Desk-topped dream
While I slept, an image appeared which reignited a passion.
Hunched over an exercise book, I picked up my pen and began to scrawl. I loved writing stories and playing schools with my younger sister, Karina.
‘Look at this,’ I said to her later, handing her the book.
My imagination was brimming over that day, after an earlier visit to see my dad. He lived out in the countryside and had a huge garden.
In the long grass, he’d discovered the grave of a horse called Taffy. And now I’d used this as a basis for a story about how Taffy’s ghost was striving to find its way home. ‘This is great,’ said Karina.
Time passed and, after I left school and began working, my passion for writing was forced to take a back seat.
I married Paul and was consumed with family life, raising four children. But I was intrigued by vivid dreams, some very disturbing which visited me during the night. What did they mean?
I visited a medium.
‘You’re psychic,’ she said, explaining that the dreams were all part of my gift.
When the children grew older, I signed up for a writing course. Then one night, I had another vivid dream.
A bohemian lady with grey curly hair, a long, red-brown skirt and loose blouse floated before me. A shower of silver descended around me like a kaleidoscope, then the lady opened her mouth.
‘Awaken, doll,’ she instructed.
Looking down, I glimpsed a desk — a stylish, dark brown Edwardian one. A message?
When I woke, I knew exactly what the dream meant.
‘She’s telling me that I must write,’ I said to Paul.
Soon afterwards, faces and names appeared to me in a series of dreams.
Some names I already knew — David Icke and Arthur Conan Doyle — but others I’d never heard of.
Dr Marshall Klaus, a pioneer in the bonding of mothers and babies. Admiral
Byrd, an American naval explorer who’d sailed a ship to Antarctica. And many more.
‘The lady wants me to write about them,’ I told Paul.
I carried out hours of research on the faces in my dreams, and began to write. And in time…
‘Look,’ I said to Paul, pride coursing through me as I held up a book entitled Winds of Change with my name on the front. I was an author!
Soon afterwards, I felt the urge to track down an Edwardian desk.
And I found one exactly the same on an auction site for £80, just 10 miles away.
Now I relish sitting at it in my living room, tapping away on my laptop.
I’m in my first year of studying professional and creative writing at University Centre Grimsby.
I’m doing what I’ve always wanted to do — and all because of a dream about a desk!