Anne Boleyn

I woke up this morning with a dream. It concerned the deadlines of a book the author or translator of which was a certain clever but unreliable figure called Buleyn. Book deadlines used to be a major part of my life and still occasionally if only distantly worry me. In this dream someone asks me to call Buleyn to put the pressure on. I don’t approve of this request; I suspect that bugging our author will have precisely the wrong effect. So I refuse. But in the dream the name then catches my attention. I don’t know why, but (still in the dream) it fascinates me. I repeat it to myself, with emphasis: BULL-EYN, BULL-EYN. And doing so I visualize the name in letters. Such mental efforts, needless to say, invariably wake me up—and did so this morning. But the sound remained on my mind; the letters were there too. Within a minute an  association surfaced. Anne Boleyn. This made me look up that lady’s history after my breakfast.

Morning dreams, as I call those that wake me—and the sun’s already up—usually deal with mundane matters, looking ahead. At present a book is just some slogging steps from publication in our realm, and the dream refers to an already resolved problem with one lady author. What didn’t fit here was that name.

The thought then occurred. If this was a precognitive dream—in which, alongside morning thoughts I also saw the immediate future, thus reading about Anne Boleyn—it was a very circular dream. I’d never have looked up the name had not the dream brought her to mind. But what then comes to mind is that, most likely, we might be in a detached dimension in our dreaming where Time has a character quite different from that which we experience in waking consciousness. Along with processing recent memories, I was also seeing something that was still ahead, the associations of past and future fusing. Therefore a future action produced its own cause. The proof of that is found in the dream itself where my peculiar fascination with that name resulted in my repeating it, trying to spell it. Which is, truth to tell, always an issue, for me, with that name. It is pronounced Boleen, with emphasis on the “e” sound. I prefer Bolayn, which might be spelled Bollein, as indeed that name was sometimes spelled, e.g. in the illustration of the Queen by Holbein.

Can the future act upon the past? I think it can. We are able, occasionally, to see events in this dimension from another more generous perspective. And then, as it were, one thing leads to another.