...Father went to Paris to play in the amateur tennis championship of France. Frenchmen called the game jeu de paume. He took Mother of course, and Margery and Iris, Wilson and Kate; which made it all the more disappointing that he did not take me. 'We shall only be away about ten days, and you are a bit too young for Paris,' he said consolingly, and gave me a complete works of Jules Verne as a parting present, four volumes bound in brown leather.

I always disliked being told I was too young for something I thought I would enjoy doing, so Father's kindly remark stung a bit.

Had the French girl I sometimes dreamt about ever been to Paris, and if so, how old was she? I had seen her in a green velvet riding-habit when she must have been a little older than Iris [14-15]; but she was not in a city then, she was on a black horse galloping through a forest. There were several other riders with her, and some hounds which were chasing a stag.

Usually when I saw her she was younger than this, about ten or eleven. She lived in a house with a steep grey roof and faded green shutters in which most of the rooms were shut up. It was built on three sides of a courtyard which had grass growing between the cobblestone. There were no other children, but she was quite happy and had a little carriage drawn by a pair of piebald ponies which were not much larger than her enormous dog. She was allowed to drive them herself so long as she did not go near the village.

There were certain people who had recently come to the village who must never find out that she still lived in the chateau.

The night before my family came home I had a long and complicated dream about her, of which I remembered enough to know that she had been to Paris, when she was nineteen. She was only there for a few weeks, and spent them in a dungeon where she was so lonely that she tamed a rat for company. Even in the middle of the day there was only a greenish twilight, and the only time she saw the sun again was on her way to have her head cut off by the guillotine.

It might have been a terrifying dream, but oddly enough it was rather comforting; because now I knew that beheading does not hurt at all. There was only a loud thud and a feeling of falling head over heels. The next minute she was jumping over a stream to join two men who were waiting for her on the other side of it...two men whom she very much loved.

Given Grant's proven psychic dreams, and her later historical novels describing seven highly entertaining past lives, it's hard for me not to assume these melancholy recurring dreams about the French girl were far-memories too, from a life she couldn't novelize--no story to tell! Stunted by hiding, even before it was (literally) cut off.

--Chris Wayan

SOURCE: Far Memory: the Autobiography of Joan Grant, 1956 (Ariel Press reprint, 1985), pp. 30-1. PHOTO: JoanGrant.net

World Dream Bank homepage - Art gallery - New stuff - Introductory sampler, best dreams, best art - On dreamwork - Books
Indexes: Subject - Author - Date - Names - Places - Art media/styles
Titles: A - B - C - D - E - F - G - H - IJ - KL - M - NO - PQ - R - Sa-Sh - Si-Sz - T - UV - WXYZ
Email: wdreamb@yahoo.com - Catalog of art, books, CDs - Behind the Curtain: FAQs, bio, site map - Kindred sites