by Ben Holden
From The Tempest
by William Shakespeare
Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices,
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again; and then in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open, and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked
I cried to dream again.
(1610–11)
★
Tove Jansson, Finnish writer of the cherished Moomins series, here weaves a rainbow of a story, fresh and mysterious. She overcomes the nightmarish and, with a child’s innocent realism, decides to soar above her night-terrors (or parasomnia). She soon describes dreams coming true. Flights of fancy become commonplace. The grown-ups are schooled. We must all dare to dream, for pigs really can fly – and we can too, as long as we muster that crucial first leap of inner faith.
Flying (from Sculptor’s Daughter)
by Tove Jansson
I dreamed that thousands of people were running in the street. They weren’t shouting but you could hear the sounds of their boots on the pavement, many thousands of boots, and there was a red glow in the studio from outside. After a while there weren’t so many of them running and in the end there were only the steps of the last one, who was running in such a way that he fell over and then picked himself up and ran on.
Then everything started shrinking. Every piece of furniture became elongated and narrow and disappeared towards the ceiling. There was something crawling under the rag rugs in the hall. It was also narrow and thin and wriggled in the middle, sometimes very quickly and sometimes very slowly.
I tried to get into the bedroom where Mummy had lit the oil lamp but the door was shut. Then I ran up the steps to the bunk. The door of Poppolino’s cage was open and I could hear him padding round somewhere in the dark and whining, which is something he always does when it is very cold or when he feels lonely.
Now it came up the steps, grey and limping. One of its legs had come off. It was the ghost of the dead crow. I flew into the sitting-room and bumped about on the ceiling like a fly. I could see the sitting-room and the studio underneath me in a deep well that sank deeper and deeper.
I thought more about that dream afterwards, particularly about the flying part, and decided to fly as often as possible.
But it didn’t work and I dreamed about all the wrong things, and in the end I made up my own dreams myself just before I went to sleep or just after I had woken up. I started by thinking up the most awful things I could, which wasn’t particularly difficult. When I had made things as awful as possible I took a run and bounced off the floor and flew away from everything, leaving it all behind me in a deep well. Down there the whole town was burning. Down there Poppolino was padding around in the studio in the dark screaming with loneliness. Down there sat the crow saying: it was your fault that I died. And the Unmentionable Thing crawled under the mat.
But I just went on flying. In the beginning I bumped about on the ceiling like a fly, but then I ventured out the window. Straight across the street was the farthest I could fly. But if I glided I could go on as long as I wanted, right down to the bottom of the well. There I took another leap and flew up again.
It wasn’t long before they caught sight of me. At first they just stopped and stared, then they started to shout and point and came running from all directions. But before they could reach me I had taken another leap and was up in the air again laughing and waving at them. They tried to jump after me. They ran to fetch step-ladders and fishing-rods but nothing helped. There they were, left behind below me, longing to be able to fly. Then they went slowly home and got on with their work.
Sometimes they had too much work to do and sometimes they just couldn’t work which was horrid for them. I felt sorry for them and made it possible for them all to fly.
Next morning they all woke up with no idea of what had happened and sat up and said: another miserable day begins! They climbed down from their bunks and drank some warm milk and had to eat the skin too. Then they put on their coats and hats and went downstairs and off to their work, dragging their legs and wondering whether they should take the tram. But then they decided to walk in any case because one is allowed to take a tram for seven stops but not really for five, and in any case fresh air is healthy.
One of them came down Wharf Road and a lot of wet snow stuck to her boots. So she stamped a little to get rid of the snow – and sure enough, she flew into the air! Only about six feet, and then came down again and stood wondering what had happened to her. Then she noticed a gentleman running to catch the tram. It rang its bell and was off so he ran even faster and the next moment he was flying too. He took off from the ground and described an arc in the air up to the roof of the tram and there he sat!
Then Mummy began to laugh as hard as she could and immediately understood what had happened and cried ha! ha! ha! and flew onto Victor Ek’s roof in a single beautiful curve. There she caught sight of Daddy in the studio window rattling nails and coins in the pockets of his overall and she shouted: jump out! Come flying with me!’
But Daddy daren’t until Mummy flew over and sat on the window-sill. Then he opened the window and took hold of her hand and flew out and said: well I’ll be damned!
By that time the whole of Helsinki was full of amazed people flying. No one did any work. Windows were open all over the place and down in the street the trams and the cars were empty and it stopped snowing and the sun came out.
All the new-born babies were flying and all the very old people and their cats and dogs and guinea-pigs and monkeys – just everybody!
Even the President was out flying!
The roofs were crowded with picnickers undoing their sandwiches and opening bottles and shouting cheers! to one another across the street and everyone was doing precisely what he or she wanted to do.
I stood in the bedroom window watching the whole thing and enjoying myself no end and wondering how long I should let them go on flying. And I thought that if I now made everything normal again it might be dangerous. Imagine what would happen if the following morning they all opened their windows and jumped out! Therefore I decided that they could be allowed to go on flying until the end of the world in Helsinki.
Then I opened my bedroom window and climbed onto the window-ledge together with the crow and Poppolino. Don’t be afraid! I said. And so off we flew.
(1969)
Translated by Kingsley Hart
★
In 2015, Canadian novelist and poet Margaret Atwood became the first contributor to the Future Library Project, a Norwegian public artwork devised by artist Katie Paterson.
The initiative is a fairy tale all of its own. Future Library intends to collect one original story each year from a popular writer until the year 2114, at which point all the manuscripts will be published for the first time, together in an anthology.
There is even a fairy-tale forest: one thousand trees have been planted in Nordmarka, near Oslo; they will be harvested in 100 years’ time, in order to print 1,000 copies of the limited-edition anthology.
And so Atwood’s story, ‘Scribbler Moon’, will be dormant for a century or so. ‘There’s something magical about it,’ she has said. ‘It’s like Sleeping Beauty. The texts are going to slumber for 100 years and then they’ll wake up, come to life again . . .’
Adventure Story
by Margaret Atwood
This is a story told by our ancestors, and those before them. It is not just a story, but something they once did, and at last there is proof.
Those who are to go must prepare first. They must be strong and well nourished and they must possess also a sense of purpose, a faith, a determination to persevere to the end, because the way is long and arduous and there are many dangers.
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br /> At the right time they gather together in the appointed place. Here there is much confusion and milling around, as yet there is no order, no groups of sworn companions have separated themselves from the rest. The atmosphere is tense, anticipation stirs among them, and now, before some are ready, the adventure has been launched. Through the dark tunnel, faintly lit with lurid gleams of reddish light, shoots the intrepid band, how many I cannot say; only that there are many: a band now, for all are headed in the same direction. The safety of the home country falls behind, the sea between is crossed more quickly than you can think, and now they are in alien territory, a tropical estuary with many coves and hidden bays. The water is salt, the vegetation Amazonian, the land ahead shrouded and obscure, thickened with fog. Monstrous animals, or are they fish, lurk here, pouncing upon the stragglers, slaying many. Others are lost, and wander until they weaken and perish in misery.
Now the way narrows, and those who have survived have reached the gate. It is shut, but they try one password and then another, and look! the gate has softened, melted, turned to jelly, and they pass through. Magic still works; an unseen force is on their side. Another tunnel; here they must crowd together, swimming upstream, between shores curving and fluid as lava, helping one another. Only together can they succeed.
(You may think I’m talking about male bonding, or war, but no: half of these are female, and they swim and help and sacrifice their lives in the same way as the rest.)
And now there is a widening out, and the night sky arches above them, or are we in outer space and all the rocket movies you’ve ever seen? It’s still warm, whatever, and the team, its number sadly diminished, forges onward, driven by what? Greed for treasure, desire for a new home, worlds to conquer, a raid on an enemy citadel, a quest for the Grail? Now it is each alone, and the mission becomes a race which only one may win, as, ahead of them, vast and luminous, the longed-for, the loved planet swims into view, like a moon, a sun, an image of God, round and perfect. A target.
Farewell, my comrades, my sisters! You have died that I may live. I alone will enter the garden, while you must wilt and shrivel in outer darkness. So saying – and you know, because now this is less like a story than a memory – the victorious one reaches the immense perimeter and is engulfed in the soft pink atmosphere of paradise, sinks, enters, casts the imprisoning skin of the self, merges, disappears . . . and the world slowly explodes, doubles, revolves, changes forever, and there, in the desert heaven, shines a fresh-laid star, exile and promised land in one, harbinger of a new order, a new birth, possibly holy; and the animals will be named again.
(1992)
★
Nietzsche observed that we are all – involuntarily – writers when we dream. This is partly due to the sense that we mostly see our dreams (as opposed to hear, touch, taste or smell them). Just as the greatest storytellers must conjure visions for their readers – Joseph Conrad famously proclaimed his task as a writer was ‘to make you hear, to make you feel – it is, before all, to make you see’ – so must our dreams paint us pictures.
And so when Czesław Miłosz describes poetry below, he might as well be writing about dreams.
Our revolving doors of perception swing open in dream – reasoning is ejected; physical impossibility is welcomed; emotion is intensified, sometimes to manic degrees; and improbable events are accepted unquestioningly, discontinuity and incongruity ushered inside with open arms.
In these next pieces about dreams, a tigerish lucidity abounds. They cumulatively beg the question, as Leonardo da Vinci framed it: ‘why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than when awake?’
From Ars Poetica?
by Czesław Miłosz
a thing is brought forth which we didn’t know we had in us,
so we blink our eyes, as if a tiger had sprung out
and stood in the light, lashing his tail . . .
The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
For our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
and invisible guests come in and out at will.
(1968)
Translated by Miłosz and Lillian Valee
★
Dreamtigers
by Jorge Luis Borges
In my childhood I was a fervent worshiper of the tiger – not the jaguar, that spotted “tiger” that inhabits the floating islands of water hyacinths along the Paraná and the tangled wilderness of the Amazon, but the true tiger, the striped Asian breed that can be faced only by men of war, in a castle atop an elephant. I would stand for hours on end before one of the cages at the zoo; I would rank vast encyclopaedias and natural history books by the splendor of their tigers. (I still remember those pictures, I who cannot recall without error a woman’s brow or smile.) My childhood outgrown, the tigers and my passion for them faded, but they are still in my dreams. In that underground sea or chaos, they still endure. As I sleep I am drawn into some dream or other, and suddenly I realize that it’s a dream. At those moments, I often think: This is a dream, a pure diversion of my will, and since I have unlimited power, I am going to bring forth a tiger.
Oh, incompetence! My dreams never seem to engender the creature I so hunger for. The tiger does appear, but it is all dried up, or it’s flimsy-looking, or it has impure vagaries of shape or an unacceptable size, or it’s altogether too ephemeral, or it looks more like a dog or bird than like a tiger.
(1960)
Translated by Andrew Hurley
★
The Tyger
by William Blake
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright,
In the forest of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder, and what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? and what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
When the stars threw down their spears,
And water’d heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the lamb make thee?
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
(1794)
★
TONY ROBINSON
When Laura’s mum and I split up, sleep became a bit of a problem. I yawned all day, and lay awake staring miserably at the ceiling all night. So, Laura, who was eleven at the time, decided to sort me out.
Late in the evening when she heard me clamber into bed, she’d creep into my room with a copy of The Colour of Magic, snuggle up, and read to me. The rolling cadences of Terry Pratchett’s prose, his wit, his imagination and his gentle passion, were a balm to my troubled and speedy mind. His words and my daughter’s tenderness, invariably sent me to sleep within minutes, and the following night she’d have to start at the same place all over again.
Terry died in 2015 of early-onset Alzheimer’s. It was only latterly that he began to get the respect he deserved as a writer. He’d be really chuffed to know he’d been included in an anthology like this, and particularly proud that he had the ability to send at least one of his readers to sleep so efficiently!
The Colour of Magic – Prologue
by Terry Pratchett
In a distant and second-hand set of dimensions, in an astral plane that was never meant to fly, the curling star-mists waver and part . . .
See . . .
Great A’Tuin the Turtle comes, swimming slowly through
the interstellar gulf, hydrogen frost on his ponderous limbs, his huge and ancient shell pocked with meteor craters. Through sea-sized eyes that are crusted with rheum and asteroid dust He stares fixedly at the Destination.
In a brain bigger than a city, with geological slowness, He thinks only of the Weight.
Most of the weight is of course accounted for by Berilia, Tubul, Great T’Phon and Jerakeen, the four giant elephants upon whose broad and star-tanned shoulders the disc of the World rests, garlanded by the long waterfall at its vast circumference and domed by the baby-blue vault of Heaven.
Astropsychology has been, as yet, unable to establish what they think about.
The Great Turtle was a mere hypothesis until the day the small and secretive kingdom of Krull, whose rim-most mountains project out over the Rimfall, built a gantry and pulley arrangements at the tip of the most precipitous crag and lowered several observers over the Edge in a quartz-windowed brass vessel to peer through the mist veils.
The early astrozoologists, hauled back from their long dangle by enormous teams of slaves, were able to bring back much information about the shape and nature of A’Tuin and the elephants but this did not resolve fundamental questions about the nature and purpose of the universe.
For example, what was A’Tuin’s actual sex? This vital question, said the astrozoologists with mounting authority, would not be answered until a larger and more powerful gantry was constructed for a deep-space vessel. In the meantime, they could only speculate about the revealed cosmos.
There was, for example, the theory that A’Tuin had come from nowhere and would continue at a uniform crawl, or steady gait, into nowhere, for all time. This theory was popular among academics.
An alternative, favoured by those of a religious persuasion, was that A’Tuin was crawling from the Birthplace to the Time of Mating, as were all the stars in the sky which were, obviously, also carried by giant turtles. When they arrived they would briefly and passionately mate, for the first and only time, and from that fiery union new turtles would be born to carry a new pattern of worlds. This was known as the Big Bang hypothesis.