THE SQUARE THAT MIGHT NOT EXIST

I had a dream last night about a place that might not exist. It's quite specific, which is why I suspect my brain is playing a trick.

It's a green square, on the way to somewhere else. On one side of the square is a bank with either a church or a large house at the top - it's sort of a wooded bank, tall elm trees and a dark canopy of leaves above, with a grave or a memorial of some sort about half way up. It's not an unpleasant place - kind of quiet and earthy. I definitely got the feeling that I was only passing through.

On the other side of the square is a bench, one that I must have sat on as the view is predominantly from that angle. To the left is a wooden shelter, again with a plaque to commemorate something or other - I don't know what, and then on the remaining side is the back of a large grey stone building.

I woke up absolutely convinced that I'd been there before and that the scene had woven its way out of my memory and into my dreams.

Yet when I thought about it in the cool light of day, I couldn't place it, or have any definite memory of actually being there. I tried to remember it in the shower, but I have no idea.

So, there are two possibilities I think. One is that I've dreamed it before and my subconscious memory has taken me back there; the other is that I have actually been there, that it's a real place and I've completely forgotten where it is.

The reason it's interesting is that I don't normally dream like this. The landscape of my dreams is almost always composite pictures of places from the past that I recognise - the school library that's somehow also our kitchen; an old workplace that doubles up as a swimming pool or something. It's always vague, nebulous, impossible.

This quiet little green seems too real for my brain to have invented in my sleep. Yet I can't place it.

There is a third possibility and that's that my brain has invented a place and has actually written it on to my memory. That'd be a bit like dejá-vu, where you're so tired that what you're seeing is actually being recorded as a memory in real-time. You aren't recalling it from a long time ago, your brain is tricking itself into thinking it's a memory when it's actually happening for the first time. Is it possible that my brain was doing that to me while I was asleep? Can brains do that? I had no idea mine was so clever.

Well, whatever it means, I guess it means I'm pretty tired.