Clearing the mind of rubbish and the not-to-be-discussed problems of adolescent males

Let me take you back to ancient history.

October 1968. University College, Swansea, Wales.

I was 20 at the time, just embarking upon my second-year of my degree course, intelligent but unworldly and desperately shy - still.

One morning, I cannot remember where, I caught sight of a girl who struck me as being the most beautiful girl that I had ever seen. New, first-year student.

That might have been the end of it, that might have become a mere obsession, this might become the great love of my life. You could never tell.

Over the next couple of weeks, as people were signing up for the various clubs that you do at the start of the academic year, she ended up in one of the same sports clubs as Bryan, one of my flat mates.

He was nothing like as shy as I was, a perfectly normal guy in most respects, did not consider her beautiful at all (no accounting for taste), and he had had enough of my nonsense and, with a lot of encouragement, introduced me to her (including her name - Susan, surname I will, for the sake of discretion, not mention).

So started two years and eight months of unfulfilled platonic love (Du Bellay rather than Baudelaire sadly). We would meet occasionally, talk politely, be very friendly and well .... that was about it really. In the last few months that I knew her she was wearing a very expensive engagement diamond ring that her boyfriend back in Somerset had given her.

June 27th or 28th, 1971. Both older, both more mature, both graduates of the university, I watched her for the last time walking out of the university building and out of my life forever. I wanted to dash up, say goodbye, wish her luck, but the immature trappings of adolescence (even at 22?) held me back.

The pragmatist in me did not hang on. George, the bad gangster (Humphrey Bogart) berates Eddie, the good gangster (James Cagney) in the last part of the classic Warner Brothers movie "The Roaring Twenties" with the line: "still carrying a torch for that dame!".

Pragmatists don't carry torches, except in the dark.

Dreams, I explain time and again to people, serve a purpose. The brain fills up with all sorts of rubbish, in total disorder, and this has to be cleared out. In a dream the subconscious grabs all sorts of bits and pieces and throws them together, and throws them out. Don't read too much into meanings etc, IMHO that is not their purpose.

So last night's rubbish to be thrown out. There, some 41 years since we last saw each other, were Susan and I. Together. Friendly. Well somewhat more than friendly. I was far more positive than I had ever been and yes, we did get intimate together. Clearly her, no question. A voice then started beating out that she will be 62 years old now (destroys the intimacy a bit), and off my dream went on the tangents that they normally take to the great Catalan opera singers, Jose Carreras and Montserrat Caballe singing "Brindisi" from Verdi's "La Traviata", at which point I woke up.

My wife's left arm was hanging tightly on to me. Meanwhile the voice in my head repeated, she will be 62 by now - if she is still alive. Not so silly a comment, two of the best friends that I ever had in my university days have died in recent years (for that matter I wonder where Bryan is these days!). And as clear as her face was in my dream, in my conscious state I could not picture her clearly any more. As for the intimacy, it was (strongly) suggested rather than graphic.

This was not always the case. When I was 14 or 15 (even further back in ancient history), I used to get some extremely graphic images in my dreams of intimacy with women. I would wake up, messy (covered with gunge) and embarrassed. I was not the atheist that I have since become, I was strongly Christian living in a committed Methodist family. I would pray at night for this to stop - it didn't. For months it was a problem and would not go away.

There was nobody with whom I could discuss the problem. "Messy and embarrassed" you can change using the Christian terminology of the time as "dirty and disgusting". It was a stage, like Christianity it was something I grew out of. By the time of my 16th birthday it had thankfully stopped happening.

I recall discussing this two years later with a friend who had not had my Christian leanings. He had also gone through this, and the more I checked round, the more I came to realise that it is not an isolated phenomenon. Your adolescent body is awakening, the sexual urges are growing, and much as your conscious mind might try to control them, your pesky subconscious is not so willing to play along.

Take religion out of the frame, you can learn to handle the problem - though even that is not easy. Given the Christian and Muslim puritans out there, I wonder how young men handle this problem when subjected to religious dogma even now. It is not a problem that you can comfortably discuss, and the element of a guilty conscience cannot be precluded. In a secular world, you can get advice, but don't look to religious zealots to understand.

I also wonder at times whether teenage girls who are still virgins go through anything similar. Interestingly I don't know. If boys cannot discuss this sort of thing, can girls? And if they don't you will never find out, will you?

To recall though - adolescence is a difficult stage to go through, and the impact of not handling problems correctly can have an unfortunate impact down the road.

Postscript (December 25th, 2021). I remember being told that Bryan became a drama correspondent for a newspaper in Winnipeg, Canada. If still there I would be very pleased to hear from him).