Dream

 

It is a known fact that everyone dreams about the Queen. Dim-witted journalists looking for a story ask why we grieve for someone we’ve never met. These writers should consult their dreamlife, their fifteen volumes of dream diaries, their inner self for the last time they interviewed her in an intense five-part series sitting opposite each other on fluffball clouds, no subject off-limits. I couldn’t count the number of times the Queen has shown up in my dreams, but then I’m not counting. Sometimes I cannot remember even meeting her the next morning, which I don’t put down to brain fog, or a temporary lapse, or denial, but the simple fact that we don’t remember most of what we dream, even when it’s a very pleasant conversation about horse racing and whether to put the cream or the jam first on the scone, with the Queen, beside a teeming skateboard rink surrounded by an arrangement of some hundred gold-edged teacups and saucers. There is no reason to have a survey asking have you dreamt about the Queen, even though there have been plenty of them, especially in England, because over a brief lifetime of seventy years the chances of the Queen showing up even just once are statistically 100%. I have found her reassuring since she first entered consciousness, she keeps to the point and is always dressed appropriately and well for the occasion. Heads of state speak of her enquiring mind and innate curiosity and I can corroborate these attributes from my own subconscious world summits, as we gaze (this is in another dream) around the orangery and through its hundreds of well-fitted panes with looks of blank amazement, sipping a very pleasant Indian brew. People who know about these things say that Queen dreams signify feelings of power and being in charge, that we are leading toward some victory in our lives. I suppose that’s right. Apparently these dreams can be about channelling my female energy and well who am I to argue, with the Queen? It makes perfectly obvious sense that someone we encounter every week in some film or newspaper or novel for decades, someone who is a living dream that we but see passing by, would blur in the nicest way imaginable into our own dreams, which is why it’s always perfectly normal (why wouldn’t it be normal?) to have the Queen come around the corner of our already hectic schedule, fix us with a hard stare, tell us we must sit down and have a cuppa and scones with strawberry jam, because truly she has a number of things that need saying right now. Having covered major issues confronting all 56 Commonwealth nations in about four seconds, the Queen departs via beds of daisies saying it was good to catch up, even as a voice can be heard from another part of the house saying Wake Up Australia, you’ll be late for work.      

Queen

 

Every Sunday of my childhood we prayed “especially for thy Servant Elizabeth our Queen, that under her we may be godly and quietly governed.” These were the precise words that we expected of her governing. If the service was Matins, or Morning Prayer, then we had not only A Prayer for the Queen’s Majesty (“…so replenish her with the grace of thy Holy Spirit, that she may always incline to thy will, and walk in thy way...”) but also A Prayer for the Royal Family, in which we asked to “prosper them with all happiness.” Although we never saw these people, they were local in our minds. Their presence was formative, their likenesses known. That Monday we marched past the flag in the schoolyard, eyes right at the vital moment, having just sung ‘God Save the Queen’, the national anthem. Adult conversation took on a different tone when the subject was the Queen; it still does. Entire banks of stored knowledge could suddenly come forth, informing opinions political, social, and cultural about these English people. Contact was made via hefty pictorials that detailed every step of their lives, sitting on silken couches or meeting a foreign dignitary or riding horses through the Scottish Highlands. Sepia annuals made way for something called colorgravure. In my childhood we could see the Queen in most public buildings, her portrait squarely positioned behind post office counter or bank teller’s window or headmaster’s desk. Most commonly, though anything but commonly, it was the Queen in her wattle-yellow gown, the 1954 portrait painting by Sir William Dargie. As with any relationship of length, learning more about a person’s politics, society and culture would change the childhood impressions into formed perspectives. It was not a Prime Minister’s bouquet of “I did but see her passing by” that made me think again, but my mother’s comment of “silly old fellow!” A line had been crossed and it was he who crossed it. The slow realisation that half the suburbs of our city had names associated with the Queen’s direct ancestors started to explain the bigger meanings of power and possession. And by the time I was a young adult, the Dismissal of the elected federal government showed in hard relief the difference between the reality and fantasy of the monarchy, the peculiar balancing act of all our relationships. The closeness that we enjoyed in regard to the Queen was sustained by the established maintenance of a distance that itself is a product of time and history. We all know the story of her reign, having lived through the reign, most of us knowing no other, and while we know about the scandals and such like, it is arresting to ponder the words “godly and quietly governed”, in a world today where such virtues are needed.

Queen

Friday night and Balmoral’s glum
Staying in now the Empire’s done

Where they play the trite music
Getting in the swing, the wannabe kings.
I am the dancing queen, old and Me

Only ninety-three. Dancing queen

Feel the heat from the Exit team.

Oh dear!

               I can sign, they can knife

Having the time of their life
Ooh, see them twirl my tiny world

Into mayhem jive and strife.

Anybody could be that guy
David, Theresa, Boris or **sigh**

At any chance in the mood to dance...

Queen (April)

I talked to the Queen last night. English cottage garden inside shoulder-high red-brick wall. Awake I know about the blighted North Atlantic islands, the postcolonial Raj, star-spangled superpowers, and bullish Commonwealth outposts known as Anglosphere. This is immaterial when talking to the Queen in a dream. We sipped tea from Royal Worcester. Awake the Queen’s Birthday is in June, though she herself was born in April. It’s a couple of years since I talked to the Queen. Dreams are the only place I will ever meet her. Like being in a film, only better. I forget everything we actually said.