I blame it all on Michael Bay. For the drawling, sandy-haired, 50-year-old filmmaker, and director of bombastic blockbusters such as Armageddon and the Transformers franchise, once recalled how he was inspired to direct his epic 2001 bum-number Pearl Harbour after experiencing a very vivid dream. This particular dream, however, was not about cool cars, big guns, or Liv Tyler’s lip-gloss, but simply, as he recalled it, the point-of-view shot of an aerial bomb falling from a Japanese war plane, plunging down through the Pacific skies, and landing, finally, and with a massive pyrotechnical wallop, onto the deck of an American warship. The dream was enough to launch Bay out of his bed, and implant in his head the creative seed that eventually blossomed into Pearl Harbour.
It was, funnily enough, the exact same thing with me, and my new book, Last Night on Earth. And though I wasn’t gifted with anything as formally specific as Bay’s handy shot-list, my dream was clear enough, dramatic enough, and memorable enough, for me to reach for a scrap of paper first thing in the morning and scribble down the bones of the scene that it had informed. This is something, by the way, that I never do. I usually find the subject of dreams, and talk of dreams, redundant and pointless in the extreme. They have always seemed, to me at least, nothing less than psychological white noise, the brain’s way of stretching out and self-cleansing after enduring another 15 or 16 hours in the terribly taxing business of conscious existence. Connecting dreams to life, in the literal Freudian sense (I fear castration because I dream of bananas etc), seems almost hysterically counterproductive.
And yet, this one was different. I won’t bore you with the blow-by-blow of the exact dream narrative itself (is there anything worse than someone saying, “So, in this dream I had, right? I was walking down the road, but it wasn’t the road, right? It was a river of frappuccino, right?”). But the rough outline was mildly epic, and memorable to me perhaps because it was so rigid in narrative terms, and didn’t feature the usual dream staples – nakedness, anxiety, sex, bananas, sex, anxiety, sex, sex, anxiety and nakedness. Instead, I dreamt (and don’t laugh!) that I was having a conversation with God (I know! Catholic guilt alert!). But I wasn’t praying in the classical sense, nor was the conversation plucked in any way from the familiar religious contexts of my childhood (national school, confession, communion, confirmation, etc etc). It was more secular than that.
In fact, more than anything, it seemed to approximate the mood in the song The Devil Went Down to Georgia, by the Charlie Daniels Band (ye know? “Granny does your dog bite? No, child, no!”), only instead of bargaining for my soul with the devil, through the power of fiddle-playing, I was debating with God on the subject of grief, and thrashing out the exact age at which a child must be before she or he is emotionally stable enough to deal with the death of a parent. Which, on paper, sounds only mildly less diverting than doing one’s quarterly VAT returns, but in the dream as I experienced it there was a profound sense of urgency to the debate, not least because one of my own children would be, according to my all-knowing celestial opponent, the first person to test out the conclusion from our discussion.
Anyway, the argument between us went on, with some swearing on my part, and exasperation on his. I don’t remember much about the mid-section of the dream, or even if there was a mid-section (they tend not to be very Aristotelian in dramatic structure, dreams, damn them), but I know that the whole thing climaxed with the appearance of an ancient woman in a chair, clearly crippled with age, probably pushing 100-plus years, head bowed, lips drooling slightly, eyes half-dead, and with a few wiry wisps of hair twisting free from a sad balding skull. I recognized her immediately as my own child, who had been preternaturally aged through the power of suggestion and special effects. I fell upon her and hugged her and told her that I loved her, and announced that the debate was off, and that no age was the right age for death to intervene and terminate the relationship between parent and child.
I’m not really sure how the dream ended. Or if God struck me down for disobedience, or if he produced a giant banana and asked me if I wanted to get naked and have some very anxious sex. But what I do know is that the dream stayed with me. As vivid as anything in Michael Bay’s bomb shot. At that time, I was just putting the finishing touches to my first novel, a quasi-autobiographical romp called The Fields, and though I had been telling anyone who’d listen that I was a one-book-only kind of guy, I knew that this dream had stirred something inside that simply wouldn’t be placated with the usual roll-call of heavy drinking, therapy and denial.
Sure enough, within weeks of the dream, some time in late 2013, I sat down in front of the keyboard and, well, in the best quasi-autobiographical traditions, just splurged. It was the equivalent, I guess, of a mammoth verbal vomiting session, but with a slightly tighter structure. I picked up from where The Fields left off, and wrote about London in the 1990s, wrote about Ireland in the 1990s, about London media land and Irish property porn, about family relationships, loyalty and commitment, and what happens when you’re forced to choose between the optimism of the future and the duty of the past. But mostly, I wrote about being a parent. I returned to this dream again and again, the implications of which are sprinkled throughout the book, and even the dream itself, though not in dream-like form, is a vital second act climax. In the end, and in the strict Bay-esque sense of the word, the dream didn’t wholly ‘inspire’ the book. But I’m positive that I couldn’t have written Last Night on Earth, in its current form, without it.
Last Night on Earth is published by Little Brown on April 2nd.
