a beat later, in a way unusual to my dreams, that the woman was Florence Welch, but it wasn't embarrassing, and we both spoke earnestly about harps and music and how hard it was to let someone else touch your instrument, how it leans so near the heart when you play.

In some other portion of dream I was looking out the glass door of my childhood home and seeing words on it – a social media scroll, something like that – and someone I haven't thought of in a long time spoke obliquely to me, and I felt a rush of needing to be cool, to impress, deadpanned something vaguely British-sounding with Stu looking over my shoulder to approve an idiom.

I think we talk a lot about the experience of dreaming that someone you love is angry with you, or did something cruel to you, or that you behaved badly and woke needing to apologize. It's never occurred to me to wonder, before now, about dreaming that a person who was cruel and terrible to you in real life was kind – that the sour, curdled thing a friendship became could be wiped from the heart's books and be the soft nourishing thing it was at the outset.

In the first kind of dream I usually wake wanting to be reassured that the relationship is still good, that a person still loves me. I woke from this other kind of dream also feeling reassured, somehow – that someone once loved me, that a friendship was real, that I could remember how it felt for that to be so, and there was strangely no sting in it, no bitter in the sweet, only a gentle sort of touch, fingers brushing hand, something fleeting that was good and that I can keep while releasing the rest.