Sunday 11 April 2004. I woke up in the night having had what seemed to be a deeply significant dream. I wish I could remember it all, and be sure of the order of images.
The starting-point that I can now remember is myself at the edge of a forest looking at the mass of leaves which I knew represented the whole narrative and fabric of a story, and this story turned out to be that of the writings of Tolkien. Where I stood represented almost the end of the story and the assumption I had was that everything was now resolved and tied up. But Tolkien himself was standing there and he contradicted this quite sharply. Far from being a straightforward story to finish and resolve, he said everything hung in the balance and as the writer he was tried to the extreme, and perplexed, about how it could all come right. I did not really follow his arguments very well—I felt rather foolish—but as we talked we seemed to move on to different territory both geographically and as regards topic. I think that I was asking about a new book or a new episode, and he said that he had an original and powerful new feature to introduce into the narrative.
This was immediately illustrated by a large group of children spread out and running, almost flying, across a rolling open landscape—there seemed to be birds accompanying them (were they holding on to the birds or being conveyed by the birds?). As we stood on a slight hill the children, in rows and ranks, performed a kind of impromptu dance in front of us. To the right, the dance suddenly became overenthusiastic and a whole group of children tumbled in a heap down a slope. There was some alarm, but as they picked themselves up it transpired that only one girl had been slightly hurt, and because I ‘knew’ the plot I knew that this was symbolic: this girl was to be the person through whom some bad element would enter the world of the story—the negative force which would have to be redeemed.
But this accident having brought us down into the field led to a very happy accidental discovery. Something glinted in the grass. Tolkien picked it up and I saw it. It was a small fragment of yellowish glass. With great satisfaction and suppressed excitement he said ‘Ah, then all the fragments of [some name such as the Palantíri, i.e. the ‘seeing stones’ in The Lord of the Rings] were not lost in the downfall (or destruction) of [another name, presumably of a city or civilization].’ And then he said: ‘With this fragment we may be able to rejuvenate Middle-earth’; in other words, somehow this fragment of glass would be incorporated into a magical device which would transform the whole world. As he said it I saw in my mind the end of the story, which I already ‘knew’, in which the world was transformed and filled with light and beauty. And immediately I saw the forest-story, this time as if looking down from a height so that it was spread out like a map, and I knew that before that transformation, and quite apart from the magic of that yellow glass, there would have to be a long narrative and an act of redemptive suffering in the midst of the story (‘would have to be’ or ‘was’ because I’d already read the book, it seems).
And as we were picking up the fragment of glass, dropping it again into the grass and nearly losing it, but finally having it safe, it seemed very significant in narrative terms that the tractor which was mowing the field swept by very close—another few minutes and the fragment would never have been seen.
I seemed to enquire what the story of the fragment would be before its final destiny and he said, or showed me, that it would just be owned by individuals, passed around or sitting on the mantelpiece (a little like the Ring in The Lord of the Rings), but that from time to time someone would look through the glass fragment at something and what they looked at would be transformed—a small localized transformation, yet important and remarkable in its own way. I also dreamt quite a bit about the process by which the fragment became part of the magical device, the vicissitudes and near-betrayals of this development, in which the crowd of children played an important part, but I can’t remember the details.
What seemed so significant was the way the narrator was also inside the story and himself discovered the glass fragment which he did not know had survived (and without which, it seems, the world could not be restored). And the other significant thing is this tiny piece of broken yellow glass, which it seems transformed anything you looked at through it, and which for most of the story lies about neglected and only at the end is able to have its full power.
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