In the Days of Rain by Rebecca Stott

Author:Rebecca Stott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2017-03-18T04:00:00+00:00

10

I was, I am told, the baby who cried; the baby who refused to sleep. My mother followed the instructions given to young mothers in the 1960s, which were to leave a baby to cry itself to sleep. Sometimes, she said with admiration, I’d take more than an hour to ‘go off ’, and she interpreted from this, as most mothers certainly did at that time, that my will needed to be broken.

One of my very first memories is of lying in a bed in a darkened room in our house in Goldstone Crescent in Hove. I am three or four years old. In that memory I can’t see the shape of the room or any of the furniture, but there’s a patch of wallpaper next to the bed that has come loose. I am pulling and tugging at it, curious about the colour of the wall underneath and trying not to think about the voices I am hearing.

Most nights I heard voices when I was close to falling asleep. They were near to my ear. Some muttered and heckled and harangued; others were sweet as honey. I had no control over them.

Forty-five years later, in a Cambridge college courtyard under a dark winter sky, Oliver Sacks asked me to describe them. We’d had dinner together at King’s College and had shared stories about the LSD hallucinations we’d had; we’d talked about Darwin and ghosts and about the drug-induced vision of cobalt blue Sacks had once seen. Now, at the end of the evening, I remembered the things I had seen as a child, the voices I’d heard and the monsters I saw. It always happened, I told him, when I was falling asleep or waking up.

‘Patterned and repeating shapes?’ he asked. ‘People standing by your bed? Voices with strong patterning – very distinct in sound and texture?’

‘They spoke in different languages entirely sometimes,’ I said. ‘I didn’t understand some of them.’

‘Hypnagogic and hypnopompic,’ he said, as if he diagnosed the conditions of dinner companions like this all the time. ‘They’re hallucinations that happen when you are falling asleep – hypnagogic – and when you wake up – hypnopompic.’ He’d had them too, he told me. And so had Vladimir Nabokov. He urged me to read Nabokov’s description of them in his memoir, Speak, Memory.

It’s difficult in truth to separate out the visual from the auditory hallucinations I had as I fell asleep. I saw and heard things that my brothers and parents did not seem to experience. And according to my mother, I saw things during the daytime too. She remembers rushing into the sitting room or the kitchen to find me wild-eyed and screaming, pointing at tiny bits of fluff on the floor, as if in fear of my life, as if there were monsters approaching. My howls of alarm and despair were a complete mystery to her. I don’t remember what scared me about the carpet-fluff, but I do remember the voices and the monsters I saw on the curtains in my bedroom.

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