Joe Bennett: The stuff that nightmares are made of

Bennett's nightmares take him back into the classroom when he used to teach. Photo / 123rf

OPINION
There are few things so boring as other people's dreams. So let me tell you about mine.

Dreams make perfect sense, but only to the dreamer, and only while being dreamed. The sense they make, their alternative logic, is visual and emotional.

It arises from the old and primitive parts of the brain. The younger, less-primitive parts, the parts that form the conscious, waking mind and deal with reason and language, have no control over the sense of dreams and no way of expressing it.

Which is why we can't communicate our dreams to others.

But we have no difficulty grasping them ourselves. At the time of dreaming they are more vivid than reality and they feel more true.

Robert Graves called them "the finest entertainment known and given rag cheap". But he didn't mention nightmares.

The best thing about sharing a bed is having someone to wake you from nightmares.

It can be a perilous task. In the throes of a nightmare I am the middle section of a car wash, a writhing, 14-stone combatant taking swings at airy enemies.

And I take some waking. The grip of the dream has enclosed me. The primitive mind is running the show.

The mare in nightmare is no horse. Mare is an ancient word for a demon, an incubus, an evil spirit that squats on the chest of a dreamer and presses.

Variants of the word appear in dozens of languages. The French for nightmare is cauchemar. The Polish is koszmar. Demons are long lived.

Nightmares come in three types. The first is the readily interpreted.

But a storm blew down the palace,
She was biking through a field of corn,
And a bull with the face of the Vicar
Was charging with lowered horn.
She could feel his hot breath behind her,
He was going to overtake;
And the bicycle went slower and slower
Because of the backpedal brake.

What could be neater? Miss Gee's nightmare is born of sexual repression. She daren't admit her lust.

It manifests in her dreams. Here is the one-to-one link between dreams and the psyche that we associate with Freud, where dreams contain symbols and the symbols mean stuff.

Not that Freud was the first to come up with it. Think of the seven fat cattle and the seven thin cattle in the Bible. Think of Lady Macbeth washing her hands.

But actual nightmares are rarely so neat. The subconscious is a gluepot.

It generates horrors we didn't know we had in us, the stuff of the true nightmare, the full threshing machine, arms and legs going at it in the face of our worst fears.

To emerge from one of these is to be drained by terror, sweating, weak as a kitten, appalled, as the monsters of the subconscious sink back down again into the unacknowledged depths.

Five minutes later we cannot remember the details, but the feeling lingers. It can colour a whole day.

For a while as a kid I suffered from such nightmares so badly that I feared going to bed.

Nowadays I get maybe one a year. But recently I've discovered a third type of nightmare, the Kafkaesque. I don't know if anyone else gets them. I don't know if even Kafka did.

Kafka's characters are held in labyrinths from which there seems to be no escape.

They are thwarted at every turn. They acquire a suffocating sense of helplessness, of being unable to control their destiny, to move towards their desires. And it is this sense that my new nightmares share.

They're not terror-mares, but suffocation-mares. Many of them happen in schools even though I haven't taught for 25 years.

I am trying to get to class but am constantly thwarted. I am trying to teach a lesson but am constantly thwarted.

Everything I want to do is denied me. It slides always out of reach. Here is the horror of impotence and just as in a Kafka story, I find myself scratching with feeble fingernails against a smooth, unshiftable wall.

And it goes on, exhaustingly on, seemingly for hours, till finally I wake, feeling withered, feeling uneasy. And daylight glimmers round the curtain.