One and a half memories, one and a half dreams

i) A memory

I had to bend down to pick something up in the bathroom the other day, and as I rose my head passed close to the corner of a wall cabinet. Suddenly a memory popped up: I was nine or ten years old, on a caravan holiday on the Yorkshire coast, and one morning I somehow banged my head on the corner of a bedside cabinet, drawing blood.

Funny how memory works like that. For the briefest instant I was in a situation vaguely similar to one twenty years earlier, and my subconscious whipped out the memory quick as a flash. "Look!" it said. "Careful now! Remember what happened last time!"

How many of our memories are like that, lurking just beneath the surface, ready to appear at the speed of a firing synapse? It seems a very clever evolutionary trick.

ii) A memory and dream

Edmund, Nole and I were walking back from Zierenberg last night along a dead, dark road when a pair of car lights appeared some way behind us. We moved to the side and a minute later the car crawled by.

As I watched its red tail lights receding, something in the geometry of the moment - those two lights shrinking like eyes into the blackness - triggered not a memory, exactly, but a memory of a dream. In the dream I was at a jumble sale across the road from my Nan's house in Swindon and I bought a remote control car, which I raced up and down the backs.

There was an emotion bound up with this dream-memory that would take a book to describe. The dream has stayed dormant in my mind I don't know how many years - ten perhaps, fifteen. Remembered dreams tend to float around in time like that, unanchored to daily realities.

The dream isn't important, but why was it invoked at that moment, by those car lights, walking down that particular lane on that night? What peculiar complex of chemical sparks in my brain brought it back to life, when it might have remained buried for the next fifty years?

iii) A dream

This one is a little weird. I dreamed my own death last week, which has never happened to me before, although I'm sure it isn't that uncommon.

All I remember is that someone was holding a gun to my forehead and counting to three. I knew that death was certain, and my only thought was how badly I wanted to go on living. The figure with the gun (I think it was a woman, whatever that signifies...) reached number three and pulled the trigger. With my last effort, as I felt the breath drawing from my lungs, I uttered my final hopeless words - but again, there isn't room to go into that here.

Rather than everything going black, my vision was flooded with white flashes and spots. Nor was it quick, but slow and muted, like wading through treacle. I had the sense of making a terrible transition.

It was in fact that unreal No Man's Land between waking and sleep, the long moment when the brain slips into the dream world, or from the dream world back into the real one. I'd been there once before, but by the time I recognised this I was already awake. The shock of the bullet had jolted me out of my sleep.

It seems that our subconscious minds don't like the idea of dying any more than we do.