26 Fruits

I’m flying home from Istanbul. It was an early flight so we’d had to wake at 4 in the morning, but I was already awake two hours earlier, unable to sleep. After chaos and delay at the airport, I’m now heading home, writing and reading, drifting in and out of dreams.

I remember we’d had cups of coffee in the Grand Bazaar the day before. The Illy cups had the word ‘dream’ written on them in several different languages. It occurs to me that dreaming is the most universal of all human activities, perhaps what makes us human. And I remember the Milan Kundera quotation:  “Our dreams prove that to imagine – to dream about things that have not happened – is among mankind’s deepest needs.”

Earlier in the week we’d visited the ancient site at Pergamon in western Turkey. Here they had once housed one of the ancient world’s largest collections of writings. Pergamon gives us the word ‘parchment’, the form of paper on which they wrote. The fortress, palace and library were sited on the acropolis but down below was the Asklepion, the ancient medical centre, with its snake symbol.

In that millennium BC, people came here to be treated in ways that now seem very new-age. Therapies of various kinds helped healing, using herbs, aromas and theatrical performance. You can stand in the domed building and see the evidence of the dream chambers. Recognising the recuperative power of sleep and dreams, doctors would speak quietly through cavities in the walls, aiming to influence the dreams of sleepers with positive thoughts.

Now, as I write, the plane is over the English Channel and I’m nearly home. I think of a story that John Sorrell told me just before my holiday. He’d visited the painter Terry Frost in Cornwall towards the end of the artist’s life. John had asked him about the new painting positioned above the TV. Terry Frost explained that this was where he placed his current work. He liked to doze in front of the TV. When he woke up the painting would be the first thing he saw and sometimes the painting would catch him ‘unawares’. In doing so, it would look right or not, finished or still a work in process of creation. He found this the best test.

I loved that idea, the thought of waking from a dream to make a decision. It’s always a hard call to make, deciding when a piece of writing is done. Right – or not? Genuine or fake? We can all dream.