The Unicorn in the Walled Garden, The Thermal Springs are Frozen

The Unicorn in the Walled Garden

The Thermal Springs are Frozen

I’ve been having some powerful dreams again lately; ones that somehow defy the usual noodling that is the brain doing its filing. In a bid to try and understand them a bit better, I’m writing them here, and hope that the contents might resonate with others too.

First dream begins as a familiar and recurring dream that borders on the nightmare territory. I am trying to cope with an influx of people into my home that I am obliged to allow into the house and I have to offer hospitality. But they will not remain in the designated area of the living room and I begin to feel panic-stricken as the guests take huge liberties by wandering all over my home and into areas that I do not wish them to be in. Constrained by politeness, I urge and entreaty them to go back to the living room and to stay there, saying I will bring refreshments to them. In vain I try to police their incursions, and the final straw is seeing a series of people coming out of my kitchen bearing bowls heaped high with ice cream they have helped themselves to. I am standing in the hallway trying to decide what to do when someone asks me about the area behind me, which contains stairs going up into a tower. “Oh, that’s where we keep the prisoners,” I tell them before finally fleeing. I go outside into the garden to escape, having given up the attempt to protect my space, and I see the garden is an old-fashioned walled garden, somewhat wild and overgrown, with traditional features like an orchard, a kitchen garden and other such things. I feel some relief to be out of the house and away from the melee, but the relief is short-lived when I see that a unicorn is approaching me, head down so that its sharp horn is level with my heart. The initial burst of fear is over with quickly, replaced with a feeling of relief that it will all be over with finally, and I don’t mind dying like this. But as the beast comes closer, I cry out, “You cannot kill me; I am holding a baby. You cannot kill me while I am holding a baby.” I am indeed holding an infant in my arms. The dream shifts and I am inside, having taken the baby upstairs and have laid it at the door of the room where its mother is staying. The baby’s name is Flora and she really needs to go to bed.

For context, I am not “into” unicorns and this is the first time I have ever dreamed of one.

The second dream has a muddled start that I did not remember once I woke but continues thus: I am in a hotel in a very cold place. Outside is thick with snow and ice and I decide to go outside into the garden. There is a large rectangular pool almost completely lost under the ice; it looks like a sort of outside swimming pool. I know that it is fed by a spring but it seems to be completely frozen over. The ice and snow over it is frozen in a kind of wave pattern, as if the water had been rippling when intense cold descended and turned it to ice. Someone seems to tell me that this was a thermal spring and I see that a small area is emitting steam and I see that where the steam is rising is clear of ice. I want to touch the water but am afraid to, because I think it may be boiling hot, and that if I lean out too far I will fall and break the ice and then be trapped under it as it refreezes. It looks as if it has happened before as great chunks of ice are trapped in the mass of snow that has been frozen. The chunks are a beautiful shade of deep emerald and of aquamarine, like huge slabs of gem stones. I want to go round to the other side of the pool to get closer, but there is an ice bridge across and I worry it will break. Someone else crosses it ahead of me, jumping it so they put no weight on it; I take a few steps and feel the ice creak under me. I want to touch the water but I wake before I can.

There are obvious ideas about what messages these dreams hold for me, but I am struggling to understand their full import.

Psst…wanna escape from the world and into a book?

I’ve not done a Countdown offer for some years; this works by starting low (99p usually) and rising in installments. I’d opted out of the Kindle select programme that allows such promotions (for a lot of good reasons) but have tentatively enrolled Away With The Fairies again just to see what happens. It can also be borrowed if you are with the Kindle Unlimited programme; I get paid by pages read rather than by purchase if the book is borrowed.

So, here it is: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Away-Fairies-Vivienne-Tuffnell-ebook/dp/B005RDS02A/

From today it’s 99p, and goes to £1.99 in three days, before returning to its original price three days after that.

Needless to say, shares, tweets, Facebook shares and so on would be greatly appreciated, especially if you have read it already and would recommend it to others. It’s got a few new reviews recently but because of the mysterious ways Amazon works, they give greater prominence to new reviews. If you have read it and enjoyed it, more reviews can keep the book fresh and current in the weird algorithms Amazon uses. Thank you to all who have reviewed it; the overall rating is 4.6 which is pretty damn good. It’s been a Kindle bestseller several times, in a number of categories, especially in the metaphysical and visionary category.

Here’s the blurb:

Irrepressible artist Isobel has survived most things. She’s coped with everything from a sequence of miscarriages, her husband’s ordination, the birth of two small and demanding children, and finally the recent death of both her parents in a bizarre suicide pact. She’s managed to bounce back from everything so far. A sequence of domestic disasters finally signals to Isobel that perhaps things aren’t quite as rosy as she’d like. With her half of the inheritance, Isobel buys an isolated holiday cottage where she hopes to be able to catch up with some painting, as well as have the occasional holiday.
The cottage is idyllic, beautiful and inspiring, but odd things keep happening. Doors won’t stay shut, objects go missing and reappear in the wrong places and footsteps are heard when there’s no one there. One of Isobel’s new neighbours suggests that it is the fairies who are responsible, but Isobel is more than a tad sceptical: there’s not a hint of glitter or tinselly wings or magic wands.
Isobel’s inner turmoil begins to spill over into her daily life when she hits a deer while driving back from the cottage. Her family hold crisis talks, deciding that she needs to have time alone in the cottage to get over long repressed grief and to paint it out of her system. As she works at a frenetic pace, the odd happenings begin to increase until even Isobel’s rational, sceptical mind has to sit up and take notice. And that’s when she gets really scared. Up until now, her motto has been that there’s nothing in life that can’t be made better by a cup of tea and some Hob Nobs. This time it’s beginning to look like it’ll take more than even chocolate biscuits to make things better.

(I’m hoping that this offer, going on for a week, may give a boost to this book, help it reach new readers and may also boost the other novels too.)