I promised, a while ago, to tell my blog-readers all about the coolest dream I had as a child. And no amount of apathy from my loyal readers will stop me fulfilling this promise, don't you worry! Now, I don't remember what year I had this dream, but from internal evidence it must have been around this time of year, probably late October. One major date-indicator is that the new season of television programmes always started in September, and this dream must have been heavily inspired by the kind of children's drama series on BBC or ITV that would always start with the new season and run for six weeks or so. It's really not the kind of thing I could have dreamed up all by myself, though I can't remember a direct source for the story.
A description of this dream will need a lot of explanatory notes, so be prepared for some lengthy analysis.
The premise of the dream, which I think was just understood rather than directly narrated, is that adults have taken over the country or the world, and treat children as slaves - this involves the children all wearing handcuffs.
'Country' and 'world' were essentially the same thing to me at a young age; I don't know if the dream specified which it was that the grown-ups had taken over. Nor does the fact that adults already rule the world seem to have bothered me - really, 'parents' or 'teachers' taking over would have made more sense, but it was a more general 'adult' seizing of power I was dreaming about.
The story started with our hero (me) in a newsagent's with my mother - me in handcuffs, looking at the new year's annuals on the shelves, and being excited to see that they not only had the ones with the next year's date, but also the year after's. My mother asked which of the two Beano Books I wanted; I said I'd rather have both, and she said I could only have one.
This scene's intention was apparently to demonstrate how horrifically cruel the adults are to their innocent children. I apparently can't imagine anything more evil than only getting one Beano Book when two were available. That the adults are still required to buy things like comic annuals for children is an unshakable rule throughout this dream. 'My mother' in this dream didn't resemble my real mother at all; I'm thinking blonde hair and glasses, and get vibes of 'TV actress' from her. The comic annuals in Britain come out in September/October and have the following year's date on them - so if I dreamed this in 1986, the Beano Books would have been dated 1987 and 1988.
I don't recall if there was any transition from that scene to the next, but now we're in Woolworths in Boston, at the back of the store where the photo booth was. I have to get my picture taken. My mother gives me the coins to put into the slot - lots of different coins, all with old-money names which she tells me one at a time. One of the names was along the lines of "a jack o'nickel".
Pre-decimal money (which became obsolete in 1971) is obviously something that grown-ups would want to restore if they took power. The coins all did have unusual names, which adults would talk about to the mystification of 1980s children. This is exactly the kind of thing that would have been on a kids-versus-adults TV show, although again I don't remember one that did it.
Sensing an opportunity for escape, since I'd be alone and unsupervised in the photo booth, I cunningly said that I wouldn't be able to put the coins in the slot wearing handcuffs, and so my mother unlocked and removed them. I immediately made a run for it, racing down to the front end of the store, grabbing either a tin of beans or a pot of yoghurt from a shelf and giving it to a pair of handcuffed children (an older girl and younger boy).
The front part of Woolworths, near the till, was where the sweets were sold. There might possibly have been yoghurt there, but not beans. Nor would a tin of beans have been likely to be in my subconscious mind, probably explaining the confusion if I'd seen a similar scene with beans involved.
The girl was unimpressed by my heroic act, saying that it wasn't much help to them. I replied something, and ran out the front doors to continue my crusade.
A streetwise girl, the same age or a bit older, would routinely feature in TV shows with a male child protagonist. This one might seem to have a point, but in the dream I felt she was being unfairly ungrateful. I have no idea what I said to her, but I hope it put her in her place. I'm sure she would have made a reappearance later in the saga.
There might be a missing scene here, because the next thing I remember I'm outside the back entrance to Woolworths, at night, and looking at the sky above the shop, where fireworks are exploding. "Of course!" I thought to myself. "Halloween! The grown-ups' favourite special occasion, because it doesn't require them to spend money on children!"
To get to that location I would have had to go a long way around or back through the shop I'd just left. At that point I woke up, sadly. But clearly the point was that I would do something to resolve the whole situation at Halloween, the biggest event in the evil adults' calendar. Obviously I'm conflating Halloween (October 31st) with Bonfire Night (November 5th), which is when we have fireworks, but they're so close together it's quite understandable. We didn't do much for Halloween where I came from - trick-or-treating was an American thing that hadn't quite made its way over here yet. There was usually a Halloween party and a costume competition, but in our neighbourhood it was understood that costumes should be hand-made rather than store-bought (and thus in my mind didn't cost the adults any money). Halloween being a non-present-giving festival obviously means it's a cheap event for evil grown-ups.
Really, words don't do the sheer coolness of this dream justice. I just wish I knew exactly how much was my own invention and how much was just cribbed from something I'd seen on TV before bedtime...
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