Will The Lion Sleep Tonight…?

From somewhere, I could hear the lion’s swift trot, its pads slapping on the floor – pad-pad-pad-pad…..
…..I awoke to the familiar dub-dub-dub-dub of my heart in full 200bpm SV tachycardia mode. Taking care not to awake B, I tried the usual physical manoeuvres – holding my breath, scrunching up my thoracic muscles – but (as usual) they didn’t work.
It was still dark, there was no way I could get out of bed and sit up anywhere without fainting; so, with perhaps hours to be passed lying awake I settled into a comfortable position and waited for my heart to sort itself out. And thought about the dream-fragment I had been awakened from.
The first dream – nightmare really – that I can remember having, was about a lion. This was all in the early 50s. I was four, possibly five; a great yellow beast of a lion was chasing me along an endless high-ceilinged corridor lined with doors that were firmly shut.

It’s easy to see where it came from, looking back. I had been born with sight problems – extremely long sight in in the left eye, and a right eye that had retinal problems and was turned severely inwards.
I can remember lots of eye examinations, lots of visits to the Moorfields Eye Hospital, eyepatches, eyedrops, glasses that had to be held on with Elastoplast to stop me from hurling them off. At the age or four or so, I had an operation to bring my errant right eye into line. (That necessitated a hospital stay of a couple or weeks or so; one of my memories from then is of several people in white coats lined up to look at me as I rode a tricycle up and down the ward and somebody saying “Look, she keeps steering to one side…”. )
Afterwards, it was back to the hospital for checkups and further tests. I was always worried by them, for it always seemed to me that I ended up failing at something. For instance, waiting for one such test, I saw some older children having to read words and letters off a chart; that induced a huge sense of dread in me, for I couldn’t read and knew that I would fail that test for certain.
On one of these visits I was given a new test, with a stereoscope. It was a wooden box with a calibrated dial on each side, and a pair of eyepieces on the top.
Look into the box, I was told. Doing so, I saw a cartoon drawing of a yellow lion on the right, with a drawing of a cage on the left.
Turn the dials, I was told; the pictures both moved when I did so.
Move the dials until the lion jumps into the cage, I was told.
I did so, the cage slid towards the lion, then slid away. I tried making the lion move instead but it refused to enter. I turned and twisted and turned the dials some more, and more. Again and again, the cage slid to one side or the lion obstinately refused the cage. At some point I screamed and hurled the box at the wall and was led out in tears.

Inside the box the lion remained uncaged. It was soon afterwards that my dream-journeying took me back to the hospital, where I found it (or it found me) patrolling the endless high-ceilinged corridors; it clearly remembered me and my attempts to imprison it, and chased me till I was far far away.