For some strange reason, I was camping at the North Pole with my family. We were in the middle of nowhere, staying in an insulated square room with a big pane of glass replacing one of the walls so we could look outside whilst remaining cosy. It was night time, and a fierce blizzard was raging outside. Beibei had run off into the snow, and my wife and daughter had moved a bed outside and were huddled beneath the blankets whilst the snowstorm howled all around them. A news report on a small television in the corner of my room reported the threat of a mutant polar bear that was preying on tourists. It was characterised by having one green eye and one red, and was said to have a murderous appetite. Fearful of an imminent attack, I whistled for Beibei to get back inside, and then managed to convince my wife and kid to sleep indoors.
"It's not safe out there," I told them, explaining that they would either freeze to death or be eaten alive by the rogue predator. With my family back inside, I locked the door and turned up the heating, watching the white snowflakes hitting the glass wall and piling up. I had never before experienced such savage bleakness as this wilderness. The night was blacker and hollower than pitch and I cringed from it in fear, expecting to see a glowing red and green orb approaching the window at any moment. Although the polar bear never made an appearance, I spent a restless night in mortal dread. Later on, the blizzard blew itself out and we were treated to a view of the aurora borealis. It was hauntingly beautiful, a ghostly green glimmer lighting up the frozen landscape.
In the next scene, it was dusk, and I was back in England, staying at my parents' house. It was a combination between their house in Wivenhoe, my own in Cooksbridge, and also our old Newcastle house. My mother told me there were a lot of animal visitors at night, so I installed myself in the bedroom window overlooking the back garden with a pair of binoculars and began a vigil to see what would emerge. As the sun went down and the light dwindled, I thought I saw large animals moving around in the field behind the house, but I couldn't tell if they were cows or deer. Next I watched some garden birds flitting around in the branches of a tree that grew near the patio.
Besides the more common native birds, the first visitor of note was a medium-sized passerine with drab brown and grey markings. It resembled a Large Woodshrike, but later I was to learn that is was a 'falchion', named after the sword on account of its slightly curved beak shape. The bird does not exist, but in the dream it was not native to the British Isles, and as the night wore on, other exotic animals were to appear. Soon it was too dark to see anything, so I fetched a torch, and also called my daughter over to spot the animals with me. We shone the torch beneath the tree, illuminating the side of a garden fence, overgrown with branches and vines. In the dense foliage we saw round glowing eyes reflected back at us.
At first I took this to be an owl, but as the beam adjusted, it was revealed to be a monkey. There were several of them here, all medium-sized, of two different species. There were titi monkeys (exact species unidentified but either San Martins, Vieira's or Parecis) which I had initially mistaken for owls on account of their round white faces and big eyes. Their long bushy tails hung like bathrobe cords beneath where they huddled in the branches. There were slender-limbed leaf monkeys, or langurs, also unidentified but ginger in coloration and with the peaked hairstyle seen on the Francois species. They were more active than the titis, and leaped around the tree foraging for food and avoiding my torch beam. With the exception of night monkeys, all monkeys are diurnal, so seeing them here was strange.
I moved the beam to the bottom of the fence and, slumped beneath the dangling tails of the titis, was a solitary slow loris (probably Sunda). These primates are nocturnal. It remained motionless, frozen in place by the torch, its eyes shining like car headlamps. Lulu grew excited by all the different types of animals outside, but when I pointed out a shallow stream with lots of small fish swimming around, she told me that fish were boring. From my position on the windowsill, I spotted some tiny written labels on the patio, as seen in an aquarium or museum, detailing what all the species were. Even with my binos, visibility was too poor to read them properly.
We positioned ourselves at another window near the front of the house to see what else we could find. This window was on the ground floor and looked out onto a hedge bordering the driveway. First, a chestnut-coloured weasel plopped out of the hedge, wormed across the driveway, and into the neighbour's house through their letterbox. Then I saw the grey snout of a Virginia Opossum pushing through the hedge, its mouth opened wide in a whiskery snarl. No longer content with seeing these animals from inside the house, I put my coat on and ventured out into the back garden, bringing Lulu with me. At our approach, all the creatures vanished as though they had never been there at all.
I stood in the garden beneath a full moon, looking into the illuminated windows of the neighbours on both sides. On my left, an image of my early childhood. It was the bedroom of a Cooksbridge neighbour, a three year old boy. His walls were full of He-Man, Thundercats, and other eighties memorabilia - posters, banners, and toy plastic shields. To my right was my parents' neighbour's son's room, a teenager. His was lit with a green spooky glow and showed posters of Hammer Horror classics, B-movies, monsters, zombies, and all that good stuff. He was watching late night television and undergoing a formative horror education, just as I had done when I was his age. I was profoundly affected by this dream.
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