In the early sixties, when I was between marriages and grimly playing the field in London, I had an on-and-off affair with a Canadian girl. For the most part it was more off than on. We lived together for a few weeks, sometimes a few months, then we fought--or got tired of fighting--broke up and found other partners to live with. The usual routine.

After about two years of this, I had a dream. She and I were off at that point and hadn't seen each other for months. I hadn't even thought much about her since I was preoccupied with another young woman--very attractive but very elusive--who was giving me a hard time and because I, being slow to grow up and stubbornly romantic, believed that true love was always doomed and unhappy, I imagined I was in love with her.

In my dream, however, the Canadian girl and I were dancing, something we always did well together and with pleasure. We were smiling at each other; I made a joke, she laughed. And then, still dancing, I pushed her out to arm's length and looked at her. I saw that her hair was white and I realised that mine, too, was white. We're old, I thought in my dream, and we're together. And I was perfectly happy.

I woke up still happy and I couldn't understand it. I knew I found her enormously attractive, I knew I enjoyed her company, but somehow I imagined that was not enough. It was too easy, too natural, not sufficiently doomed. (I suspect she felt the same.) But the dream was telling me what I refused to know: that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her.

A few days later, I met the Canadian girl on the street and told her the dream. Soon after that, we got back together again.

We were married six months later.

SOURCE: The Tiger Garden: A Book of Writers' Dreams by Nicholas Royle, p.6
DATE: this anecdote compresses the timeline. His autobiography, Where did it All go Right?, makes it clear they dated over three years not two, 1962-65; their wedding "six months later" was 1966--no longer "the early sixties". The compression hardly invalidates his point, but it is revealing. Seems like our memories compress and flatten in time as strata do in bedrock. As the song says, "Sedimental journey..."

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