The road from Windermere to the Kirkstone pass collapsed over the winter and is proving difficult to fix. There is an alternative from Ambleside called The Struggle, a very steep, narrow fell-road with hairpins. I've driven it many times, without difficulty. But then I don't drive a delivery van or a Range Rover.

With the main approach shut and the official diversion being a long detour via Penrith, I guessed there'd be a lot of traffic on The Struggle that shouldn't be there. And I was right. But my little car doesn't take up much room and can squeeze through gaps, when two vans or Range Rovers meeting head on cannot.

I made sure I had an early start, but still only just managed to make way among convoys of careless, and in some case frightened motorists, coming the other way. How the wide-beamed vehicles fared I can't imagine, since reverse gear seems optional these days.

It was a warm one too, our second wave of heat looming, and looking to settle in for a while. I was heading for Patterdale where I'd be setting up for a couple of days in the hotel, some light walking and some thinking in the coming days, hopefully before it became too hot to move. The valley was quiet. I even managed to park at Cow Bridge, normally full by mid-morning. But today it was half empty – the introduction of a pay and display machine perhaps being the culprit – either that or a general reduction in traffic coming over the pass.

I had in mind a short walk up Hayeswater Gill. The plan was to take my time over photographing the numerous falls along the way, a project I've had in mind for some time now. But I also wanted to locate one set of falls in particular that I remembered from way back. It was the tail end of a long walk, and I was coming down off Grey Crags, not much evidence of a path. It was a slow, ache of a descent, on aching legs, and way below I'd spied a lovely looking pool in the gill. There I'd promised myself, if I ever got off the mountain, I'd stick my feet in the cool, clear water until the aches subsided. And so I did.

I remember it as such a beautiful spot – idyllic – a splendid cascade plunging into a deep pool, crystal clear. And I remember just resting there, a feeling of utter bliss upon me, before making the last mile to the car. So, I made my way up the track to find much of the lower reaches of the gill fenced and inaccessible. And each of the falls I saw further along, that were open to access seemed difficult and some of them dangerous. Certainly, these were not the falls I saw that day coming off Grey Crag, none of them inviting of repose.

In the end I climbed the entire length of the ghyll, as far as its source in the outfall from Hayeswater. There I sat a while, feeling as if the entire landscape I'd thought I'd known had somehow shifted over the decades. But then I realised I'd also been carrying this feeling with me for a while now – this general sense of unease at the pace of change, and of an uncertain future. I also realise, I have lived much of this landscape in my head. I wrote about it intimately in my novel The Lavender and the Rose – the setting being a conflation of the valleys off Patterdale, and the remoter reaches of the Far Eastern fells, plus some that did not exist anywhere outside of imagination.

That said, I'm sure I did not imagine those falls, but like the past, like that day coming off Grey Crag, they are simply no longer assessible. The decades have erased them, reduced them in a sense to the story I'm telling now. And I realised too even the long silver arrow of Hayeswater was no longer as it was when I first encountered it, long ago. It used to be much higher, but at some point the dam at the outfall was removed, and the levels have settled back to a more natural level.

The photograph I took of the outfall was the only one to survive the cut, and a place I did not intend photographing at all. The others I deleted for one reason or another – blurred, poor composition, flat light, or simply disappointment at the apparent inaccessibility of the past. Whether that remaining photograph will one day carry the memory of place, or merely record the geography, only time will tell.

I briefly contemplated taking the higher routes back to Hartsop, over Satura Crag and the Angletarn Pikes, but that was a much longer day than I'd planned and not enough time on the ticket anyway. So I made my return the way I'd come, checked into the hotel, sat out on the green with, of all things, a leisurely pint of beer – since beer is not usually my thing.

Surrounded by the beauty of towering fell country, I fingered the maps on the phone, planning the next day's walk. But it was with a feeling the maps I've been carrying in my head are becoming increasingly unreliable for navigating the real world. Yet memory can retain an astonishing clarity our whole lives, accessible at the slightest turn of thought – the ache of a descent, the soothing shock of cold water on tired feet, the feeling of release from an intimidating mountain's grip. But it's the routes back that fail us. Roads collapse. Paths disappear among the swelling, steaming thickets of seasonal bracken. Gates, once open and inviting, we return to find locked against us.

But we keep going by whatever means come to hand, and with a growing awareness those old routes are not always reliable guides to memories of place. And by the same token, the paths we walk today may not be there tomorrow. Yet in some ways that's not important, and once followed, they can be discarded.

Memories of place seem gifted. They come to us with a feeling, with a sense of something having opened, allowing us into a more intimate relationship with our surroundings. It can be a moment of intensity, perhaps brought on by struggle or hardship, but other times that intensity comes out of nothing more than the kind of attention we bring to bear.

So, yes, although the routes we once travelled may prove unreliable, and the destinations themselves altered beyond all recognition, the moments in which a landscape once admitted us into itself remain curiously intact, long after the maps have forgotten how to get us there.

I was walking a ridge in the far eastern fells, long ago – out for the day, with only myself for company. Cloud base had dropped to around fifteen hundred feet, which meant I was passing in and out of a silvery mist with intermittent light rain. I'd disembarked from the lake steamer an hour or so earlier, and had another six miles or so of undulating hill country ahead, and only my legs to carry me.

There has always been a silent emptiness to those fells, a feeling of liminality where even the wind seems to hold its breath. The valleys are worked, and grazed but unobtrusively. There are wild deer, and dotted here and there on the fell-sides are romantic ruins, reminders of a fallen past – tumbled walls, moldering, moss grown barns. But it is an emptiness that invites connection rather than loneliness. Something comes to us more easily here.

After an hour or two of solitary walking, the attention changes. We become alert enough not to stumble, aware of the weather, its movement, its likely trend. We are aware of the line of the path and the feel of the ground beneath our boots, yet the mind is no longer occupied with the business of the everyday. Thoughts come and go neither resisted nor pursued. The rhythm of walking dissolves the hard edges between the outer and the inner landscape, which is perhaps why the hills have always attracted hermits, pilgrims and visionaries. Something in that measured movement allows another mode of seeing and being.

It was some way along the ridge I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, an attractive reedy tarn. By its shore stood a curious stone shelter, almost ornamental in appearance. And there was a man sitting beside it, perhaps another walker, resting. He seemed entirely at ease, contemplative as he gazed over the water, its surface gently rippled by raindrops and a faint breeze.

I remember no sense of surprise. Had I thought I was seeing something impossible I would surely have stopped. The scene possessed the same ordinariness as every other feature of the landscape. The reeds stirred. The shelter looked weathered, as though it had stood there for centuries. The man neither acknowledged me nor ignored me. He simply inhabited the space.

I remember thinking it would make a wonderful photograph, but I didn't want to disturb the man's quiet, so I carried on, storing away the memory, assuming I would return another day, perhaps in finer weather to get my photograph.

Was that thirty or forty years ago?

I've since walked that ridge at least half a dozen times, enough to know now there is no tarn. The maps confirm it. Modern satellite images confirm it. There was, and is, no tarn.

So the question remains: what did I see?

The rational mind approaches such puzzles with rational tools, and those tools inevitably begin by questioning the reality of experience itself. There is no evidence of it beyond my own memory. There is no photograph, no witness, no place on a map where I can point and say, "There, that's where I saw it."

The next rational step is to question the memory itself. Perhaps it was another ridge. Another walk. Perhaps I've unconsciously conflated two separate recollections. It is a perfectly reasonable explanation.

Yet I know what I experienced.

From there, other possibilities emerge. Perhaps it arose from the imagination, though not in the ordinary sense of making something up. Many traditions speak of places that appear only in passing, landscapes glimpsed once and never again. Throughout the old Celtic world there are stories of the faery, or the Good People, and of places that seem briefly to overlap with our own before withdrawing. The faery, it's often said, are glimpsed only through the corner of the eye. Perhaps it is wise not to go looking.

There was nothing remarkable about the man himself. He wore ordinary modern clothes. Memory even supplies him with a rucksack, though that detail may have been embroidered over the years.

So was the tarn real? Or did something from the imaginal world briefly intrude? Was it an hallucination? And if so, does that entirely explain it? We tend to imagine there is a sharp boundary between imagination and reality, yet our inner lives rarely respect such tidy divisions.

In the end, there is no answer that carries any material weight. There is nothing to prove, and nothing much would change if proof were possible. A solitary walker, on a lonely ridge in poor weather, saw something that was later not there anymore. But, for a time, the mystery troubled me. I sought an explanation, and in the seeking realised I had diminished the experience itself. These days I still think about that tarn. I thought about it again when I walked the ridge recently. But now it seems less important that I solve the puzzle, than to simply remember it. And be comfortable in the remembering.

In this way we resist collapsing the tension of opposites: resist the urge to reduce experience into certainties, whether by dismissing such encounters as fantasy, or insisting upon them as supernatural fact. Some memories do not require explanation, only that we carry them. They remain alive precisely because they continue to inhabit that fertile ground between what we know and what we cannot explain.

The tarn has never returned. Yet, in another sense, it will always be there. And I think therein lies the only clue – that none of this means anything to anyone else.

We are increasingly uncomfortable with things that refuse any form of classification. They must either be debunked or believed in. One must either be rational or credulous. But perhaps these are not the only choices. Another possibility arises: to leave them exactly where they arise, neither peddled as supernatural, nor dismissed as an aberration. Better, I think, to allow them simply to remain what they are – an interruption, a slight unevenness in the regular weave of the world.

If I had got my photograph that day, all I would have had is a photograph. Had I returned years after to find the tarn still there, long marked on the map, it would just have been a reedy tarn I had once passed, and thought nothing of again. Or more likely, in its ordinariness, I would have forgotten it.

So, Theseus, son of Aegeus, legendary King of Athens, accepts the challenge in order to rid Athens of this menace. In the process, he wins the affections of Minos's daughter, the princess Ariadne. It's she who comes up with the plan of spooling out a ball of thread and, since Theseus is confident he can kill the beast, all he has to do then is follow the thread back out, to escape the labyrinth.

On his triumphant return from Crete, Theseus is supposed to display a white sail on his ship, so his father will know of the victory ahead of time. But Theseus forgets, and his father, Aegeus, thinking his son has perished, is so stricken with grief he jumps from a cliff into the sea, which, thereafter, becomes known as the Aegean. It's a bitter-sweet story then — positive in one sense but also cautionary, and in a way that's more haunting than explicit. And it suggests already this is a story about two opposed relationships to memory, one that forgets and one that doesn't — and everything that follows from each.

But then there's more to the story we were told as children. The first missing element is the genesis of the monster, which begins with a case of breathtaking hubris. King Minos wants to win favour with the god Poseidon, so he's sent a beautiful bull and told to sacrifice it in Poseidon's honour. But Minos is so taken with the bull, he decides to keep it, and breed from it instead, so he substitutes another in its place. But you can never cheat the gods. Indeed they know what you're going to do before you do it yourself, so Poseidon punishes him by having his wife, Pasiphaë, cursed into desiring the bull. Thus through a perversion of desire, the Minotaur is born.

In order to contain this monstrosity, Minos has his master-architect Daedalus create a labyrinth and places the monster at its centre. But is this because the monster is so fearsome, it cannot be contained any other way? Or does Minos merely wish to cover up the shameful nature of its birth, and his own dishonourable role in it? The labyrinth by now is beginning to look less like architecture, and more like fate — Minos's fate, but also ours collectively, since he now demands the eternal sacrifice of our innocence, our youth and therefore our future.

Then we come to Ariadne, saviour of Theseus. We forget she is the sister of the monster, related in blood, and of the house that created it. Therefore in some ways she is part of the corruption at the heart of her father's kingdom. And then we come to the thread. It's such a simple solution, you'd think, someone else might have thought of it. So, we are not to read the thread literally, but metaphorically. And if we do so, the thread becomes symbolic more generally of memory acting as saviour to the hero. What else must Theseus not forget in his battle with the monster? Can it be that he should avoid the fate of becoming a monster himself?

So, Theseus kills the Minotaur and sails home in triumph. Some versions of the myth have him taking Ariadne with him, and they make a romance out of it. But other versions have him calling at the island of Naxos on the way. Here poor Ariadne falls asleep on the beach, and Theseus sails off without her. He abandons her — or, in the versions that read the gods' hand in it, Ariadne's fate was simply never to act as consort to a mere mortal.

Naxos just happens to be strongly associated with the cult of Dionysus, god of revelry and ecstatic abandonment. Sure enough Dionysus sweeps her away, and she becomes consort to the gods instead. She is granted immortality, while the hero, still buzzing with his victory, sails home to Athens and the perpetual tragedy that is the fate of men. Ariadne's thread was able to save him once, but without her protection of remembering, it's inevitable he's going to forget the sail. He will inherit his father's kingdom, ensnared by a fate that is apparently not of his own choosing, yet inevitable all the same.

The labyrinth, then, is more than architecture; its walls conceal both the monster within, and the consequences of hubris — a confusion of ever-branching paths that represent the proliferating patterns of shame, secrecy, and inherited corruption. To enter such a maze is to confront the inescapable — not only the Minotaur at its heart, but also the structures that generate such monstrosity in the first place.

And here lies Ariadne's most subtle, yet profound power: I see her as the poet's princess, the preserver of memory, and orientation. While Theseus battles the monstrous, and risks succumbing to mortal fallibility, Ariadne ensures the thread endures — the thread as narrative, as conscience, and continuity. She transforms the labyrinth from a trap into a story, a myth, a poem, in which human action, memory, and wisdom can navigate fate without being consumed by it. She does not fight the Minotaur herself; she protects the possibility of return.

And it's her union with Dionysus that marks the ultimate recognition of this power. Unlike the warrior, she does not confront the monster directly, but it's her wisdom and memory that allows the labyrinth to be navigated at all. In then being swept into the divine sphere of Dionysus — god of ecstasy, transformation, and the dissolution of ordinary boundaries — Ariadne embodies one whose insight moves beyond mortal limitation, and whose gift preserves orientation, conscience, and culture. Where Theseus's triumph is fleeting and human, Ariadne's thread endures eternally in the realm of imagination and myth, reminding us that the true work of memory and guidance lies closer to the gods than to men.

Myths can appear strange and incomprehensible at a first telling. But their strangeness is the hook and the line that reels us in. And as we get to know the stories better, the more we realise the depths of insight the original tellers of these stories possessed — insight that makes it easy to imagine these tales did not come from mortal minds at all, but arrived, like Ariadne's own gift, as dreams.

Not a thing,

not a charm of words

spoke plain, spoke clear,

or hidden in a secret book.

Nor can it be whispered

by a guru, into an adept's ear...

It is more something we inhabit, in the sense of simply living. There are levels to it, of course, some people are quite content to live at the very surface of their being – to pay the notion of 'meaning' no heed whatsoever. Others are driven to enquire more deeply into things, while the truly spiritual, the adepts of the mystical traditions, perhaps, approach the deepest layers of all. This is the idea I'm circling here, that we discover meaning not in revelation, or in a secret teaching, or at least we only do so to the extent that the revelation, the teaching, is that meaning only manifests in our relation, both to others and to the world.

There is a dream-like quality to all of this. Sometimes we wake, only vaguely aware we have dreamed. We search our memory for slight traces, like catching the tails of shy creatures. But, once held, and gently, up they come, and the dream unfolds into memory. And so it is with meaning. It is the remembering of a deeper relationship. But such slender threads require a certain sensitivity of vision, a sensitivity for the connections by which we enter into that deeper relationship. Then the world is laid over with imagination, and the sense of meaning colours all things in more vivid tones.

But our sense of meaning is not a constant companion. More often we catch only glimpses of it in the day to day. At other times the world will seem flat and grey, like the Monday morning commute after a long holiday in the sun. Only certain states of mind will allow us to enter into deeper relationship. This begins I find, with opening oneself to the possibility. Also, if I dream of something, and carry that image with me throughout the day, treat it, at least as a phenomenon, with a certain seriousness, I feel relationship deepens. But this is not to say we understand anything in any greater detail, let alone the nature of reality. Indeed, all things remain mysterious, or even more mysterious than before.

To inhabit meaning, we seek understanding no more than we do when pulling on a comfortable old coat. The coat fits, we settle into it, we navigate our reality with a greater certitude, a greater confidence for the security against the elements it provides. Or, like in human friendship, we do not seek to understand its nature, or the genesis of our connection, but only draw strength and completeness from that sense of meaningful relationship. Such things are elusive to analysis, yet we pursue them anyway, perhaps because even the search for meaning is itself another facet of meaning in disguise.

Having then established at least a notion of what meaning might be, we realise what we are left with is reality. The two exist in relationship, reality being in a sense the stage on which meaning is enacted. So yes, while they are in a sense conflated, and confusion is understandable, we must be careful not to mistake the one for the other. But it is also true our moments of heightened meaning also grant clues as to the possible nature of the reality we inhabit.

For centuries now, and especially in western culture, the light of a life's meaning has gradually dimmed in exchange for the metaphysical assumption our world, our universe is entirely material in nature. In such a world as this, imagination becomes downgraded as merely a source of fiction, rather than being itself a means of sensing and intuiting the nature of reality. Yet it is through the agency of our interiority, our imaginations, humans can achieve, at times, their sense of greatest connection, moments of a profound deepening of our relationship with reality.

A recurring insight reported by adepts of many traditions is that of a fundamental misunderstanding regarding the concept of material reality, and our apparent separateness from it. On the one hand this separateness seems a sensible position to take. From birth, we are aware of our own private interiority – our thoughts, our feelings, our memories, things to which no one else has access unless we choose to share them. And then there is the world, the sensed reality – seen, touched, heard, and smelled. Our senses bring that world into our personal awareness. But then there are also these rare, yet widely reported moments, when the inside/outside barrier appears to dissolve. With it comes an insight that the world, the universe, is itself an interiority – or rather that self and universe are aspects of the same greater interiority, that reality is in essence imaginal.

Perhaps, then, we should think more of the meaning of life, and the nature of reality as companions. The discovery of meaning is not the explanation of reality, nor reality the explanation of meaning. One belongs to the way we inhabit the world; the other to the mystery we abide in. Yet by attending carefully to dreams, to imagination, to those moments when relationship deepens beyond the merely functional, we may discover that each illuminates the other in ways that deepen our relationship with the mystery of both the universe and our own selves.

Will we ever understand either completely? For all the keenness of our enquiry, perhaps that isn't the point, that it is enough to live as though the world were deeper than it appears, and allow its mystery to continue unfolding within us.

I dreamed I was in a crowd, all of us pressed against an iron railing. Some unspecified event was taking place beyond my sight, beyond my knowing. It didn’t seem especially important; it was just noise at the edge of awareness. More immediate was the rain.

It was coming down hard.

I unfurled my umbrella, but it was broken, trampled by the crowd who seemed febrile, unsettled by whatever they were watching or about to witness. The frame protruded like skeletal fingers, the fabric torn and flapping in the wind. Still, it was a large umbrella, and it managed to keep the worst of the rain off.

Beside me stood a woman, cold, shivering. I didn’t know her, but I shifted the umbrella to cover us both. She responded by inching a little closer, until our elbows touched. We did not speak. Just stood there together, strangers in the rain, observing. No longer quite separate.

It would be easy to read this in a Jungian way and speak of the unknown woman as anima figure, the soul-image, an encounter with the inner feminine. But that isn’t really where the dream was heading for me, and not quite what I want to talk about here. I want to talk about dreams and dreaming, not as puzzles to be solved or messages to be decoded, but as something far stranger and more neglected.

It always surprises me how casually dreaming is dismissed in Western culture. Along with so many basic psychical functions, it is treated as marginal, as if it were a kind of internal waste product, a processor of day-residues. Also, I often hear people say, quite sincerely: I don’t dream. Never have.

But this isn’t true. We all dream. Every night. More than that, I suspect we are always present in relation to dreaming, even when we're awake – it's simply that waking consciousness no longer has access to it.

Then comes sleep, and we are invited back into an ongoing inner life: unscripted, ad-libbed, timeless. A dimension without length or mass, yet somehow entirely real in its own mode. And on waking, it slips away again so easily we begin to doubt it was ever there at all.

Our first concern is the day ahead, the demands of the literal world. We rarely pause at that first threshold of waking to ask what has just happened, what we have just been part of. The dream dissolves like mist before our eyes.

My own approach to dreams has changed over the years. I am less inclined now to treat them as encrypted guidance for waking life. Waking life belongs to egoic navigation – necessary, bounded and practical. But the personality is bigger than that. It includes unconscious and imaginal dimensions that modern secular language has lost touch with and is even hostile toward.

We become, by degrees, hollowed out into something merely functional. But we are not only functional beings.

In certain traditions—both Freudian and Jungian—we are encouraged to make associations: what does the umbrella mean, the railings, the rain, the unknown woman? And sometimes something does indeed click into place. But I am less convinced now this is the most important question.

My dream journal is now a quarter-century deep. Meanings proliferate. Patterns recur, fold back on themselves, multiply like kaleidoscopic reflections. One can end up with a forest so dense with interpretation that the original image is lost entirely. The dream becomes merely a commentary on itself.

Perhaps, then, we should begin somewhere else. What if we simply stay with the images as they are given? What if I am simply at some iron railings in a hard rain, holding a broken umbrella, and beside me is a woman I do not know, and there is no further agenda than this shared proximity?

There is something here that is not interpretation but more an experience: a restoration of dignity, a small act of shelter, an almost imperceptible movement toward nearness. The images carry their own intelligence, if we do not rush to extract it from them. Like shy birds, they should not be approached too directly.

It does not necessarily mean they “mean” something in the way waking life demands meaning.

And yet something remains.

A poem comes out of it, not by way of explanation, but as an extension of the dream:

A Broken Umbrella

So here we are, eh?

Pressed up against the rails

waiting for the main feature to start,

though, yes, it might already have begun.

Hard to tell now, isn’t it?

I mean the signal from the noise.

Then that hard rain hammering down

and my umbrella, sadly broken,

trodden into rags by this careless crowd.

Yet still, I raise it, click the button,

and it unfolds bravely, for all its wounds,

still big enough, I’d say

to restore a little faded dignity.

And you there at my elbow,

shivering and unsure,

might you not inch a little closer?

It’s true, what I have lacks perfection,

but what little it is, it pleases me

to share with you.

And still there is the feeling, not explained, but at least explored.

In older times such things might have been carried in printed form. Now they drift through our blogs, social media fragments, transmissions—dispatches from somewhere not entirely located in waking life.

There is such richness in dream imagery that it seems almost a kind of cultural failure to ignore it so completely. At times it feels like hubris: to assume that what arrives in sleep is insignificant simply because it does not serve waking utility.

Other cultures have not always thought this way. In some, dreaming and waking are not cleanly separated. Western modernity once dismissed this as primitive confusion. Yet it may be closer to a more integrated form of perception than we are willing to admit. Perhaps the deepest mistake, though, is not dismissal but appropriation: treating dreams as if they are simply messages for the waking ego.

A better question might be simpler and far stranger:

Where have I been?

Not “I” in the narrow sense, but the wider field of what I truly am.

It may be that dreams are not explanations at all, but temporary residencies in another mode of being. Not symbols to decode, but places we have actually visited, in whatever way “place” can be said to exist there.

We are not outside the dream looking in. We are inside it, implicated, belonging there. And like any journey worth taking, it alters us – not because we understand it, but because we have been there.

Something happens in dreams that no analysis quite reaches. Figures look back at us. Places feel true. Encounters carry weight. And the dream does not explain itself. It simply meets us half way.

And if I trust anything dreams offer, it is this: that life is larger than its explanations. That we are not defined purely by our waking identities. That existence is not confined to function, to transaction, and utility.

And perhaps this is why our dreams sometimes embarrass us. They do not serve us. They do not justify themselves. They refuse productivity. They belong to another economy altogether: one of image, atmosphere, and gesture.

They return us, night after night, to the sense that kindness is not meaningless simply because it is not rewarded; that shelter matters even when it is imperfect; that standing beside a stranger in the rain and offering what protection you can is not nothing.

There is honour in it.

So tonight, when sleep comes and the world withdraws, and you dream... do not begin by asking what it means. Ask, instead, what has just been lived.

And then, perhaps, let it be.

It was after ten-thirty pm, a still summer's evening, the sky not yet dark enough for stars. I was sitting out at the garden table, by lantern light. The bat that roosts in my eaves was hunting the bounds of the garden, and was my only company – the slight rustling of its wings the only sound, and the day at last cooling after one of the hottest of the year, the air at last loosening. We marvel at the bat, at its agility, creating a universe from reflected sound, navigating in ways we cannot imagine.

I glanced up and suddenly there, emerging from behind clouds, was the moon. Low in the west, it rode a shallow ecliptic towards its setting. It was like a sickle, or a bull's horns. And riding the upper horn was a lone pin-prick of steady light – the planet Venus. Just below, a little further along the ecliptic another prick of light – Jupiter.

Of Venus, I once wrote:

...holder of our soul's desire:

The treasure of reunion,

With what was lost

In exchange for life,

And which we seek in love,

In beauty, and in spirit forms.

And of Jupiter:

Seeker of the Sovereign Self,

Amid a vale of illusion.

Revealer of purpose, through vision,

Through pattern in the primordial chaos.

...the symbols of all meaning.

Snatches from a tone poem on the mythic, on the planets as archetypes, and the moon of course, that great vessel of dreams, galleon of the night.

Mother Moon, first gate

On the inward path.

You offer glimpses

Of self-reflection,

And tender pulse of feeling,

In the dark night of the soul.

I watched its slow ride, until a spill of cloud – honey coloured against the deepening azure of night – obscured it. Then I went to bed. But in the sleeping, there arose a dreaming, and it was of that same crescent moon, with Venus riding the upper horn, and Jupiter leading the descent. And then the night came on proper, and the stars shone, but with an intensity only dreams can deliver.

It was a blaze of stars, and then a line of aeroplanes, like migrating birds, nose to tail, strung out in a line. They formed a river, crossing from one horizon to the other, and each cartoonified like those little symbols on a flight radar map. It was an entire people, the whole world in motion, all heading in the same direction.

But there was something lonely about each of those symbols, and I woke with the impression of a narrow fuselage and an oblivion to the breadth and beauty, and the sheer numinous radiance of the starry night through which the people flew. Or rather their view, their perspective, was restricted by the severe vignette of their narrow, slot-shaped windows. And as I pondered the dream, the windows became our phones, and the vignette was a closing down of our vision, so that we each lived in our own universe, unable to understand the language, the perspective, the pain or the joys of one another, even though we are all heading the same way.

As I thought back on the dream, it was unclear where the dream had begun, and the reality of the crescent moon, and the bat, and the cool of a summer's night, had left off. They had merged into one mythic image. And I wrote:

Venus rides the moon,

gentle upon this tide of dreams,

while Jupiter leads,

and the world in flight

going the other way.

Because that was the other observation, that the motion of the moon was from left to right, and the migration of souls was a juxtaposition – the mythic, the symbolic, moving in one direction, unseen but for me, and the whole the world moving in the other. But this was not a judgement, for I've found dreams never accuse. It was more an invitation to enquiry, to run the dream through the mind and to see what thoughts arose from it.

Of course, I was not the only person to have watched the moon that night, perhaps not even the only one to have set sail into their dreams, launched upon that mythic imagery. But that was the story the dreaming told, and certainly it was that sense of isolation I woke with – and the question too: was it worth spending time teasing meaning from those images, and making an accounting of them, when such poetry does not even touch the sides, when a crazy cat video will garner a million clicks.

In other words: what does it profit the obscure thought in an age of memes?

But I've thought, and surfed the tide, and had the dream tease me this way and that, and I've written an account of it anyway. Indeed, I have written several accounts of it, merged them into the novel I'm writing, and which I may never finish. And I've made an accounting of it here because it is a growing theme in my thinking, and a question: how can we read the world mythically, and orient ourselves by it?

It may not make any more sense than it did before – at least not in words. But the images become slender threads, leading into a deeper dreaming of interconnection, one in which beauty becomes not merely observed, but strangely intimate...

So many of us are engaged in a search for meaning, without knowing what that looks or feels like. We mistake it for affirmation, for status perhaps, but these things are fleeting, the connections fragile, breaking away at the slightest jolt of reality. But if we can take a moment to attend to images, to dreams, even if such attention appears irrelevant in the greater cultural milieu, there I think we find our direction, our tender pulse of feeling.

Things have always been this way, but online writing has rendered the phenomenon almost inescapable. The platforms on which we publish shape the terms of engagement. We provide the labour and the content, original and often free of charge, while they own the means of presentation. It can begin to feel, at times, like a feudal arrangement: the writer as a kind of medieval peasant with literary pretensions, labouring in the hope of one day owning the farm.

But this is rarely about money. What the writer wants is recognition – not fame, exactly, but more a feeling of wanting our work to come back to us, reflected in another's eyes. This is not vanity. It is more simply the need to have one's existence substantiated by another consciousness. The online economy is tuned to exploit this need, offering us breadcrumbs of recognition – likes, shares, follower counts – while delivering very little of the actual psychological connection we imagine we require.

So the crisis, when it arrives, is not: "I didn't get rich." It is closer to: "I poured myself out, and nothing came back."

This is about soul-hunger, and it requires soul-level thinking if we are to explore it properly.

I have often described the act of writing as alchemical. The essay, the poem, the story – though we seek an audience – are works whose real product is the psychological transformation of the writer. If a reader is moved as well, then all the better, but the inner transformation is the point. It's not that any particular piece alone is going to provide a Eureka moment – it's more a gradual process, over years or decades.

Yet there is a difference between discovering this through experience and adopting it as a consolation in the face of disappointment. The idea can be true, and still be used defensively to cover up our suffering.

The writer craves recognition and then constructs elaborate justifications for writing. Yet these too can become another form of craving. And yet the dissolution of this craving self does not feel like the right answer either. Archetypal psychology would also refuse such a settling out of the personality — it has no interest in curing us of our complexes or delivering us into some imagined untroubled Nirvana. Instead, it suggests that it is not vanity to ask what a life means, provided we understand that the question arises from the soul. What does this experience of life – these dreams, these obsessions, this body of work – mean?

The materialist answer is that it means nothing unless you have become a name and earned at least a living by it. But that is only a materialist response to a non-material question. For meaning to exist at all, the question must be lived internally. And the psyche, in my experience, then offers its own enigmatic confirmations.

I've been circling this question again recently, as I periodically do, and in response I dreamed I boarded an old British coaster – an unglamorous working vessel that stays close to shore and knows particular coastlines intimately. The ship had held its departure for me, by name. The captain assigned me a role: journalist, world-facing. That image has stayed with me because it is so precisely not the Romantic version of the writing vocation. Not the poet on the mountaintop, not the mystic in the cave, but a journalist on a working vessel, calling into familiar ports, witnessing and recording as the ship goes about its business. The journalist files his copy and moves on.

Then, in a later dream, a mercurial figure – Mercury as psychopomp – made me promise never to go to Russia. In the logic of the dream, this was not meant in a literal way. Russia represented a seductive elsewhere, a place imagined as more authentic and more aligned with deeper values than the life one has actually been assigned.

The moment the writer decides the world as it is cannot recognise what he is doing – and that true recognition exists elsewhere among some imagined audience of the spiritually attuned – he has, metaphorically, gone to Russia. He has abandoned ship. And the real work stops.

My promise to Mercury then feels like a psychological injunction: that value must be internally generated. Our orientation remains outward – world-facing, audience-facing – but without expectation. The abiding fantasy of a truer "elsewhere" is the danger.

Finally, a third dream completed the sequence, and with a note of dry humour. I was pushing a rail-trolley from a platform around a circular track, labouring unseen while others enjoyed the ride. The image was unusually explicit: a track leading nowhere but back to its starting point, my efforts benefiting only those who owned the platform. Then came an awards ceremony, with dignitaries distributing praise they did not seem worthy to give.

Then came a shift in perception: I realised I was not performing for them at all.

My mother was in the audience – perhaps as a symbol of ancestry and tradition, the long line of those who have written and dreamed, attempting to articulate something true. It was for her that I had put on a decent suit and done my best. Not for the dignitaries, not for the platform, not for the apparatus surrounding the work.

This was the dream's resolution – or at least my reading of it. Not the dissolution of the desire to be recognised (for the suit still matters), but a reorientation of who the recognition is for. The craft must be honoured. The presentation must be tidy. But the real audience is not external, contemporary, and fleeting. It is interior, ancestral, and enduring.

The commission on the coaster, the promise to Mercury, the track to nowhere, and the figure of my mother – each image addresses, in its own way, the same question: who, in truth, are we working or writing or even living for?

We dress well. We do the work properly. We honour the craft – for the work itself, for the tradition, for the ancestral witness that persists whether or not the world responds to it. And the alchemy, if it occurs, occurs there.

Writing as alchemy, then, is not a consolation we construct to manage disappointment. It is a description of something that happens when the work is done faithfully, and the demand for something in return is held, however imperfectly, at bay.

I remain grateful for the connections I have made over the years of writing online. But I am also reminded how long it can take for anything resembling even modest traction to take hold.

But perhaps that's the point. The writing that survives the silences, the work done in the small hours that no one reads, that nevertheless changes something in us – that is the only part that can be relied upon to remain true. We all know those moments and we should hold them gently, as the only parts that can be protected.

In writing this piece I am trying to put my thoughts into some sort of order. Unlike code, they do not run in a straight line, nor do they loop with algorithmic predictability. A snapshot of my thoughts, a removal of context, would reveal something of a random pattern, or perhaps more fractal. Only in motion do they suggest a direction – points of departure identified in retrospect, destination as yet unknown.

They are occupied by many things, usually destinations of deep introspection – away with the fairies some might say – though of late more corporeal matters have begun to assert themselves. These I press aside for now. They tend to pull down a veil upon the inner life, seek to deny us access. If they have a virtue, it is in reminding us it is not our place to escape life. The world, life, nature, presents many challenges and our place is to face them. It is to remain – as my dreams keep telling me – world facing, not to seek solace in the company of Astraea, among the stars.

I don't know where this piece is going yet, nor if mention of Astraea will help or hinder us, but I find her among my thoughts, so she earns her place at least as a concept to be reckoned with. Last of the immortals to walk the earth at the close of the mythic Golden Age, she despaired of a growing corruption, and withdrew. She becomes then the embodiment of our own temptation to withdraw, to leave the world to its ills, unplug from our phones, our media, and retreat ever deeper into ourselves. But then Astraea startles us with the declaration that she refuses all followers.

Then we have the title of this piece which comes from a short story I've just pulled from submission. I've used it instead as a kind of metaphorical dust-jacket around a lifetime of other short fictions, and placed it deep in the book-lined labyrinth that is the Internet Archive. There may be some clues there – a kind of Astraean withdrawal, certainly – I don't know. Or maybe a clue...

What is it about? Well, a man falls asleep each night and dreams the same dream, of catching the night train, riding it to destinations of labyrinthine allegory. There are guides, archetypes to encounter, but, like the mystery of one's own interior, one's own inner labyrinth, only we can judge the message from the noise. That's the gist of the story, but does it mean anything here? And what can it possibly mean to you?

Then there's artificial intelligence – not so strange a companion to dreams and myths as it first appears. Machines can now invent and tell stories with great fluency. But if stories themselves can be engineered from a prompt, are we not forced to ask where the value of a story really lies? Is it not in the product itself, perhaps, but more in the life from which it arises? Has our technology finally confronted us with the ghost of our own forgotten sense of being?

Knowing a story to have been written by AI, we might comfortably sneer at it. To engineer such a thing from a prompt, will produce a story, but it will not produce a writer, no more than cheating at chess with a computer will make you a chess-player. In a material world, one that carries no inherent sense of its own values, this might not matter any more, since value becomes whatever is written down. But not all that is written makes sense. Not all that is written speaks for the human.

So, Astraea, the night train, AI. What else is circling in my thoughts? Ah, yes... Ariadne – she of the slender thread, the thread that guides the hero from the labyrinth. Such a rich myth... and deeply fertile for the imagination to ponder. Slender Threads is also the title of my latest novel in progress, a work of dreams, of imagination, and of a life lived in search of its own meaning, rather like this essay: the meaning, the purpose, of the Romantic in an age of barbarism, in an Ovidian age of iron.

This is the very thing that proved the last straw for Astraea, who took with her that inherent knowledge, the instinct which allowed all beings to thrive in harmony and without the written law – a time when both gods and men still walked the earth. It's a myth, an ideal – its opposite being barbarism. And in the middle we have the poet, the writer – holding the tension, but without any apparent means of resolving it.

Since we're aiming at not much more than a thousand words here, it may be that a resolution of such matters is a little over-ambitious, and what we should be looking for instead is more an indication of direction, not just for ourselves, but for the reader who has followed us along this far, with at least some hope of a punch-line. But what seems to be forming, clarifying if you like, is more the image of a role. And it is not heroic.

It's true, not all of us are born to the role of hero. But that's okay. We are blessed in not being short of heroes – they who willingly enter the labyrinth of injustice and do battle with monsters. But without that thread to lead them back, they might slay the monsters but end up lost, or worse, run the risk of becoming monsters themselves.

We Romantics then, we are each of us Ariadne's children, spooling out the slender thread, travelling the night trains of dream and imagination. And what we bring back, what we try to maintain within the collective imagination of the culture, is that Astraean sense of what is right. These are the incorruptible rules that determine the relations between the gods and men, and which do not need writing down.

No, we cannot follow her, but we can maintain her memory, remain proxy to her influence, spooling out the threads, weaving them through an age grown so complex it no longer remembers why it entered the labyrinth in the first place.

I treat dreams as an extension of waking life, treat the situations and the characters I encounter, as if they do in fact mean something. This is not to say they do, or that they prove anything. It's more that I simply allow myself to live as if they do, and in doing so, this lends a certain glamour to life.

I'm not sure if I like the word "analysis", though in some sense, remembering and pondering our dreams is inevitably a form of self-analysis. At one level I think they offer a window on the unconscious mind, giving symbolic hints regarding the issues currently occupying it – evidence therefore of a cognitive processing of personal significance that goes on without our direct awareness. But I've also noticed how our dreams also seem to know when they're being attended to, and will modify the images they deliver, the stories they tell, almost in a spirit of cooperation. If we're careful then, this allows us a window of opportunity for a deeper dialogue.

There seems to be an intent, a direction in which the dreams are drawing us. We notice this over a period of many years – not so much in the actual circumstances of our lives, but our psychological disposition, namely the relationship between ego and unconscious.

This is what the Jungian analysts might describe as a process of individuation, a balancing out of the psyche, a state where the egoic mind and the unconscious, begin to work more in harmony than in opposition. The process involves a study of one's dreams and a search for resonant associations. But as lay dreamers, I think we need to be careful with the word "process", and avoid making a quest out of it.

I see establishing a relationship with dreams less as a self development goal, one that moves through various levels of awareness, with a clear end-state, and more as a slow deepening, a softening, which is a thing that has no actual conclusion. In this, I've found it's often enough to pay our dreams the respect of simply listening to them, even if we've no clear idea what they're saying.

But what's also curious is that when I am most connected with my dreams, when I am attentive and listening, I am also at my most creative in terms of the art I pursue - in my case poetry and fiction. But to recall dreams nightly, as one sometimes does can lead to a feeling of being overwhelmed by them so, in recent years, I've begun to render the dreams more manageable by breaking them up into chapters.

The lunar period – the synodic month – gives us a convenient time period to work with. I've also created a kind of mythic journey around each lunation, which the dreams can use if they so wish. This provides a symbolic lexicon the dreams can adopt, and which may add a little to our mutual understanding. Again, this is not to say it means anything, nor do I propose it as a method for others, but by allowing myself to believe in it, it gradually allows us to take a different perspective on life, especially when we realise our dreams are indifferent to our usual worldly concerns.

Insights begin to coalesce around repeated motifs, from one lunation to the next, certain characters appear repeatedly, some wearing the guise of people I know or have known. And these people are symbolic in the sense of representing the emotions aroused when I encounter them in waking life. Other times the dreams are more clearly archetypal.

The archetypes are a special case and deeply interesting. They tend to appear in the more numinous, more memorable dreams, though this does not mean they are any more understandable. We take note of them, pay them the respect of pondering their mythology, and how it might pertain to our life situation. Mostly they're enigmatic, speak in symbols, allegory and metaphor. But sometimes... the archetypes can be startlingly literal.

I have read that dreams are rarely verbal, but my own dream characters do occasionally speak. The current lunation began with a background anxiety around a medical test I was to have, and a particular dream in which a surgeon appeared – a friendly, fatherly, protective kind of figure I would have described as Mercurial. He said he was sorry to have deceived me, that actually things were a bit more serious than he'd led me to believe. I wondered about that, wondered if it was the unconscious mind granting me the time, ahead of time, to deal with the eventual result of those tests, which landed this morning.

His message was to let go of everything that was vexing me, that the diagnosis would give me permission to shut the world out for a bit, to recalibrate. This is not to say the dream was prophetic, though some might interpret it as such. I suspect instead the unconscious had been gently preparing the ground for the possibility all along.

But the point I think I'm driving at here, is that we can live with or without our dreams. Indeed, there are some of us who claim never to dream. But life is richer, more interesting, more meaningful and yes, occasionally more frightening, if we choose to live with them. Our dreams need not be literally true in order to be profoundly real. By living in conversation with them, we sometimes find ourselves unexpectedly prepared for life's inevitable encounters with suffering and mortality.

If there was an Internet in those days, you couldn’t do much with it. Digital cameras were beyond the pocket, and mobile phones were not nearly so mobile or as smart as they are now. It was an entirely analogue expedition then, the first time I walked the Dale Head Round. Map, compass, and an eye to the weather was what we went by. It’s strange how the date is fuzzy now. I feel I should have a better fix on it, but 2001, 2002 is the best I can do. And it was summertime.

I set out from just below Little Town, in the Newlands Valley. I should clarify Little Town is not a town, more a collection of rural cottages and farm buildings. The valley is a sublimely beautiful place, remote, just the one narrow road, tall hedgerows, pastures and woodland on either side, and the fells rising steep all around.

Scope End was the first objective, a shapely cone of a hill, and a lovely thing to climb. Then it was the ridge to the summit of Hindscarth, and finally Dale Head, with its massive cairn. There was a girl, too. I'd found her resting by the cairn, as if waiting for someone to catch up. She smiled at my approach, seemed open, inviting of company. It stirred something in me, sent me tumbling down a void of years, all the way back to the teen years and memories of unrequited love. I returned the smile, but sensed a danger, either in her or me, so did not settle on the summit for long. Decades later, I wrote her into a novel and called her Jen.

The unrequited love of our teenage years seems an important step along the way. It's a stirring of the archetype, a recognition of the thing that is missing in us, and without which we feel we shall never be complete. It is the memory of a connection we each once possessed, but from which all details but the scalding essence of the feeling itself have been removed.

It was peculiar this should be catching up with me again, a guy who had begun the downhill into his forties. But this was a desire for connection, more in the metaphysical sense. I had simply mapped it onto the form of a kindly young stranger.

From Dale Head, it’s a long descent to a reedy tarn, then another climb onto High Spy and Maiden Moor. After that, when you reach the foot of Cat Bells, the route branches off to the west and descends once more, bringing you safely back to Little Town. Finally, there's a short section of that narrow road. It had been a long day, and I was pleasantly tired, satisfied at having completed the route, but still haunted by that encounter by the cairn – or at least by the peculiar way I'd reacted to it and the memories it had triggered.

Then I glanced up.

Scope End came into view.

And nothing was ever the same again.

My vagueness over the precise date I put down to the fact I attempted to suppress the memory of what happened next. But the inner self kept offering it back until I accepted it and dealt with it. Dealing with it has been a journey of many years, and by now the precise time, the precise year, is blurred.

But first I need to take you way back.

Imagine you’re very young, and you’re in love. And the person you love? They don’t even know your name. You hope they’ll notice you and love you back, for how can they not? Except they don’t.

I dreamed of her once, the one I loved. And in the dream she realised my love and told me how much she wanted to be with me. For a time, in dream-time and before I woke back to the unrequited reality, what I felt was euphoric, and I floated in it. It was the first time of such a profoundly stirring experience.

The second, and the last, was that day in the Newlands Valley.

One dream.

One reality.

If you’re a religious person, you might see the deities related to your faith. I’m not, and did not. I was secular, rational, shy of the word “spiritual”, aware it comes loaded with the potential for misinterpretation. Mystical is a better fit for me, though I resist even that. The metaphysical reality is mysterious, but that’s only because we do not understand it. All we get is a glimpse. But a glimpse is plenty, for thereafter it becomes your life’s work. More than a glimpse and I reckon you could easily go mad.

What happened was that Scope End and I were no longer separate. I was Scope End. Indeed, everywhere I looked, I was. For a time I pathologised it, told myself I had been on the verge of a faint, that consciousness had retreated into a hallucinatory reverie. And yet the feeling itself had been authentic: that my mind and what I had always taken to be material reality out there were, in some sense, the same.

For years I feared that accepting the experience meant accepting a kind of solipsism, a world populated only by projections of my own self. Yet the experience itself had never suggested that. Quite the opposite. It had suggested participation rather than isolation. No, we do not create our own reality. Reality creates us, right enough, and our fellow beings, and the universe itself. It’s just that reality may not be what we think it is.

But what has any of this to do with love?

The materialist reading of me will agree with that early diagnosis of a near loss of consciousness and a lapse into an hallucinatory state, and I do accept that as a possibility. However, I must remind them, and myself, a loss of consciousness does not tally with the fact I was walking along the road at the time, perfectly aware of myself – that I did not stumble, that the whole thing, timeless and expansive though it was, could only have lasted the time it takes to raise one’s foot, mid-stride, and put it down again.

Nor does it tally with the overwhelming feeling of love, the perfect love of completion, of consummation, of going home.

It was the love of the dream I had dreamed as a boy, the love that pours in when what is unrequited is, by some miracle, returned.

That said, I don’t know what love is, I mean as a thing in itself, only that in life we interpret it as the source of all meaning, and we will move mountains to attain it. It is the engine that drives us, as it drives everything else into being. I believe we each once knew this undifferentiated and non-dual state, but in life the limited apparatus of our biology does not permit its recollection. Thus we crave reunion with a mode of being we cannot be sure exists, yet nevertheless believe we shall find in the love we pursue and feel for others.

To experience the underlying nature of reality, however briefly or imperfectly, is to know the source.

It is to know love too, as the energy that creates the universe and all that is in it.

If we are lucky in life, we will fall in love, our love will be returned, and consummated in partnership, marriage, whatever. And then? Then we discover our partner is not divine. They are human, and they have their foibles, as do we. If we’re really lucky, they are easy to be with, we settle into their loving presence, and we can’t imagine ever wanting to be with anyone else.

And if we are luckier still, we are granted this insight that we also exist within a greater reality, in whose loving embrace we rest, no matter the ups and downs, the trials and tribulations of our waking lives.

This is the nature of love and being.

It’s the way it has always been.

We have simply forgotten it.

I am sitting outdoors with coffee and a book, but I have set the book aside for now and am reading the sky instead. Rain is forecast and I want to see it in. The distant fells are spilling over with mist and looking gloomy, but just here the sky retains a soft, hopeful glow. Time passes, seems to slow. I’m wondering if the rain will pass us by. But then the woodland, up the hill, raises a sigh as the wind comes down the valley. The temperature falls, the leaves show silver, and the rain comes on.

For a moment, before I gather my things and move indoors, there is a feeling of connection. It is a deepening, an expansiveness, a feeling I am no longer this small creature, this accident of evolution. There is a part of me that makes up a mysterious whole with the universe. Except, it’s more than that, more than a feeling I mean. It’s a certainty. It passes, of course, as these things do, but I am left for a time at peace with our crazy world. It is what the writer JB Priestley, who knew this valley long before my time, once called a solemn tenderness for life.

Anyone who has spent time in the countryside, in nature, has felt the same thing. It’s why we do it. It is one of the gentler of those moments of participation that are so hard to put into words. A sunset will do it, or a walk across the tops with a cloud inversion at our feet. A walk through an upland hay meadow, aglow with buttercups, or even a drive to work on a fresh spring morning, if our head’s in the right place. It doesn’t happen all the time. It’s not automatic. We seem to have to bring something of ourselves to the moment as well. We have to relax into it, or at least have the heart to let it in when it comes calling.

Such moments stand in contrast to the times, of course. I don’t know if things are truly any worse than in times past, or if it just feels that way. But the stories the world is telling me now definitely speak the language of defeat. We are in decline. Our economics, politics, even the fabric of our societies are worn so thin we seem in danger of falling through into a despair that not even our great-grandparents knew. And it has been like this for decades – these vexed narratives telling us how much we have lost. It offends our sensibilities because our instincts, as people, are to grow, to ripen, to harvest the fruits of a life, not to wither on the vine.

Our opinions regarding what it is that thwarts our human and humane ambitions will vary depending on our politics. But what we seem to have in common is a growing bewilderment that there is little we can do and no truly wise men coming to our rescue. As for the nature of our being and the meaning of our lives, there things are even worse. Certain stories told in the name of science suggest we are little more than our genes, that consciousness itself is an illusion, and that meaning is something we invent to help us get by. Likewise, much contemporary philosophy appears content merely to acknowledge how difficult life is, and that we make our way as best we can. And if that is all there is, then fair enough, our defeat is complete. We are routed, body and soul.

But can this be right?

From a purely materialist perspective, we have not a lot going for us. And I know these moments of participation can be explained away as nothing more than the activity of the brain. But my own feeling is that we cannot so easily discount a thing as wholly positive as that, just because it seems to serve no clear evolutionary purpose. By my rules, the experience points the way to a more wholesome future, if we can only find a way to engage with it. But we also need to be careful.

The Romantics of the nineteenth century came this way, and they asked what it would be like to live in a world where, instead of all the life-shrinking rhetoric, and the encroach of the material and the profane, everyone could feel like that all the time. These sublime moments of participation, I mean. But we must remember many a Romantic has paid dearly for those visions, falling into despair when the old grey world fought back and laughed at what they took so seriously.

So I’m not talking about losing our minds to it. Aldous Huxley had a point when he cautioned us that while there would be no more wars, there would be no civilisation either. And yes, he was talking about LSD trips, but the same principle applies. We do not want to blow the doors of perception off their hinges. We only want to open them a crack – let some more of the light inside, illuminate the darkness a little, and see how we go.

Exploring the question a little deeper, then, we might ask whether we really are living in an age of defeat, or whether we are simply not yet human enough to prevent ourselves from drowning in the complexity of our own civilisation, and our own growing self-awareness. The danger lies in misinterpreting the direction these moments of participation are pointing. They are not inviting us to disengage from the materiality of life in exchange for a purer metaphysics of the mind. Because to dwell there among the fairy dust, we disappear from life, where we are of no use to our benighted fellows.

Then, the opposite is also true. There is an equal comfort to be had from not engaging with these ideas at all. Better to go on living with the volume of ourselves turned down, forever distracted by the discordant jangle of everydayness, than to heed the call of these moments. And yet it seems the door to a greater engagement with the world – this solemn tenderness for life – is already open. It is just that we refuse to enter.

The rain comes on heavier now, rattles against the glass, looks bleak. It speaks once more of the age of defeat, when only moments ago it was hinting at something very different, the only difference between then and now being something in myself. If only I could remember what it was. But like a dream it slips away on waking. And, like the Cheshire Cat, only the smile remains.

We had not intended to run into the ghost of Lizzie Deane today, but a routine errand brought us close enough to the Ribble Valley that a visit to the village of Chipping was called for. It helped, perhaps, that I was not intent on walking, which usually takes me out of the village and up onto the fells. Instead, my wife and I were looking for lunch, so we called at the Sun Inn, and fell headlong into the story.

Lizzie died at the Sun Inn by suicide in 1835, jumping from an attic window with a noose around her neck. She timed this dramatic act to coincide with the wedding of her former lover to her friend, then taking place across the road at St Bartholomew’s Church. In her hand, it is said, was a note asking that she be buried near the church entrance, so the newly-weds would have to pass her grave each Sunday, and reflect upon what she saw as their betrayal.

She’s buried in the churchyard, though not so prominently as she wished – perhaps on account of the sensitivities of the time, regarding suicide. Instead, she lies a little to one side, beneath the shade of a great yew. If you visit today chances are you will find flowers, and pebbles left as offerings. Lizzie Deane is more than a ghost – she has become a myth, reaching back into the heart of the English Romantic.

Staff and customers at the Sun Inn report seeing her about the premises – a bright and colourful young woman in period costume. After lunch, we took coffee at the Cobbled Corner Café, which looks out toward the inn, and my wife found herself speculating, with a mixture of horror and morbid curiosity, on which of the attic windows poor Lizzie might have leapt from.

We spoke, too, of the story itself. Sympathy tends to settle understandably with Lizzie, as the wronged party but, even at this distance of nearly two centuries, can we really reduce it to such a simple interpretation? There is grief there, certainly, and betrayal, but also something more unsettling: the deliberate timing, the real desire to haunt the living, and the framing of the act itself as a form of accusation and revenge. By her act did Lizzie trap herself in time, bind herself to that one moment, instead of being able to transcend it? And is that why she haunts us still?

Then we try to imagine things from the other side of the story – the young couple at the centre of it. They left the village not long afterwards, and one can only speculate as to how the day unfolded: the ceremony, the celebrations, and then the interruption arriving with a force that’s still echoing down the centuries.

Whatever the truth of their actions, whatever the nature of the betrayal as Lizzie perceived it, they would have carried that moment with them for the rest of their lives, an event that time could never erase. It is easy, at this distance, to cast them as villains. But they, too, must have lived on under its shadow, and we might ask whether Lizzie’s act was as simple, or as just, as the story suggests.

Thus, it began to seem, as we spoke in the Cobbled Corner Café, that it is through the story itself Lizzie still haunts Chipping. There is a power to it, whether one believes in the reality of apparitions or not. She has even been described, with a certain local humour, as a “loyal employee”, still drawing visitors into the Sun two centuries on: the betrayed serving girl who never left, and who continues, in some strange sense, to serve. Above all, the emotional keys here are universal, mythic and accessible to all who encounter them.

Unlike many reported hauntings, there is no long catalogue of dramatic phenomena: no poltergeist disturbances, no escalating horrors. There are only occasional sightings – a consistent image, charmingly enigmatic in its brevity. I suspect this restraint is part of the story’s endurance. It has not been over-elaborated into absurdity but remains plausible enough to inhabit a kind of ambiguity – a liminal space where experience of something “other” may be comfortably entertained without being fully believed in.

If we step back from that question of literal belief, what stands out here is that this is not a vague haunting without a cause. It is sharply defined by its own story: betrayal, humiliation, and self-destruction. It is also anchored in place – the attic room, the window, the church, the graveyard – each element forming part of a tightly bound symbolic geography.

And then there is the behaviour of the ghost. She does not perform, or seek to communicate. She simply repeats. She sits, moves, passes silently through rooms. Like other hauntings of this nature, she does not acknowledge those who see her. It is as if what persists is not a person, but a fragment of time, a kind of memory.

But it’s not a memory in the usual sense, meaning one contained within a human mind. Rather, it is something that has slipped its proper bounds. It is anchored to a place and, under certain conditions, briefly accessible, though perhaps only to those sensitive to such subtle phenomena. What appears is not Lizzie Deane herself, continuing her existence beyond death, but the persistence of a single tragic human moment.

From a strictly materialist perspective, of course, there can be no such thing. The physics does not allow it. My own view is a little more open, though I have never seen a ghost. I have, once, felt something – an unwelcome presence in a hotel room – which seemed very much like one, but which I dismissed by morning, when the sun came up. Others, whose judgement I trust, have not dismissed their own experiences so easily. So I am left not with belief, but with a question: what kind of world produces experiences that feel so insistently like visitations, even if they are not? What kind of world produces such stories and archives them deep within community, so they are passed from generation to generation?

It may be that the question is not whether such hauntings are real, but why they matter to us – why they continue to exert such pressure on the imagination, as Lizzie’s did on ours this afternoon.

Part of their persistence may lie in their refusal of moral erasure. Lizzie Deane’s story is not just about death, but about grievance – about a perceived wrong that, whether real or embellished, has resisted all attempts by time to erase it. The haunting becomes a part of our cultural memory, a way of saying: this happened, and it mattered.

But there is something else at work, something less easily articulated. Stories like this seem to express an intuition that experience itself is not as easily contained as we would like to believe. That certain moments – particularly those charged with strong emotion – do not simply vanish, but leave an imprint, not only in the minds of those who remember them, but in the world itself. It is as if reality were not a neutral stage upon which events occur and then disappear, but something more receptive, more retentive of our emotions and experience.

In this sense, a haunting may be understood not so much as an intrusion from another world, but as a persistence within this one. This would help explain why such stories are almost always tied to a place. The location becomes more than a setting; it is a kind of vessel. The attic, the church, the grave – these are points of convergence, where story, emotion, and memory are held in a stable relation. And they persist.

We do not need to believe in ghosts for this to work. It is enough that we remain susceptible to the possibility. Perhaps that is the true function of such stories: not to convince us of the supernatural, but to resist a certain narrowing of the imagination – to remind us that not everything resolves to verifiable fact, that not everything is accounted for, that some things continue without explanation.

In that sense, Lizzie Deane does not haunt Chipping because she continues to be seen from time to time. She haunts it because her story has found a form that will not let her go, nor any of us who encounter it. And so, in ways less visible but no less real, perhaps we are all inhabited by such presences: moments that have not entirely finished happening, and meanings that have not yet been laid to rest.

It was a Friday much like any other, the day I retired. Such a strange year, though. Most of the office had been working from home, the rest split into long shifts, so those still on site could maintain social distancing. This meant each shift squeezing the working week into three twelve-hour days. It had worked, as far as I know, and none of my colleagues had caught Covid, though we were all looking pretty worn out, as we approached the year’s end.

As I counted down my last hours, after forty-three years of working there, it felt unreal that I would soon be walking out forever. There was just this final tick-sheet of tasks to make sure I left behind a tidy ship. The last one was the handing over of my pass to the security guy at eleven forty-five. The sparsely populated office was absorbed in their separate calls and video-conferences – eyes glued to screens, headphones to block out the world around them. At the appointed time, I rose from my desk, put on my jacket and walked down to the security desk, unnoticed by anyone. I didn’t want a fuss, and in any case, shaking hands was forbidden, so it would all have been a bit… well… awkward.

The guy on duty didn’t know me, but he wished me well when I said I was retiring, that I wouldn’t be coming back. His sentiment was genuine. I’d noticed an uncharacteristic tenderness amongst my male colleagues in those last weeks. It was as if the fact they wouldn’t be seeing me again had granted them permission to speak from closer to their hearts than they would normally. We were all trying to make the best of it, to put a brave face on things – the pandemic, I mean – but we also needed to speak of the feelings we had for one another.

Thinking back on this, the obvious lesson is not to wait until that old guy is retiring. You should tell him now. Tell your mates, tell your colleagues how much you respect them, how much they mean to you ­– or even just tell them you think they’re doing a good job. And okay, maybe I’d been lucky with my work-mates, but if you think your colleagues are a set of lazy, incompetent, bullying, bastard psychopaths, you should tell them that too. But those were the times, and they were like no other. I suppose we've all moved on now, moved back closer to the way things were.

It had rained all day, rained like the devil on the drive in, this being my last commute, thank God, pitch dark at half past seven, down the M61. It was all rain and spray off the heavies, the usual tit-mobiles brightly lit on full beam and speeding blind. The rain hammered down all morning, but as I stepped out through the sliding doors that lunchtime, a thin, watery sun came out, like it was doing its best to mark the moment. I appreciated the effort.

It was perhaps not the best time to be changing course, but is it ever? I wasn’t sure I’d caught the wind right, and BREXIT was a worry. The markets had been recovering well from the first shocks of Covid, but they’d been jittery again all week, scared of another dip, while the lorries were queued for miles either side of the English Channel, and the supply chains lay broken in a million places. But I’d been planning this for a long time, and there was no going back.

Stepping more into the soul-life is what I was aiming at. I’d twenty years until I turned eighty. Any time beyond that would be a bonus, but I wanted a good crack at the time I’d got before then. What for? Well, if you’re young you might think a guy just turned sixty is pretty much spent, and better off dead, but I think the last few decades of life are as important as the first, and I was looking forward to them:

“A human being would certainly not grow to be seventy or eighty years old if this longevity had no meaning for the species. The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life’s morning”

So said Carl Jung, and I’m not going to argue with him.

So, my early and middle-stage work was done, but I felt I still had important connections to make. Indeed, this latter stage of life is potentially where the way becomes most interesting, provided we can let go of this idea we are still young, when clearly we are not.

The nature of work had changed a lot and, in truth, I was no longer of a mind to be charitable towards it. I had a hands-on job, one I enjoyed – a technical specialist, lab based. But like all workplaces increasing amounts of useful time were spent simply answering emails, or sitting in meetings doing nothing except listen to others sounding off. Take any time away, and there might easily be hundreds of emails waiting for you on your return, so much so one hesitated before taking any leave at all. Most of them were junk, but each had to be eyeballed for the one that was going to ruin your day. I was unable to develop a strategy for dealing with any of that, without increasing amounts of anxiety.

I wondered about casting round for a fresh identity, since I was no longer a fully functioning, commuting, salaried C Eng MIET. I didn’t like the idea of becoming just another grey old man pushing a trolley round the supermarket, dithering over brands of breakfast cereal. I could call myself anything I wanted, I suppose: writer, poet, photographer, but none of it sat right. And of course, I was still the same as I’d always been, this guy who writes and walks, and takes pictures, only now had more time to do it. I felt blessed to have escaped that email inbox, which I still imagine filling up in my absence. Neither do I miss the snarling deathtrap of a twenty-mile commute on pitch black roads, in pouring rain, lit by dazzling headlights on hateful winter mornings.

If I can close in on the meaning of my own life, if I can correctly judge my journey in this time of “spirit”, is yet to be seen. But whatever, success or failure, the adventure continues. Many of my well-wishers in the run-up to that day wished me a long and happy retirement, which I translated as meaning: “Don’t drop dead too soon.” And fair enough, I knew what they meant. So to those well-wishers, to whom I wished an equal share of wellness and more, I said this:

I’ll do my best.

I understand now why they took my father. To most people he was one of the nameless who went out nights, worked his shift, and came back tired. Someone was watching him though, someone who knew what he was really about, and that’s why they took him. He was also a writer, you see? He was an explorer of ideas, a lover of maps and books, but only those closest to him knew about that side of him.

They took him long before he’d had time to perfect his craft, long before he became dangerous to them. He was still coming to terms with his powers, getting into his stride, finding the right words. But I suppose, given the course he was on, they felt they had no choice but to act.

At weekends, I’d wake to the sound of his old Underwood typewriter as he hammered out pages of manuscript. The Underwood was what he used to capture those words that seemed right to him. But after a while he’d destroy them, having decided they were no good after all. Meanwhile, the rest of his work, the more speculative ideas, he’d write up in his notebooks which he’d consult from time to time, searching back for fresh avenues to explore, for things he might have missed along the way.

He had a neat hand, a draughtsman’s hand, so his notes and diagrams possessed a beauty that went beyond whatever they were actually saying. After they took him, another man came asking for those notebooks. He said he was a friend but, I’d met him before, and I knew he wasn’t, not really, so I told him we hadn’t kept them. He came again forty years later, a wizened old man, still on the trail, still something deceitful about him, and worried about the things my father knew. I told him the same thing. Even after all this time, it pays to be careful who to trust.

On the weekend afternoons my father and I would be scrambling up nameless gullies on the moors. It was in such places, where the rocks broke the surface, the earth hinting at its secrets, and he would scratch at them, peer at their traces under a magnifying glass. He was good at finding pyrites for me – fool’s gold, he said – not that he was fooled by it. He was never a seeker after gold, not the ordinary kind at least, but he enjoyed splitting the rocks for me to see. And then he’d tell me we should always be careful not to chase after everything that sparkled, because it might not be what we thought it was.

It was a different kind of gold he was hunting, a secret thing, the philosopher’s gold, I suppose you’d call it. This was a mysterious substance, hidden since the dawn of man. It wasn’t that others wanted to take it from you, more they had to stop you getting hold of it in the first place, because that kind of gold was the key to everything. That’s why it was so dangerous.

Often, my father and I would be out on the moors where the old maps said the standing stones used to be. Balmy days and bleak days, we'd seek their traces in the dun-coloured grasses. I could see those hills from my bedroom window, miles away. Indeed, I could see the whole moor spread out like a map, and then there we were, he and I, in the map itself, looking for the stones, solving mysteries.

My father said he believed the stones had once marked the passage of the seasons. That they weren’t there any more is the reason we’d lost our way, and that was why no one ever looked at the moon any more, or could name the stars. This was important, he thought, and it was thrilling to me he was on the trail of a thing that could restore such marvels to the world. It was this, I’m sure that roused the same forces that had taken the stones and hidden them away, this same power that had taken my father.

The night they came, I hid his notebooks. I would decode them one day, I thought, but I’ve had them fifty years now, and they remain as puzzling as ever. Which of his ideas are worth the smoothing out into clearer prose? Which are the fool’s-gold sparkles of frivolous intrigue? I don’t know. Mould mottles their pages, and they’ve become brittle. It adds a fragility to their beauty. But still, I guard them, though lately I’ve been thinking the secret isn’t in them at all, not like I once thought, not a clear arrow to point the way. I think the secret lies elsewhere, off the edge of the page perhaps, and you have to ride the beauty of them, as if on a butterfly’s wings, to get there.

Besides his notebooks, I have his watch, but I don’t wear it. We inhabit different times now. He was spirited away to a place where I fear he must walk the moors alone, and without his maps. The watch still ticks, though the date is faulty, settles between days, as if pointing to another reality, one in which my father has been trapped all these years. But I have the feeling that in continuing the spirit of his work, I am asking the same questions he asked, and if I can reveal the answers, those who took him have no reason to go on holding him, do they? They will have to let him go.

I have written a million words by now, and in that time I have grown old, much older than he was when they took him. But I will bring him back. One day I will pay their ransom. Then I might wake again to the sound of that old Underwood, as my father banishes the emptiness of night, and restores to me once more his world of marvels.

The Camera Shop

I wish I could remember the name of that camera shop on Pall Mall. That’s Pall Mall in the little market town of Chorley, in the north of England, not the more famous Pall Mall, in London. It’s forty years since it closed, but I can still hear the sound of the doorbell as I enter, feel the hollow ring of the place, the scent of it, see the weird photographic contraptions on the shelves: the bellows, the enlargers, the developing kits.

The guy rises to meet me, suit and tie, yellow fingers stained by the nicotine. He knew cameras, lived and breathed them, and he didn’t mind sharing his knowledge, even with the pocket-money teenager I was back then, and who could barely afford the price of film.

My father was a frequent customer. He bought only second hand equipment: cameras, developing tanks... I remember ancient box enlargers too, with fixed focal lengths and grubby lenses. It was always dusty, and smelled of the cigarettes of past owners. By the time it fell into my father’s hands, it was next to junk. But he’d bring it home with a gleam in his eye, like one who had discovered treasure, and was eager to share it. Thus equipped, through the haze of an already bygone era, we learned the rudiments of developing film. That’s no small feat when you’re living in a small semi-detached house, without the luxury of a dark-room. Needless to say, we improvised a lot.

Our rewards were few, but precious all the same – soft images that took ages to tease out, and which would all too often fade back into the paper again for want of the right amount of fixative. I couldn’t help feeling the effort taught us little, only that we needed better kit.

I swore I would have a darkroom one day, a bees-knees enlarger, and bags of space to set out those trays of sweet smelling chemicals. But then the world changed, and I didn’t need any of it. You could do it all on your computer, even on your telephone. Nowadays, I lift the ‘phone and produce effortless images in seconds, enlarge or shrink with a swipe of the finger. I can post-process, add any number of effects and have them beamed round the world for other eyes to see.

If he were still around, he’d be approaching his century now, my father. I imagine him with an iPhone in his pocket – second hand of course – but still pushing the limits of what you could do with it.

I don’t know what we were searching for back then, what rich seam of discovery we’d hoped to strike. Was it something in the images we sought? But those images were like ghosts, and hard to bring out, to materialize. Or was it more about the technology, such as ours was then, I mean it being near Victorian, in an age of rockets? Sure, that might have been the thing.

The world can be intimidating in its complexity if you think too wide and too deep about it. But if you can master one small part, you feel in some way something less than small. I feel that’s the gist of it anyway. We never produced enough images to get into the mystery of them. That was another universe altogether.

My father’s best camera was an early Russian SLR, again from the dusty, cigarette scented shelves of that shop on Pall Mall. It had no doubt been cast off by a more well-heeled amateur, who’d upgraded. The only mode it possessed was manual. There was no metering. We read the light with a hand-held selenium meter, and dialled it in on the camera, or more often we got a feel for what would work – aperture and shutter speed – and we trusted to luck.

I have some decent cameras now. But in using them, the aim, the drive hasn’t changed. It’s the same as when my father and I struggled developing film in the bathroom, half a century ago – a towel over the window and a safelight that took ages to fix up and take down again when the bathroom was required for more conventional purposes – often urgently and in the middle of timing an exposure. It’s about the exploration, the desire to understand a thing bigger than oneself, for such a thing serves as a proxy for another kind of quest, something archetypal, something transcendent, and internal.

I glimpse it now and then in the images I’m taking, and more often by chance – the camera seeing something I do not. It’s an abundance of something, call it a wordless insight. We can reject it of course, seek instead our meaning in the material world, through material things, and become ever dissatisfied slaves to it. Or we can say yes please, more of that transcendent thing, and then the world becomes at once a place of magic, and much more the worthy subject of enquiry.

Yes, it was a treasure trove my father shared, that dusty old kit from the camera shop on Pall Mall, but mostly it was his enthusiasm for the quest, and for the insight one could still pursue the transcendent through the humble and the ordinary. He knew something of the nature of things, I think, and was kind enough, to pass it on.

Thinking back to my grandparents’ time, their world was like another country. It was a pre-wireless world, one of books and close-knit community, of horses and carts. It was a world of work, the clatter of looms, and religion. It was Sunday walks to chapel, sermons, hymns, and hard pews. But there was also an underlying folk superstition that lent a quiet glamour to the times.

My grandmother read tea leaves and dreamed vividly of the dead. Her stories came to me through my mother, and we grew up on those second-hand superstitions, which by then had softened into something more tongue-in-cheek. Crossed knives foretold an argument. A dropped glove meant a surprise. I didn’t wholly believe in good luck charms, but carried them anyway – pebbles, fancy marbles, and coins, all were attractive to me. And I had a cat who would occasionally shed a whisker. These were particularly charged with a sense of home and security. That cat was a great pal of mine. Before school or college exams, I’d thread a whisker into the lapel of my tweed jacket. There it would stay, invisible to the outer world, to the profane, known only to me.

I suppose I caught the tail end of those times. Now, at a different stage of life, I look back from the vantage point of smart-phones and social media. Things move on, and though I’m not much given to nostalgia, I do regret how the world today feels far less enchanted than it once did, and certainly the way it was in my grandparent’s day.

A group of women gathered in a kitchen in a mill village in the north of England, reading tea leaves – there was a social aspect to it, of course, but also an openness to something “other.” There was a lack of distraction, a lack of noise, that made space for superstition, and for imagination. Nowadays, we spend on average two and a half hours a day simply staring at our phones, caught up in news cycles, algorithmic feeds, and doom loops. What are we missing? Could we ever get back to that way of thinking? Why would we want to? What would it mean to re-enchant the world?

It might help to understand what all that superstition was pointing toward. The priests and parsons of the day hardly approved of it, yet for all the Sunday-best devoutness of their flocks, they couldn’t stamp it out. It was a secret conduit to something deeper, a sense of inner knowing. It felt important and meaningful. Today, steeped as we are in a purely materialist tradition, a raven tapping on a window means nothing. But to my grandparents’ generation, it foretold a death. Waking in the night to see a ghostly figure at the foot of the bed might now prompt a trip to the doctor. Back then, it was a revered anecdote to be passed down the generations, a puzzle piece of the ineffable.

Traditional, so-called pre-rational cultures wouldn’t find this strange at all. They’d find it entirely normal. And what’s also unsurprising is how those sensibilities collapsed under colonial rule. When Carl Jung spoke to tribes in British-administered Africa, they told him they no longer needed to dream – the British, they said, now knew everything. Their imaginal faculties had been displaced by rational certainties. And while this added a layer of material order to their lives, the price was the loss of intrinsic meaning.

We downplay it now, perhaps out of embarrassment, but I can’t bring myself to dismiss what we called “superstition” as mere nonsense. I see it more as a folk metaphysics, an instinctive grammar shared across cultures. It was a sixth sense for feeling our way into the field of meaning in which we’re all embedded. My grandmother’s generation might not have spoken of synchronicity, or archetypes or daemons, but she knew a sign when she saw one. She intuited the way the inner and outer worlds rhyme.

I’ve come to think of the universe as possessing an informational field that underlies our experience – a kind of matrix of mind that precedes matter. In earlier times, people connected with it through dreams, signs, omens, and rituals. There were guides too, though we didn’t call them that. They were spirits, saints, ancestors, or angels – personifications of something subtler, what the Greeks called daimones.

These were not demons in the modern, corrupted sense, but intermediaries -messengers between the human and the divine. I’ve long been willing to at least reckon with the possibility that we each have a personal daemon: an inner companion or sixth-sense guidance system. It’s not of the ego, but close to it and perhaps rests somewhere between the conscious, waking mind and the unconscious world of sleep and dreams . It is neither our servant, nor our master. It moves through dreams, images, and hunches, it knows things we do not, and it will tell them to us if we’re quiet and receptive.

When the world was more enchanted, the ways of listening were many. Now, surrounded by noise, such subtleties have been bleached out of us by too much sunlight, by too many screens, by the capture of our imaginations through algorithmic seduction, and by click-bait culture.

The daemonic do not shout. They speak in images, metaphors, and strange coincidences. Their language is more like poetry than prose, more like dreams than demonstrable facts. To catch their drift requires a softer kind of attention – not the analytic scrutiny of the rational mind, but something much looser. Like catching a shadow in the corner of your eye, the daemonic moves in the periphery and the half-glimpsed.

I think the old world knew how to give that kind of attention. It emerged in quiet moments, in repetitive work, in walking, in lamp-lit winter evenings. It was the kind of attention that made space for wonder and for mystery, unlike now, when we merely scroll, click, and scan. The daemons are still here – but they won’t fight for airtime. We must sense their presence, or at least be willing to suspend disbelief, and be prepared to meet them halfway.

Our grandparents’ daemons came in dreams, in tea leaves, in signs in nature. Their world was rich in symbolism and openings – not because they were naïve or ignorant, but because they lived closer to the thresholds of the liminal, where meaning and matter meet. They didn’t need to speculate about the universe as pure consciousness, as an informational field structured by archetypes. They just listened. They were receptive.

We, on the other hand, are born into noise. We have no sacred rituals. Our symbols are corrupted by marketing. Our sense of meaning is flimsy, teased this way and that by the algorithms which always leave us empty handed. Yet the field is still there, as are the daemons. Only now, they must come to us through new forms.

We don’t dream so clearly as we once did, but dreaming can be taught. We can write, walk, meditate. We can spend time with the noise turned off. And then the imagination – long dismissed as belonging to children, and a thing to be grown out of – begins to reassert its ancient purpose: not merely as a fantasy machine, but as an interface to the Other. The old tea leaves become symbols in film, poetry, even in AI dialogue. The oracles we once found in birds, or bones now arise in synchronicities, in subtle alignments between inner thought and outer world. Myth is not dead. It waits to be renewed.

To re-enchant the world is not to regress, but to honour the intuitions of our ancestors while seizing the opportunities of our own times. The informational field – whether we call it psyche or soul – responds to intent. We mythologise not just to remember, but to shape the field of becoming. The daemon doesn’t guide us backwards. It leads us forward.

But what does that mean, really?

Some time ago, all the spirit seemed to collapse out of my writing. The world felt too much with us, as Wordsworth said. Global events stream daily from our devices, a storm flattening the soul, leaving us fearful of the future. Although the current crescendo feels intense, I see it more as part of a long wave of perma-crises stretching back as far as I can remember. It’s a function of our broken times: our imaginations atrophied, led around like helpless marionettes, left at the end of the day with our strings cut, collapsed in a corner of our disenchanted lives.

And then I had a dream.

I was exploring tunnels deep underground. I heard dripping water and smelled the deep earth. Fellow explorers said the tunnels opened in a place I’d never heard of. On waking, I looked it up, and found it existed. The dream also featured my old art teacher, whose presence stirred me to grab my pencils and paper again. I visited that place, found a symbol there on the moors, drew it, copied it onto a pebble, and left it in a location suggested by another dream.

I have no idea what it means. I only know my fingers haven’t stopped tapping on the keyboard since. The words are pouring out. I offer it here as an example of a modern opening to the daemonic, and how it might respond. My world had gone flat, crushed under the weight of a chaotic news cycle. That hasn’t changed. New calamities arrive daily. But to live mythically, poetically, re-enchants the world, even if you don’t believe in magic or daemons.

This isn’t escapism. It’s not a return to pre-rational times. Living mytho-poetically means holding multiple layers of meaning at once, both the rational and the daemonic. Our grandparents understood this. We need both ways of being. But we have sacrificed the magical for the promise of the rational, and in doing so, we’ve cut ourselves off from the source of meaning.

I don’t live with a cat now, more’s the pity. But if I did, I think I’d still be tucking those lucky whiskers into the lapel of my jacket on occasion. To live magically is to dwell in the world as if it were alive with meaning, and to do so is to remember, actually, contrary to the doom cycles pouring from our devices, it still is.

Late May, about an hour from sunset. I've walked this path before, just the once, I think. It was coming on dark then, midwinter, the fells under snow. Was it thirty years ago? I wonder, can I be the same person? Biologically I suppose not, every cell in my body having been replaced over and over since then, so the only continuity is that of memory, but memory is selective. Like the imagination, it's also hard to say what a memory is. Is it a mere arrangement of atoms in the gloop of a brain? I find it hard to think of things that way, that memory is like a computer hard drive, and imagination a mere program running in a processor. It's something more mysterious to me, also intricately bound up with my own sense of being.

The sun is going down over my shoulder now. The rise of fells, across the valley is in deep shadow, while the riverside meadows are still bathed in a rich light. Also, the occasional lone tree. It's a pleasant evening, sense of something cooler and more tranquil descending after a hot day. I've been lugging the camera all week, lugging it all year, but the shots have been few and most of those blurred or spoiled in some other way, like I'm losing the eye, losing control of the machinery. I'm not expecting much then, but suddenly, I come upon this tree. It's an oak, I think, but I don't want to fuss too much over labels. It's alone, alive and beautiful, lit up against the dark of the fell. I lift the camera, shoot a few compositions, bracket for exposure...

There are times when the world is too much with us, and it feels like we can't shake it off. It brings a weight to bear, closes up all the little fissures through which we might still escape into the imaginal. Indeed, it's a measure of how far we've gone that we begin thinking of it as an escape, when for some of us at least, life is incomplete without that easy switch from pragmatism to the more poetic ways of thinking and seeing and being. To live always pragmatically is to live as in a prison, it is to live blind and without meaning.

Meaning is not a thing, nor is it an emotion. It is not happiness. It lies deeper, rises from the subliminal. It is a connection most felt at the intersections of the manifest and the non-manifest worlds. I rarely find it in the built environment, more often in moments like this, moments of rare light in beautiful, less peopled places. Sure I've taken a hundred shots this week, and none of them any good. But even as I take these shots now, I know they'll be the only ones to make the cut. Then I lower the camera and just look.

I'm sure, buried somewhere deep inside of us, there's an awareness of pure being. It's always there, but more often obscured by our awareness of other things, more busy goings-on: sights, sounds, thoughts, emotions – and that's without going to the darker side of anxieties, fears. Sometimes it'll come upon you spontaneously, at unexpected moments like this, as we slip through a fissure in space and time. The moment arrests us with its beauty. Then it's just a sideways step into the imaginal, into the sense once more of one's own interiority. The world retreats, the heavens hold their breath and a sense of the magical returns. It is a moment when all things are possible.

As if on cue, a lone woman moves out of the shadows, takes my arm and stands a while in quiet company. We do not speak, but her presence fills me with a deep sense of longing for a home I have never known. It is a remembering of something the soul somehow knows but cannot consciously recall, not a home left behind, but more an imaginal place glimpsed but briefly in these moments of enchantment.

Hiraeth, the Welsh would call it, that mysterious longing for a place and a time, and a home we've never known. Interesting how there's no equivalent in the English language, a tongue shaped more by action, utility, commerce and empiricism, than to contemplation. We English still feel it, but we have to borrow the words from other cultures to describe it. Or we write stories and essays and epic poems to capture what other cultures pick up at a glance and understand intuitively.

Last limb of the sun now over the shoulder of the fell, a deep quiet over the vale – just the river gently running, and I am the last man, stolen away to the land of the faery. The world that was too much with me is a memory fading. And the realisation comes with it that memory is perhaps not the root of being we think it is, that indeed, we can forget everything, as I do in this moment, yet in this moment become more ourselves than we have ever been.

I turn, walk slowly back towards the village, keeping step, hip to hip with my familiar companion, my eternal twin. And together, with every breath we feel the aliveness of the body, and the earth beneath our feet. We glance back, briefly to the tree, distant now, catching the last of the light – feel it too, sense it in the motion of every leaf, stirring in an imperceptible movement of air.

Then a sound. A young family out with their dogs, children's voices, a lusty bark and a rush as the dogs take to the water. My companion melts away and I return once more to the village, alone, as the world closes in. Except, not quite. There is something about such moments that sustains us long after they have passed. And it's not the memory, nor less the photograph. It's more in the readjustment, a shuffling of the priorities of one's awareness, so that sense of pure being sits a little closer to the top than it did before.