Toy Dreams

It is awfully boring to talk about one's dreams - in my case especially, as I dream almost exclusively about toys I used to have. I have no idea what these dreams could mean in a Freudian sense, in that they seem mainly to be dredging up into my conscious memory things I have stored somewhere in my mind but have to all intents and purposes forgotten about. 

One night recently while I slept, I wandered through a flea market and came upon a tiny china rabbit that I had loved very much when I was maybe four or five. I had not thought about that little figurine for decades, but I was once intensely fond of it. 

A few weeks ago, I dreamt I was sitting outside in our garden in Kuala Lumpur holding a doll called Sarah. I didn't care for that doll. Someone gave it to me as a present and I felt obliged to appear pleased and carry it about with me, but the truth was it held no allure and was in fact something of a burden. The fact that the china rabbit, which I loved, had vanished from my thoughts, while the wearisome doll had not may suggest that I've a tendency to remember unpleasantness more than pleasure - or possibly it is purely due to the fact that the doll appears in a few old photographs, while there are no visual records of the rabbit. 

What happened to it though, the little china ornament - and what happened to all the other tiny things that briefly passed through my life and gave me pleasure but were later lost or thrown away by higher authorities. What happens to all the things that are part of our lives at one time or another but as we move forward through the years somehow get left behind? Do they end up three feet down, buried in the topsoil of the planet or will they be found one day right at the back of a top shelf in a dark corner of a junk shop? 

There is one toy I found never-endingly fascinating and consequently have never forgotten about. I'd like to meet it again, either in reality or in a dream. It was block of wood - oak, I think; it had that rather black grain that oak sometimes has - and it was a bit over a foot long and probably 10 inches high and the width of a shoe box, or perhaps a bit less. It had a gold and black transfer on its side, with the name of the company that made it, but I don't think I could read at the time that I had it. I certainly don't remember what the label said.

You stood the thing on the floor - it must have had tiny feet, I suppose, or perhaps it just stood upright as the bottom of it was flat. The top of it was curved - or domed might be the better word, slightly reminding one of the thin wooden covers sewing machines used to have. Into the top was cut a circular opening which led into a kind of tunnel in the wood. On the narrow side of the block farthest from that circular opening was another circular opening. There were four painted wood cylinders - one blue, one red, one green and one yellow and there was a small hammer or mallet, which I don't remember the details of; I assume it too was made of wood. 

This is how you played with the toy: you put one wooden cylinder into the top circular hole and hit it with the hammer. It disappeared into the wooden block. You did the same thing with the next cylinder. It too disappeared. You repeated the action with the third cylinder and then the fourth. Only when you had hit the fourth, did the first emerge at the other end. Only if you took the first one that had just reappeared and banged it back in at the top would you ever get an opportunity to see the second again. On and on it went.

It fascinated me. The impossibility of ever assembling the original four cylinders outside of the block of wood again was frustrating, puzzling and therefore wonderful. The mystery of how the cylinders could be sliding down vertically but end up coming out of a tunnel horizontally is still absolutely and totally beyond my understanding. It is one of the most interesting objects I have ever owned. It seems to me that it taught a child a lot about life

When I asked my mother about this toy the other day, she said she couldn't remember it. "No, I don't remember the toy", is what she said, "but I know you enjoyed hitting things." 

I think that reply pretty exactly captures the nature of our relationship.