Igor Clark

This afternoon I felt rather tired and decided to take a nap, during which I had a strange, but also quite wonderful dream.

I was walking along the bank of the canal or river near my house, and I came across the boat I'd left there and forgotten about. It was the one I'd bought a long time ago, a sailing boat with elaborate rigging; it was made of a mixture of dark mahogany beams below, and pieces of chipboard with a white formica covering on some of the upper sections. It had great big strong oat-coloured canvas sails, all furled up and stored away for safe keeping, but capable of opening up and catching a good, strong wind. I'd spent a long time doing it up all on my own without telling anyone about it, and couldn't work out how I'd forgotten about it, but I realised that it didn't matter because now I'd found it again, and I was so pleased and happy and really ready to make it beautiful again. Maybe even more beautiful than before.

I'd painted the boat, and constructed a number of rooms inside it; I'd put pictures up on the walls, and I'd even climbed up the high complex of walls and sidings on the piece of land by where it was moored so that I could put out a range of big square boards I'd painted things on, to dry and harden with time. They went all the way down in location and scale, from the huge, bold, expansive ones along the tops of the buildings through to much smaller, intricate and detailed ones along the top of the boat, and all the way down to very small ones I'd left unfinished right up on the prow. So I cut the right shapes for the last few out of the wood that remained, and painted some things on them, and left them to dry. I saw that the scale wasn't always uniform across the boards; although they were all perfect squares, the ratios by which they'd been scaled, and hence the relationships between their sizes, were a bit out of whack according to convention or the way other people might have done it. At first I was a touch annoyed by this, but again I realised that it didn't matter, because they were there for me, not for other people.

I walked along the towpath next to the boat and looked at all the objects on its roof, and saw the table I'd made, or started making - it was a bit wobbly, but it could easily be fixed. The screws just weren't in very tight, and I could tighten them up. That would be no problem. Under the table were three chairs covered with a slightly faded, gold-coloured shot silk; I thought that there had been four before, but I guessed this wasn't that important, so I let it be. All of this stuff was made in slightly odd ways; other people probably wouldn't like it much, but I didn't care, because it was my boat, and it was meant for me to like and to be kitted out with things that I like.

So I sat down on the towpath and started to undo the moorings, and the boat began to move. It started forward, quite fast, and I had to hold on to it and tether it again so I could get inside and work out exactly what it was like in there. I found all these rooms, some amazingly ornate big ones mixed in with some smaller, oddly-decked-out ones, including one with a big mirror and a very old-styled telephone. There were some people on the boat, and I started looking around it with some of them, and some of them said that they were amazed at what a great boat it was, what great rooms they were, how well I'd done to build them on my own, and how good it must be for me to have such a boat to live in all by myself. I said "yeah", it was, told them how pleased I was to have found it again, thanked them, and asked one of them how he'd got there - had he just arrived or had he been there all along? Maybe he'd just come along to a party and woken up months later, or maybe he'd been squatting? (Which was fine; I didn't mind, I just wanted to find out where he'd come from.) He didn't seem to know, or perhaps I couldn't hear him - but it didn't matter, because he seemed OK, and I'd have the place to myself soon anyway.

I saw that there was a door in one of the upper rooms, a comparatively small or medium-sized room with chequered flooring; big black and white squares like the kitchen in the house next door to where I'd lived as a child. There was an old oil radiator, and the door in this room looked like the kind of door you'd have in a small terraced house; the kind which opens straight from the living room onto the street. I went straight up to it and opened it up - I wasn't scared, more just curious to know what was out there - and when I did, I found a little anteroom: the sort of cubby-hole bit of a house where you'd keep your muddy boots when you'd been out for a long walk in the fields, or to another village, and this tiny room had another door that definitely led to the outside.

This second door was painted strangely and quite darkly, and the Yale lock on it was a bit wobbly - like the table I'd made - but it was clear that it hadn't been opened for quite some time. Now I was a little worried because surely, when you're out at sea you shouldn't just be opening the door, isn't that right? There's water all around, and you might fall in. But I opened it anyway, and streaming in came the most beautiful light, calming and smooth and powerful and strong, and I realised that it was OK to have the door open, because you're going to be there for ages without anybody to direct you, and it'll be lovely to have this friendly, helpful light there, making it easier for you to find your way.

I think that was when I woke up.