Upside down tree

I actually find other people’s dreams interesting, and sometimes amusing…  and occasionally I use fragments of characters’ dreams in my stories, although I never ever have incidents which turn out to be dreams, I think that is the most irritating device, and sometimes a lazy device to explain a preposterous situation a writer has written themselves into. However dreams certainly are mysterious and quite often downright weird… and many writers and artists have been inspired by their dreams.

Last night I dreamt I had a small dried piece of tree trunk, probably about five foot long, no roots, not top, the bark all long disappeared, and the ends of the branches gone. It looked as if I might have picked it up on the beach which actually is about a quarter of a mile from where we really do live. In my dream I wanted to stick it in the ground, not to plant it hoping it would grow, but for some other now forgotten reason… and that was it, that was my dream.

It made me think about an upside down tree I had really seen, not the famous baobab from Madagascar (or the couple native to Africa and Arabia or the one from Australia) but the mighty rooted trunk which had been planted upside down at Seahenge at Holme-next-the-Sea in Norfolk. I didn’t see this wonder in situ but in the museum at King’s Lynn. If you have the chance to go to King’s Lyn, you must go to the museum and see the exhibition. The tree was ‘planted’ and set in its construction about four thousand years ago, and no-one really knows why or its purpose but as you might imagine, there are hundreds of theories. It was undoubtedly a sacred and important site, revered and respected before it disappeared beneath the sea as the coastline changed and eroded. The idea of an upside down tree occurs in other mysteries and religions, including the image of an inverted banyan tree in some Buddhist texts.

My dream didn’t have any significance whatsoever… I’m sure if I really did find such a bleached and bare bit of tree I might very well think it was an attractive object, bleached by the sun and sea and carried from faraway, and I might very well bring it home, and I might want to stick it in the garden as a nice piece of natural sculpture, and I might wonder which way up to put it…