Your Wildest Dreams?

I could be wrong, but I blame the medication.  Ever since I started using this stuff, I've had some amazing dreams.  Nothing scary, you understand, just strange ... and some of them memorable!  Often one dream picks up where another left off, as if another chapter in the same book, or else the venue is the same house.

This morning I was in one of those houses where I'd been several times before.  Wherever I was in the house, I needed to get back - outside, I suppose - but I knew I couldn't go back the way I'd come.  I also knew, from past visits, that there were hidden rooms.  I opened the door to one of these, knowing that, by going from one room to another, I would find my way out. I entered the first hidden room, filled with flowery fabrics, curtains and covered furniture in bright yellows and golds.

I was about to pass into the room beyond, through a bright yellow door, when I heard voices.  A glance through a lace-covered window showed that there were people in there, so I knew I couldn't go further.  I turned to make my way back again but ... .   At the same time as I discovered that I couldn't see the door through which I'd entered this 'yellow room', I realised that I wasn't alone.  Standing beside the fireplace, looking coyly up at me, was a woman.  She must have come up to my shoulder, and I took her to be the chambermaid.  I hadn't spotted her before because her dress was of the same flowery fabric that covered the furniture.

No word passed between us but, as she smiled up at me, I laughed at her, took off my peaked schoolboy cap and placed it on top of the mob cap that crowned her golden curls.  She giggled; I grasped my cap, removing hers along with it and, evading her grasp to recover her headgear ... suddenly I was back in the 'normal' part of the house, talking to my father who, not surprisingly, asked what that was inside my cap.

Somehow, it was decided to 'lose' this by putting it in with the laundry, and I was next aware of all kinds of normal washing dancing on the line, and this little mob cap in the midst of them.  Word must have got around about the hidden part of the house, the 'other people' there and the servants, because soon all the other houses in the street were seen to have strange items on their washing lines too.

What a story.  Where had it come from ... and why?  The only thing I can possibly dredge up from this side of slumberland (other mattresses are available!) is the fact that, a few days ago I was discussing with friends the comparison between our modern economy and that of, say, 150 years ago. We had been speaking of slavery, and the fact that, although it had been abolished, some of the house servants of the Victorian era were little more than slaves.

Although they were paid, what actual use was £25 or £50 a year?  How did it relate to the probable incomes of their employers?  I posed the comparison that someone earning maybe £500 or £600 might well be able to afford a girl (they were almost always girls) at £25.  With a comparable salary today of £20,000 or £30,000, the appropriate proportion to consider paying a servant would be a pittance.  Who would work for £1,000 to £2,500 a year ... however light the duties might be?

Like their Victorian counterparts perhaps, such a sum would be pocket money.  The difference is that today's 'slaves' would want to 'live' on whatever they earned, have career prospects, and so on, while the Victorian servant girl would probably live in, and in a few years be married to a former errand boy and running her own home for no pay at all.  She wouldn't complain because that was the norm.

Norms change;  and so does medication ... and dreams!

More fairy tales next week.