Haunted Scotland by Roddy Martine

Author:Roddy Martine [Martine, Roddy]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Europe, Unexplained Phenomena, Social Science, Body; Mind & Spirit, Travel, Great Britain, Supernatural, Folklore & Mythology, History
ISBN: 9781841587400
Google: fp7wSAAACAAJ
Amazon: B008Y3WMT2
Publisher: Birlinn
Published: 2010-07-31T12:00:00+00:00

13

THE STUFF THAT DREAMS ARE MADE OF

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing,

Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before

Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Raven’ (1845)

It was well over twenty years ago that an elderly lady of my acquaintance confessed to me that in her sleep she had seen fire falling from the sky over southern Scotland. Her nightmares started in the summer of 1988, six months before Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over the small town of Lockerbie.

Dreams are common to everyone, although only occasionally do we recall their content in detail. Watch a sleeping figure while he or she is dreaming and the eyelids and mouth twitch and flicker and the eyebrows furrow. Something involuntary is taking place.

Jolyon Spence from Moulin in Perthshire was in her mid-twenties when she experienced a series of vivid dreams. ‘They always came around dawn in that half-sleep when the ghosts start to appear,’ she said.

‘I was in a car with a man at the wheel and two children in the back seats. We were all being very happy and jolly, although it was pouring with rain outside. The car was heading along some nondescript Highland road with trees on either side. I don’t remember the rain being particularly heavy but all of a sudden there was this great roaring noise and a mountain of rocks and mud came crashing down in front of us.’

Jolyon told me the nightmare repeated itself until she met her husband Ted. When they married in 1991, they stopped. Michael and Nicholas were born, and as they were growing up, she and Ted rented a house for the summer holidays at Killin in Perthshire.

‘Mike and Nick absolutely adored it,’ she recalled nostalgically. ‘They got to sail and water ski on Loch Earn and their dad took them fishing. It was lots of fun, but one evening, it was my birthday and we’d been out to dinner at a local restaurant. We were travelling back through Lochearnhead when I suddenly had this awful sensation of impending doom. I looked at the road ahead of us and it was just exactly as it had been in my dream. It was raining. Ted was cracking jokes and the boys were laughing, and before I knew what was happening, there was a massive landslide. Fortunately, my husband slammed on the brakes and we swerved into a ditch.’ Thankfully, nobody was hurt and they were not alone in their plight. Around fifty other motorists were trapped in their cars until a helicopter from RAF Kinloss arrived to fly them to safety. Heavy rain from the tropical storm Bonnie was blamed.

‘It was a horrific shock at the time, and a miracle that we weren’t all swept away,’ said Jolyon with a shudder. ‘But although I didn’t exactly realise it at the time, it’s reassuring to know I’d been forewarned, even if it was thirteen years before anything happened.’

Aside from warning, dreams can have a practical application.

Having been born and

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