I mentioned recently that Cosmo Lang, the eccentric Archbishop of Canterbury through the Thirties, had dreamt of John Henry Newman beckoning him into a third-class railway carriage, though he had a first-class ticket.

Now I’ve come across a tale by Wilfrid Ward about his father W.G. “Ideal” Ward, who in 1845 had been literally degraded, when Oxford’s Convocation deprived him of his MA degree for remarks he published about Tract 90. “In a dream,” wrote Wilfrid Ward, “he was once dining with a veiled lady, to whom he exclaimed, ‘I have never felt such charm in any conversation since I used to talk with John Henry Newman, at Oxford.’ ‘I am John Henry Newman,’ the lady replied, raising her veil.”
Their dreams may tell us something that is hard to pin down about the Victorians. But being dreamt about is a marker of an even less certain kind. I suppose the Queen is the most dreamt about person in Britain, but I was surprised to learn that the Apocalyptic lyrics of Johnny Cash’s late album track “The Man Comes Around” were inspired by a dream about the Queen.

Cash’s lyrics for the song are Dylanesque: “And the whirlwind is in the thorn tree / The virgins are all trimming their wicks.” By his account, Cash had dreamt that he was in Buckingham Palace and the Queen was sitting on the floor knitting. “And I walked up and she looked up at me from her knitting and kind of gasped and said, ‘Johnny Cash, you’re just like a thorn tree in a whirlwind.’ And I woke up and I thought, what does that mean?”