Waking into Dream

This book is a sequel to Victoria Challis, although the characters have different names and circumstances. The first book dealt with a great passion, the sequel with its aftermath. Stories have endings, but life is more persistent. People have to find their way forward after a huge experience, no matter how much it has affected them. In this case the two people who have to find a new path are Don, a tree surgeon, and Josephine (Jo), mother of three, and a deeply inward person.

The magical voices and movements of Victoria Challis are absent from this book. Instead, there is a replacement for ‘normal’ background description. The book provides almost no setting, described as physical presence. Instead, there are any number of stray conversations, chance meetings, and interruptions from radio broadcasts: the ‘background’ enters the book via the ear rather than the eye. I didn’t do this by deliberate choice, I merely noticed that the book was writing itself in that way. I was driving to the Ivanhoe post Office one morning and an ABC broadcaster made the comments on Mozart and Haydn which I have included here. As I heard them I knew that I would use them, and listened with delight. Mozart and Haydn, two men with very special minds, sensed that they would never meet again; I sensed that they would live again, for a few lines, in my book.

One morning, in the cafeteria of the Marseilles railway station, after an overnight trip from Brest, on the other side of France, I saw a photo in a newspaper someone had opened on a table not far from me. There was a young woman lying on what seemed to be a cape, and her arms were thrown out wide. There was also a lurid headline which I no longer remember. I know nothing about this young woman but she came to mind when I started writing about the Englishman, searching for his daughter, whom Don encounters on a train and at a station – Marseilles. It may seem quirky, or arbitrary, of me to make the imagined encounter happen in the spot where the instigational reminder, shall we say, had happened too, but for me this was a way of alluding to the fact that we are surrounded by others’ lives and it only needs a slight opening, or widening, of the doors of awareness and a great deal can come flooding in. Similarly, we can keep our doors of perception closed and we can thus, we think, protect ourselves. Does knowledge hurt us more than ignorance? I cannot say.

I would like to add here that both Victoria Challis and Waking into dream have on their covers paintings by Vicki Varvaressos. I am most grateful to Vicki and to Niagara Galleries, Richmond, for making this possible. Women’s awareness of other women, particularly those closest to them, is a theme of both books and something which Vicki has treated in a way that I admire.