ABSTRACT
What is your earliest unequivocal childhood memory and how old were you at the time? And how much might that and similar events around that time have influenced your life subsequently? During the Battle of Britain, in late summer 1940, when I was 6 months old, and for the next 18 or so months, my mother and I were evacuated to a small town in North Yorkshire, Selby. For some reason she always claimed it to be the sootiest place in Britain, and I can clearly remember sitting on the floor in front of a wood fire and saying ‘why aren’t they dirty?’, referring to some newly split logs on the hearth. I also remember lying and screaming in my pram, a tall, blue coach-like vehicle with large wheels and high springs, seeing shops flash past as my mother chased and endeavoured to stop its runaway career. In a corner of our rather large garden, which my father treated as a kind of small holding, to be self-sufficient in fruit and vegetables during the war, he had built an underground bunker, similar to modern Australian fire shelters in our bush-fireprone southern states. In it there was a crude bench, some blankets and the family’s gas masks. I can still smell them now, an odd rubbery odour, and visualise their curious, black goggle-eyed shape. During nights of bombing of the docks and city of Liverpool, some 10 miles away across the River Mersey, we would take refuge in our bomb shelter. My father would take me out when the ‘All clear’ sounded, and we would gaze at the red sky as Liverpool and Birkenhead burnt. In the morning in our suburbia there would be houses or whole groups missing in adjacent streets, where German bombers had jettisoned unnecessary remaining loads before the hazardous flight back to base. And I had a recurrent nightmare in which I would be chased by a small, black plane which never quite caught up with me. I even learnt to recognise this in my sleep as a bad dream, and somehow taught myself to awaken before the plane got too close. I can still voluntarily terminate the odd, infrequent, bad dream, an ability often reported in what are nowadays recognised as lucid dreaming. Such dreams tend to be particularly vivid and memorable. 35The dreamer recognises them as dreams, and can manipulate them at will. Lucid dreams often occur with electrical activity in the brain more typically associated with alert and waking states.
