The Greatest Knight - Book Extract

In the dark hour before dawn, all the shutters of the great hall were closed against the evil vapours of the night. Under the heavy iron of the curfew, the fire was a quenched dragon's eye. The forms of slumbering knights and retainers lined the walls, and the air sighed with the sound of their breathing and resonated with the occasional glottal snore. 

At the far end of the hall, occupying one of the less favoured places near the draughts, and away from the residual gleam of the fire, a young man twitched in his sleep. His brow pleated as the vivid images of his dream took him from the restless darkness of this vast Norman castle to the smaller, intimate chamber of his family's keep at Hamstead...... 

Lead from a burning church roof had destroyed his father's right eye and melted a raw trail from temple to jaw, leaving him with an angel's visage one side and a gargoyle’s mask of a devil on the other....

"Will I be gone a long time?" his dream self asked in a high treble. "That depends on how long King Stephen wants to keep you." "Why does he want to keep me?" "Because I made him a promise and he wants you beside him until I have kept that promise." His father's voice was as harsh as a sword blade across a whetstone. "You are a hostage for my word of honour". 

Dreams and Dreaming

“Dreams! The royal road to Integration” Fritz Perls. 

Dreams and Dreaming Part 1: If we live for sixty years, we will have been asleep for twenty as we spend a third of our life in sleep. During this sleep state, we dream for many hours, not just one dream per night! If we experience any kind of problem, we are often advised to ‘sleep on it’ as this is a recognized way of accessing wisdom that not available to us throughout the day.

The ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Druids, Native Americans and almost every other culture have used dreams for gaining wisdom. Sigmund Freud said the examination of dreams is the “royal road” to self discovery.

Interesting dreams have been recorded throughout all time. Sir Christopher Wren dreamt that a woman gave him dates to eat and when he bought some the next day, it cured him of his crippling colic condition. As a child, Lady Seymour dreamt of nine finches in a nest. When she married the Earl of Winchelsea, whose name was Finch, she had nine children. Before the Coronation of King Edward VII, the Duke of Portland had a dream that the state coach was stuck under Coronation Arch. When measured, the coach was indeed too large. Otto Loewi dreamt he won the Nobel Prize before it was awarded to him.