|
TUESDAY, 25 AUGUST
|
| Dear friend, |
|
I said yesterday that if you turned round in a chase dream you would probably find nothing there, and I was wrong before breakfast.
|
|
Marta wrote in overnight, and she has been running down the same corridor since she was at school, so the letter reached her at a bad moment or a very good one, depending on how you want to look at it.
|
|
On Sunday night she stopped in that corridor and turned round, and standing there, out of breath, was her mother, holding Marta’s coat.
|
|
I read it at the window in my socks and did not go back to the coffee for a while, because it is the kind of dream that answers something you have not got round to asking.
|
|
|
|
|
What Marta saw
|
|
The chase had never had a face in it before, she told me, so the face turning up now matters more than all the years of running did.
|
|
|
The coat is doing more work in this dream than the mother is. A coat is what somebody hands you when they think you are cold, or when they would like you to go, and Marta says her mother has managed both of those in a single afternoon.
|
|
The chase stopped being the point the moment she stood still, because what was left in front of her was a woman worn out from keeping up, and that is a very different feeling to being hunted.
|
|
Whether her mother would know herself in it, I cannot say, and Marta says she cannot either, which is how most dreams about our parents go.
|
|
| “ |
The coat is doing more work in this dream than the mother is.
|
|
