The Black Dreams: Strange stories from Northern Ireland

Introduction

Dreaming the Black Dream

‘When I say that Belfast is dominated by a dream, I mean it in the strict psychological sense; that something inside the mind is stronger than everything outside it. Nonsense is not only stronger than sense, but stronger than the senses.’

G.K. Chesterton, Irish Impressions, 1919

Idon’t recall if I saw my first gunman in my childhood nightmares or on my childhood streets. There were plenty in both and they looked very much like each other. The things my mother warned would happen to little boys who spoke to soldiers or travelled by taxi soon happened to other people – it was frequently in the news. She was anxious about many things, and stories were her way of sharing them with me. Her warnings were partway between fairy tale and premonition, a magical act of manifestation. It became easy to believe, then, all the other stories. For example, there were devil worshippers sacrificing dogs on Black Mountain. And when it was suggested that those stories were actually planted by the military as part of British psy-ops, that was easy to believe as well. Everything was possible. I borrowed The Prophecies of Nostradamus many times from the Falls Library and was able to match each news headline with one of its vague quatrains. Fear is a function of imagination and one lives in it as fully as a dream – the same laws apply. There is something inside the mind stronger than everything outside it and physics only asserts itself on the occasions when the dream meets the reality, when bomb scare becomes bomb.

When G.K. Chesterton visited Ireland in 1919, he was surprised by the ‘sleepless’ Irish: ‘If a dream haunts them, it is rather as something that escapes them; and indeed some of their finest poetry is rather about seeking fairyland than about finding it.’ However, there was one place in Ireland where he seemed to find ‘the dream itself in possession; as one might see from afar a cloud resting on a single hill. There, a dream, at once a desire and a delusion, brooded above a whole city. That place was Belfast.’

And not just Belfast, I would say. A dream possesses all of Northern Ireland and Northern Ireland is a sort of fairyland too. It is a place of outspoken symbols and unspoken rules, where only local logic applies. Strangers finding themselves lost there may find themselves lost there. And the dreamers who inhabit the place are safe as long as they don’t wake up. They sleepwalk, sleepwork, sleepwatch, and sleepwait, living inside the mind, eyes wide shut to what is outside it.

Dreamers march along their dream streets and we get out of the way, as though their streets had as much claim to the space as ours. Walking among them, we must be conscious of their dreams and the shapes they take. There is nostalgia, for one, and there is idealism: a dreamed-of past and a dreamed-of future. There is anxiety, fear, and denial as well. It is easier to live in those fairylands than in the reality. However, the insistence of the dreamers makes their dream a reality for us too, blurring the line between the sleeping and the waking world.

And so you find yourself in a dream as well, ever ready for someone else’s dream to intrude. Even in the quiet moments, one is alert to sudden change, to a rude awakening. You are set to go from resting to racing on a hair trigger. You are full of this energy and it has to go somewhere.

I put it into monster movies, ghost stories, and fantasies – a safe place to be afraid, because, in a ghost story, something must happen. Then, when the something happens, it’s over and you are still in the library or on the sofa with the curtains drawn. The whole time, your imagination is under the bridle of a benevolent author: Poe, M.R. James, Kafka, Machen, Shelley; dream dwellers like me, funnelling their own troubled states into stories.

The landscape of their tales was a familiar one. A feeling of unease permeates the text. An expectation. But the expected thing is absent or an unexpected thing is present. There are forces you choose not to see, or can’t see, but they are perpetually in motion. There is secret knowledge, a hidden order of men or monsters at work beneath the surface: they are under the rules of fairyland; they are as real as dreams and, as such, more like life to me than the Kevin and Sadie books we read in school. They mapped out the emotional, if not the actual, geography of growing up and living here.

I am not entirely sure what to call this type of story that so fully captured my experience and imagination. Ghost story seems inadequate, as there is so rarely a ghost, even when the story purports to be from real life. When I was young, there was, reputedly, a poltergeist resident in a house in Beechmount, but one refrained from remarking on it just as you would have if a schoolmate was being raised by their grandparents or a supposed uncle.

Fairy tale is inappropriate, as it has now come to suggest a morality tale, when the fairyland I know is completely amoral. Roald Dahl wrote Tales of the Unexpected, which spoils the surprise I always thought, while the ‘weird’ of Weird Tales magazine and weird fiction is an awfully weighty adjective. These stories are light, like a mist – they cloud your vision.

The old, psychedelic annual that my mother locked in the wardrobe to curb the worst of its effects was called Tales to Tremble By. The wardrobe was obviously ineffective; the green-skinned woman who cackled against the red-purple vortex of the book’s cover was already in my head. And stayed there, long after I went to sleep. She was always there.

Really, these are dream stories. That’s what I want to call them. Dream stories, such as the dreamers tell themselves as they march the streets of their imagination. And the dream mode has always sounded in art from the northern part of Ireland, as early as the visions of St Colum Cille. The dream is present as the harbinger clowns and moons in the paintings of Gerard Dillon. The dream is there is in the plays of Stewart Parker, whether as the reminiscing ghosts of Pentecost and The Iceberg or the reveries of I’m A Dreamer, Montreal. It is there in Brian Moore. It is an escape in Owen McCafferty’s Mojo Mickybo. The young fellas of the title slide between this world and the cowboy films they love. Those fantasies of the western allow them to be heroes who can survive the Troubles. I suppose I did the same with horror films, although there are no heroes in the stories I liked.

Whether wittingly or not, Northern Ireland’s great pop tradition resides in the dreamscape of nostalgia, both potent and paralysing. What is ‘Cyprus Avenue’ but a dream of the past, a dream of a love that isn’t or never was? Nostalgia holds back Feargal Sharkey – or whoever replaced him in The Undertones – when he cannot beat teenage dreams. Even at eighteen, Tim Wheeler of Ash was looking backward, wishing to reside in the perfect summer of ‘Oh Yeah’. All looking back to a time before the trouble started. Only Stiff Little Fingers look forward to an ‘Alternative Ulster’.

The novelist Forrest Reid, Northern Ireland’s most dedicated dreamer, set his work in the space between childhood and adulthood. Having attempted suicide as a teen, afraid to grow up, afraid of his adult sexuality, he knew the allure of nostalgia and paid the price for romanticism. His stories occupy a place between the two. There are multiple dreams and Reid’s dream stories represent the ones I most easily understand: full of wonder and anxiety and uncertainty. To differentiate them from the metaphysics of C.S. Lewis or ’pataphysics of Flann O’Brien, I will borrow Robert Aickman’s term: they are ‘strange stories’; stories of in-between states, of unstable realities, of the unreliability of our understanding. It is no surprise that, like the people in Beechmount, the young Reid lived with a ghost on Mount Charles in Belfast. His story ‘Courage’ is one of the most widely-anthologised ghost stories ever written.

There have been other writers of strange stories from the north of Ireland. Forrest Reid’s young disciple, Stephen Gilbert, wrote several remarkable Ulster novels that develop and twist the traits associated with his teacher, charting a troubled relationship between the two men. In Monkeyface, a chimpanzee is brought to Belfast, where he is taught to speak and be an upstanding Ulsterman, but he dreams of running back to the jungle. In The Burnaby Experiments, a young man with no prospects is forced to share his body with his ageing, eccentric mentor. Gilbert’s final novel, published in 1968, is perhaps the most successful piece of strange fiction from Northern Ireland. Ratman’s Notebooks, an international bestseller, sees the bullied son of a dead businessman befriend a nest of rats in his garden. The maladjusted youth trains them into an army to overthrow his father’s successor at what was the family firm. It is a peculiar revenge fantasy that became the cult movie Willard and started the film franchise that gave us Michael Jackson’s paean to a pest, ‘Ben’.

Around the same time, the acclaimed children’s author Martin Waddell began his career writing for Herbert van Thal’s popular Pan Book of Horror Stories anthologies, producing numerous stories under his own name and a variety of pseudonyms. Although Waddell would employ the supernatural and the strange in his award-winning children’s books, these early stories are marked by their macabre wit and cruelty. Waddell stands apart as being the only Irish writer to have a story – ‘Whisper’ – adapted for Rod Serling’s TV show, Night Gallery.

However, the seam of strangeness in Northern Irish literature predates these writers. History hasn’t always remembered these predecessors fondly for their excursions into the weird, but, for some, it has been the saving of them. I have largely considered it my duty to seek such writers out. Mrs Charlotte Riddell of Carrickfergus was a popular, hardworking author of City of London novels. She is now better remembered for her collection Weird Stories and her much-anthologised Victorian ghost tales on Irish themes. Rosa Mulholland, born in High Street, Belfast, in 1841, is another successful author whose lengthy novels of rural Irish life have been largely forgotten, while her short, strange stories have found renewed life. A close friend of Charles Dickens, her weird tales, also frequently on Irish themes, appeared in his magazine All the Year Round alongside Wilkie Collins and J.S. Le Fanu. Frances Browne, ‘the Blind Poet of Ulster’, was best known for her collection of children’s stories, Granny’s Wonderful Chair, but published a wide variety of strange tales in the popular Victorian periodicals.

Not all such writers incorporated Irish themes into their writing, especially in the twentieth century. Frank Frankfort Moore, student at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution, pro-Union journalist, and brother-in-law to Bram Stoker, set his 1905 collection, The Other World, in Ireland, England, the Mediterranean, and the coast of Africa. Mayne Reid, son of Ballyroney, County Down, was a veteran of the American-Mexican War and set his many strange adventure stories along that southern frontier. The Headless Horseman, his best-remembered novel, was beloved by Teddy Roosevelt, Vladimir Nabokov, and Czesław Miłosz. Larne-born journalist, James M’Henry, set his Gothic novels in the forests of New England, where he immigrated in the nineteenth century, while Beatrice Grimshaw, the explorer and travel journalist, published several collections of weird tales based on her experiences in the South Seas.

The peculiarities of Ulster are rarely presented in these stories, even those with an Irish theme. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the monster and the man both find themselves shipwrecked on the ‘detested shore’ of Ireland’s north coast, where the man is tried for the monster’s crimes. The awkward geography of these scenes makes it clear that, for Shelley, Ulster was a concept of strangeness rather than an experienced reality. We might surmise that the ‘county town’ in which Victor Frankenstein faces justice is Ballyshannon in County Donegal, birthplace of Shelley’s grandmother, Elizabeth Dixon. However, that detail is no more important than if it were Carrickfergus or Coleraine. It is all the same ‘wretched country’.

Writers from the North may have been too close to represent the region’s complexities, but they were not disassociated from its political and cultural turmoil. George W. Russell, the mystic and fantasist known as Æ, is now most closely associated with Dublin and Irish nationalism, but was born and raised in Lurgan, ever ‘grateful to Providence for the mercy shown … in removing [him] from Ulster.’ The Belfast Quaker Herbert Moore Pim played his part in the Easter Rising, standing in a field in Coalisland that Easter morning, and contributing his speculative serial, ‘The Supermaniac’, to the republican magazine The Irishman. Although his strange novels take place in England, the conflicts and the idiosyncratic concerns of his homeland are evident in them: in The Man with Thirty Lives, a London dandy deals with the legacy of Catholic persecution with a time-travelling wizard; in The Pessimist, an Ulster philosopher must decide if he ends the world’s suffering by ending the world. In a life as strange as any story, Pim changed his political allegiance in 1919, becoming a vocal unionist, and spent time in a French mental hospital.

In 1921, the Professor of Celtic Languages at Queen’s University, Anglican minister F.W. O’Connell, began writing his collection of strange stories, The Fatal Move, under the pseudonym Conall Cearnach. Although, pointedly, none of the stories take place in what was then becoming Northern Ireland, that political upheaval is felt through the whole collection. In the title story, two bitter rivals, once best friends, play a fatal game of chess using a set of ancient Irish chessmen; one of them will die when they make the wrong move. In another story, sectarian conflict between the Muslims and Hindus of India leaves a legacy that haunts the combatants even after death. And, in the future imagined in ‘The Rejuvenation of Ivan Smithovitch’, where the language has been politicised out of existence, the last surviving speaker of Cockney English comes to the door of a Gaeilgeoir seeking sanctuary.

Whether consciously or unconsciously, the strange story gave O’Connell the vocabulary and techniques to convey the strangeness of the new state in which he was living. Dreams, when interpreted, tell us the emotional truth. So, there are ghosts in the plays of Stewart Parker, because the Troubles was haunted by and begets ghosts. If the weird intrudes on the post-conflict writing of Anna Burns or Jan Carson, that is because the weird was there at the time of writing. Some may call that work magic realism, but, for me, they are just strange stories. That is the vocabulary I learned.

The strangeness of the story does not have to reflect the strangeness of the place. There can be a connection with strangeness as an experience in itself. Nobody wants to hear you describe your dream, but everyone understands the feeling of a dream. The American writer W.H. Pugmire was a closeted gay Mormon who was sent on his mission in 1972. He brought the message of Joseph Smith – half-heartedly – to the people of Omagh, in the most volatile year of the Troubles. He said he spent his time dodging bullets and being bored – there were no cinemas where he could watch monster movies like he used to do at home. In a second-hand shop in the town, he found a collection containing H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Haunter of the