Ghost stories

I dreamt that the ghost of Snape fell desperately in love with me, and I with him.

I lived in a dark, dingy, huge old apartment building where ancient red carpets padded our steps, the halls were lit by flickering yellow candles, and the dim elevators shuddered up and down the floors.* The building was populated by my family and friends, and many ghosts, and we all spent much of our time there; it was like home and village all at once. The ghosts were indistinguishable from the living humans, and many of them were mischievous, so that when we encountered people we didn’t know, we had to try to figure out whether they were ghosts or not. Some of the ghosts were known to us because of their history: as living beings they’d resided in the building and so the chronicles of their lives and deaths were passed down through building lore, and everyone knew them for what they were. But other people were never identified as ghosts, and this gave life in the apartment building a very odd character.

The ghost of Snape seemed a particularly villainous one (just as his namesake was always misjudged in life), but one day he settled himself next to me and began telling me how much he loved me, that he had fallen in love with me at first sight and had only grown more passionate with time. I was with people I knew, so I couldn’t respond to his remarks, but he astutely judged the situation and began to write me notes instead, which were sweepingly over-the-top romantic. I felt myself moved by his emotion, and began to respond in kind, which he eagerly solicited.

One of his notes read: “Do you not like the sight of me?”

I wrote back something like this: “I have been struck by the passionate depths of your eyes since I first glimpsed them on the day we met, but I never thought I should see them looking at me the way they now do.”**

It quickly became clear that we felt the same way about each other, but I wasn’t sure what it meant to be in love with a ghost. But when Snape realized his feelings were requited, he swept me into an enormous secret world of ghost life that no one could enter unless invited. Ghosts could leave a sort of hologram of themselves, doing whatever it was they normally appeared to be doing, while their true selves spoke and acted and looked in totally different ways. Snape could, while seeming to my friends to be his normal disagreeable self, come to me and drop me the darkly beautiful love poems he so often wrote me. Moreover, he was able to grant me the power to do the same. We could sit in the hallways of the apartment building, where we were accustomed to do, and while all the living world thought Snape stoic and uninterested in everything, and I busily occupied with some reading or writing of my own, the two of us were running through vibrant gardens and leaping fountains in the secret world of ghosts.

He introduced me to his family (so I suppose it’s more accurate to say this was Alan Rickman dressed as Snape acting as someone else), which was composed of his mother, a sweet ghost lady — who took to me right away, and twinkled at our obvious love — and his sister, Kate Winslet, whose story was very interesting in its own right. She was still alive and raising two boys on her own after her husband, Colin Firth, had died. When her husband was living he was taciturn and unimaginative, but after his death his ghost self was able to shed his living inhibitions and misunderstandings, and he became a devoted, energetic, affectionate husband and father. Kate loved him more than ever, but his new self appeared now only in the secret ghost world — the ghost him who existed in the human world was only as stern and boring as the living him had ever been — so she often brought the children there, and reunited the family in the secret world. When Snape and his mother pointed them out to me, Colin was standing in a fountain, holding one of his sons and throwing him up in the air, while Kate and their other boy frolicked in the droplets. The whole family was dripping wet and laughing with the kind of joy that excludes all else.

Indeed, the whole of the secret ghost world seemed suffused with delight in every way. I don’t know if it was just because I was in love and Snape only showed me the glorious parts, or because only happy ghosts inhabited the place, but everywhere I went I found new wonders. One day Snape took me to what seemed to be a staid church service in the living world, but I — now able to see the ghost world — soon realized that ghosts were filing in by the dozen. Snape’s mother sat a few rows ahead of me, and she turned around and winked at me after she’d come in. Before long a gentleman walked in and sat down in the pew next to me, and all the ghosts cheered and clapped and whistled, and I understood he was the choirmaster of the ghost choir, and Snape had placed me in a seat of honor. While to living humans Snape and I appeared just members of the congregation of a rather dull church, our secret selves dazzled to the music of the enormous ghost choir, surrounded by his family (Kate and Colin’s family was there too) and people who had known him forever.

On another day, Snape brought me to his family’s magnificent, lush garden estate (this was where Kate and Colin danced in the fountain with their boys), where I thrilled to see plants burst from the ground, grow, and bloom in a matter of minutes. Everywhere I looked, green stems were shaking themselves from the earth, and deep purple lupines and tiny blue cornflowers and gorgeous pink peonies exploded across the gardens in riotous color. This was a world I could enter anytime I wished, just because a ghost had fallen in love with me.

On top of all this, in the living world, Snape would plan surprises for me as I went about my day. I’d be out walking with my friends and we’d pass a rundown little shed, but to my eyes only it would be sparkling with fresh paint, windows lit from within and beckoning with cozy promise, the outer walls covered over in messages and drawings of love. In this way each of my days was filled with fascinating new things and secrets, whether I visited the secret world or remained in my own.

It was without a doubt the most wildly romantic dream I’ve ever had. It echoes every romance I’ve read or seen in the past year. It was sensuous (not sexual) and wonderful and fun, and I’m very disturbed it should have been about Snape and ghosts.

*The hallways looked like a vaster version of the hallways in my old Berkeley building.
**Over-the-top, I told you! I didn’t even know I had it in me!