I must confess I rather like writing dream sequences.  They allow an escape from reality and day-to-day logic, yet they often have an internal logic of their own.  They can also give an insight into a character’s state of mind, both to us and often the character as well.

Dreams might show love, desire, guilt or fear.  Hazel has even been known to get inspiration for dress designs in dreams, and Debbie for music.  They can show a whole gamut of other emotions or situations a character might be working through, perhaps without even realising it in their waking life.  For example, Tina loves her Carol to the exclusion of all others.  But the faint candle that still burns deep in her soul for her first love, Rosie, has been known to come out in dreams that she sees as a distinctly guilty pleasure.

Perhaps strangely, dreams can sometimes come with a back story: my dreams can anyway.  We don’t just experience the dream itself but we know its context even though it’s total fiction that has nothing to do with our waking reality.  We will see a series of such dreams in my next but one book, ‘Wyeburn Station’, although I’d better not give any more away.

Perhaps the most disturbing Saltbury dreams though, are those that Hazel experienced as she agonised over losing her beloved Annie, after her near-fatal drug poisoning.  Annie survives, but no longer even knows who Hazel is.  The doctors all say she will never recover, but Haze still feels the most intense guilt when after more than a year she finally begins to accept that she needs to move on.

The dreams show Hazel’s subconscious haunting her and they use the fact that folklore all over the world is rich in triads.  The Christian Trinity is one classic example.  But we could also mention amongst others, the Ancient Egyptian Isis, Osiris and Horus; or Juno, Jupiter and Minerva in Roman religion.  In Celtic mythology threefold deities could be a way of showing particularly powerful single beings, and there are many non-divine trios from the classic three witches to the biblical magi.

So Hazel’s terrifying dream series features three Annies, each very different.  There’s the vivacious, devastatingly attractive late teen that Haze fell in love with, but who now takes on a vengeful air.  There’s the deeply damaged, blank eyed woman in her twenties who barely even remembers her own name.  But most frightening of all is an Annie that Hazel never knew: a sweet seeming little girl in a pretty party frock, aged perhaps eight or nine.  This apparent innocent simply drips vitriol and contempt for Hazel along with all her supposed inadequacies.

The dreams tell us nothing at all about the real Annie, of course.  These Annies are wholly the products of Haze’s own subconscious.  But they speak volumes about her inner torment as she tries to face a situation she finds too painful to bear.