Three White Mice Dream

Genesis of the Three White Mice story

I keep a dream journal, which includes this one, the basis for the Three White Mice story. I began when I was twelve, and have only just finished typing the first five years' worth of dreams onto my laptop.

The best time to record a dream is after being awakened by an alarm, while still lying in bed. The alarm brings you suddenly out of R.E.M. sleep, so that you don't perform the gentle ascent through various other sleep stages, during which you tend to forget what you've dreamed.

Keep a pen and notebook beside your bed where you can reach it easily. Don't talk to or interact with anyone until you're done!

I find many of my dreams seem to be divisible into "parts," often related, sometimes not. I don't worry about which of the parts I write down first, and if I remember something from one section while I'm writing another, I'll jot a keyword in the margin or at the top of the page to spark my memory when I get to that part.

If you think you can't remember your dream at all, you can try to recapture it by sitting still and letting your mind wander. Often a single thought, image, or action will come back which will start a kind of cascade of other memories.

Here is the dream – a very old one! – which became the story The Three White Mice. It will open in a new window if you want to go back and forth between the dream and the story.

Dream – September 19, 1987

I had four beautiful white mice. One was very clearly my favourite, although all of them were dear to me.

I kept them in a medium-sized rodent cage with a food dish and water and a little platform for them to sit on. The doors of the cage were curiously elongated vertically.

I was watching them when I noticed one of the mice being lifted into the air and shaken like a dog would something it had caught. My little mouse was dropped to the cage floor and lay stiffly by the water dish. I put my hand near the cage – and pulled it back when something invisible bent the bars outwards, trying to bite me. I was stiff with terror for my mice and at my own helplessness.

The thing in the cage got my second mouse. He was shaken silently and dropped, spreading blood. I ran to the door and yelled for my friend Brenda to get me her "small rat transfer cage", because I remembered seeing her demonstrate how to take a rodent out of a cage and putting it in another by setting the doors of both cages together, then opening them and baiting the animal through with food.

I was frantic when I returned to the cage, and the third beautiful little mouse was lying still. The thing was virtually flying around in the cage, knocking over the dishes and bending the bars. The mice were piled beside the water dish, white and red with blood. My favourite seemed to be alive, but barely, cowering beside the bodies of his companions.

Brenda brought her cage and I attached it and started to open the door to mine. Brenda stopped me and moved the smaller cage out to open its gate first. I pushed it back to the big one and some food spilled out over my hand - there were mouse pellets piled on the top of the little cage. I opened the door of the big cage, and almost instantly, there was an enormous brown rodent sniffing its way through the cage door into the trap. His colour seemed to be a brown hole in my dream; I couldn't say for sure whether he was brown or another colour, or just an absence of anything which seemed to suggest itself to me as brown. I also was not sure when it had appeared, but it was mean and very fat. It barely fit into the small cage. It had to lie on its back to get inside, and I stuffed its feet in myself, and its fleshy rats tail also. I latched the door behind it and gave the cage to Brenda and looked to my mice.

They were still lying broken and unmoving. I took my favourite in my hands. He was confused and his heart was beating very fast. I set him on my shoulder. The others I took into my hands and felt how cool they were and how tiny and vulnerable they had been. I held them firmly and willed them to live again. One stirred, then the other, and then they both had come back to life.

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