When a child, I had extremely vivid and usually rather frightening dreams. I suspect many of you have had likewise (and I would love to hear them). It seems to come with the creative realm, somehow. I wrote some of mine down; others have remained impressed upon me with no external help.
    The first two most striking dreams I recall came to me when I was very young indeed, I would guess four or five years old. 
    The  very first was quite charming: I dreamt that I was swallowed by an animated Dragon -- I mean a dragon drawn and painted like an early Disney film. It was an Asian looking Dragon. Inside the Dragon I found all sorts of other living animals, including an enormous rooster, all appearing as in an animated movie. Very colorful. We all wanted a way out of the Dragon’s belly, and at the end of the dream, I was inside the Dragon’s mouth, looking at the inside of its neatly drawn, tightly closed teeth, and wondering how we would escape.
    At that point, the great mouth opened, and I saw, behind and below the Dragon’s Disney fangs, my mother reaching up from the bed and holding the creature’s mouth open with one hand.  My mother and the bed were photographic, ‘real-life’ images, while the Dragon’s teeth were still drawn and painted, forming a frame around my ‘real’ mother. Really pretty wonderful. I’d like to have more dreams like that, but as far as can recollect, I never have.

    The second dream I remember from that earliest time was far darker; perhaps for all its simplicity it could be called nightmare. This one reappeared, within a new dream, a night ago.
    In the original vision, I was a child underground in a long, very long tunnel. It was of damp stone, ancient, low and rectangular, stretching away into darkness behind and before. There was no visible source of light; it was a blackness in which I could yet see.  Far, far ahead of me, and drawing steadily away, was a tall black figure, whom I knew to be my mother. She was remote, and vanishing, and did not know that I was there. 
    I do not now remember whether I stood and watched her dwindle, knowing there was no hope, or whether I moved forward. But soon I heard a slow and regular drip, drip.  I saw to my right and ahead a bucket by the wall of the tunnel. Above the bucket, hanging from a hook by its white, white hair, was a paper-white and severed head, dripping, drop by drop its wine red blood, the only color present in that black-gray realm. It was a solemn and strangely meditative head, oval, almost stylized, rather like the head of a Buddha. Detached, you might say, in more ways than one.
    Nonetheless it woke me.
    This has always been to me The Dream of the White Head. It was one of those which impress beyond the telling, by an atmosphere not conveyable. It has come back to mind, for obvious reasons, since my mother’s death last year.
    A night ago, I dreamt that someone showed me a drawing, in black ink. At first it made little sense. Turning the paper, I saw that it was of a tunnel. Looking longer, holding it up, it shifted in a vertiginous moment like an M. C. Escher image, gaining real, sinking perspective of a sudden, and I saw it resembled The Tunnel, where the White Head hangs. At once upon this thought I also perceived the Head, with its bucket, a tiny scribble in black, but most definitely there.
    Whereupon, I woke again.