Last night, for the first time in many years, I dreamed about my late boss, the singer and musician Chris Cornell.
It turned out that everything I thought I knew was wrong. He hadn’t died at all seven years ago; there had been no sudden suicide, no loss, no pain, no grief. It had all been some kind of a misunderstanding, and here he was, arriving to play a show at a tiny restaurant just a few metres from my home in Wester Ross in the Scottish Highlands.
The fact that this restaurant has long since closed and become a private house didn’t seem to matter, either. In my dream, the building had been extended and refurbished, and a smiling Chris was setting up to play at one end of a big sunlit room, in front of a huge window overlooking the loch by which I live.
The mood was light and cheerful; the sun was out, the air was warm, and any confusion I still felt was soon brushed away like a stray hair on a sleeve. I leaned on the beechwood bar and chatted to him as though nothing had happened since last we met. For him to be playing an acoustic set in a remote rural village in Scotland was nothing to worry or wonder about at all. History had shaken itself like a wet dog in the sunshine and all my memories of death and grief and loss evaporated like dew on the grass. All was well.
I woke to the same Spring sunshine streaming through my bedroom window, but as the dream subsided and normal logic and memory reasserted control, I didn’t feel the usual conscious collapse into the everyday. Somehow, the bright sense of optimism that had suffused the dream persisted.
The fact that this morning was Easter Sunday wasn’t lost on me. Whatever our beliefs, whatever we think about the concept of Christian or pagan resurrection, it’s impossible not to feel life reasserting itself in Spring as the birds build their nests, daffodils bloom and trees explode into new leaf.
I’m not sure I believe in an afterlife, and I’ve never felt that the dead survive with their consciousness intact, or that they’re watching us. I do believe, though, that life constantly renews itself: both in the cyclical renewal of each new Spring, the replacement of what dies with new life, in the endless self-renewing creativity of the human mind.
Perhaps the resurrection of my friend in the dream was a glorious reminder that despite all the grief and horror and loss in the world, love survives. They say that no-one truly disappears as long as people still remember them. I still remember Chris, his smile, his voice, his humour, his essence, the joy he gave people through the exercise of his art, and his unearthly lightness of being. Perhaps the dream told me that it’s time for those memories to replace the nightmares that have haunted me. Life goes on. All is well.
Quick now, here, now, always
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
T. S Eliot, Little Gidding