Dark Sister, Dark Water, Dark Cliff, Dark Donnybrookers, Dark Giants, Dark Bull, and the Watery Fair of Rogues!
The Latvian Sisters, the Unclimbable Cliff, the Lone Jew, the Atlantean Dock, the Dark-wearing Donnybrookers, the Lavatory on the Cliff, the Twenty-Feet High Highwaymen, the Black Gaelic Bull, the Fair of the Rovers in the Bay
Reporting a dream of height, depth, frivolity, intimacy, song, and Giant Perils
Woke and slept many times today, in which a story was woven in the waking one knows when one is asleep. I came to a seashore, a place I'd been before and often with my sisters and two parents. But family had only travelled there (so far) in my sleep. There was a great reunion along the coast, where the ocean lay to the West. We met in a lodge inside a sea-side forest of elms, oaks, hollies and beeches. There grew very few pines or evergreens - it was not the Great Northwest. Lilija Pugasevich's many sisters were there, though Lilija herself was absent. One of her sisters, unusually dark-haired, kept asking me if I would set sail and visit the Land of the Jews. Her eyes were big and sad. I told her I'd no immediate plans or ability to do so, and she walked away, downcast. Another sister with hair like the sun kept having tea with me, and we shared many stories.
Over this ocean to the West was an island or more, and peninsulas jutting further west to the north. For a look outward over the sea, I climbed up a steep rock-cliff with a loghouse on top, but the residents behaved surly and I retreated down, avoiding a glut of cars and their rubber tires rubbing the pavement into smoke and fire. I had to jump aside to avoid getting run over. I flitted northward up the coast until I came to a quay of boats and sailed west onto a strange platform at sea. We floated upon it and spent the night. But recreationalists with motorised skis kept jumping over us, sometimes landing splat on the platform while we tried to sleep. I eventually erected a tent there - similar to the one I'd laid up in in Glencolmcille Donegal in 2004 and 2010. (https://www.facebook.com/nathan.p.hillman/media_set?set=a.430408248594.199938.695643594&type=3) But I could get no sleep, and travelling Germans begged me to harbour them in my tent.
We all headed back ashore, drifting northward then west again on the south shore of Glencolmcille's peninsula. We looped around the finger until we came to Glencolmcille, where Mary O'Donnell's hostel stood on the high hilltop abandoned, and converted into a hilltop cottage lavatory and tinker's bed.
I headed for company into Glen Head Tavern where the landlady told me with goodwill,
`Careful wearing dark colours now. 'Tis a contest between all dark-haired and dark-clothed ones to knock each other cold. If you're not playin, well, just mind you might get a Ka-NOCK on the head. Careful on the road.`
I looked at my clothes and hair and realised, `I am a dark one!` Then capered up the path to the highest hilltop where Dooey Hostel once stood, and walked into the lonely lavatory. No sooner had I shut the door then a man walked in, an African.
`My friend,` I said. `You are dark as I am dark, though we are dark in different ways. Do not hurt me!`
He pulled a €10 note from his pocket, handed it to my hand and whispered,
`Take this as a sign of my peace! And in payment for interrupting you!`
I took the €10 out a backdoor onto the sheer cliff-face and looked over the 500-feet cliffs down into the sea. I ran as fast as I could back into Glen Head Tavern, €10 richer, my chest to the bar.
`You're for the pub after all?` the landlady asks. I look right and a man comes beside me and stands 20 feet high, ruddy-haired and ruddy-skinned in a ruddy-brown sweater. I nervously give the landlady my note for a drink, and she gives me *€20* in change.
`Is that enough?` she asks.
`Das reicht!` I reply, in German, because the joy of old friends and European community surged in me and I felt like leaping. `Germans say this to mean, "It's plenty!"`, I told her, and I sidle to another side of the inn. Another 20-foot donnybrooker walks inside, shot with ravenblack hair. I scamper out for a breath of stout air.
Needing some privacy again, I run at a fenced pasture, thinking how wonderful to be outdoors hidden from the eyes of priers, lookers and donnybrookers. But as I roll under the fence cables, I get entangled in the barb and nylon and fear an electric shock. `Thank goodness it's not live,` I say to myself. But once inside the pasture, I remember that Ireland is known for bulls and cattle and get too nervous. I leap over another spot of fence, only to find myself in an even narrower fenced pasture with oak-trees and oak-mast. A positively gigantic and intolerant black bull stands 50 feet away next to cows, and lowers his horns and sets straight at me!
In my dreams, quadruped bulls are my greatest enemies. His horns fly toward my ribcage and I suck in my belly and hurl down my hands upon each horn in a tight grip, arcing my body up as he heaves me upward. I fly a hundred feet through the air and land next to the Hilltop Cottage i.e. Dooey Hostel.
I bowleg my way down the wet-grass hill, crouching on the salty slick stone, till I reach the bay far below. A huge tractor ploughs the water and I hear rolling song. Every rover in Glencolmcille is on a sea-tractor, sea-boat, or sea-cattle, riding furiously in the bay while singing songs to echo in your bedroom. The Lost Fair is reinstated, as it was for the first time in 50 years in 2010 when I lived in Donegal, and now is enacted in the waters of the very ocean. The giant tractors and Clydesdales and heavy-hulled boats pull up and down the cove, ringing with the furious delight of local song.
I wake up.
I go back to sleep.
Now I'm with my father, and I tell him I've been filmed in a movie in Donegal. I set him down and begin to play for him the spools which unfold the experience of my above dream.
`Who's the protagonist?` he asks. `Are there any villains?` `Who is the forlorn woman - is she herself a Jew, a Gypsy, or one of the Dark Irish?`
I wake up and write down the dream.
