The dream

‘The angel fell off its wing’ - 2025

For so many years I was amused at the idea that I used to sleep walk as a kid. I have no idea when it started but I am guessing it was about the age of nine or ten. It didn’t last for that long but I managed to scare my parents more than once.

Late one night in the mid 1970s my dad had been asleep and was woken by a strange noise outside his bedroom in the hall. I had taken the barometer down from the wall and was standing there playing it like a banjo. All he could make out was that I was singing ‘the angel fell off its wing’.

Fast forward fifty or so years to last week, 2nd Nov 2025, when I finished the above painting. I began searching for what it meant to me. The more I thought about it the more I thought it looked like a wing, maybe an angel’s wing and that led on to me associating it with the kid in the hall sleepwalking. Fine I thought, that will be enough of a link.

However, yesterday, 10th Nov 2025, I looked up what ‘an angel falls off its wing’ meant in common interpretations on google. To my amazement it showed up as either a loss of grace or reputation, a symbol of misfortune, a struggle between good and evil or a sign that someone is helping them like an angel.

Well to be honest a loss of grace at the young age of nine or ten didn’t seem relevant to me. I don’t think any angel was in my social sphere at that time either. However, a symbol of misfortune and a struggle between good and evil punched my heart.

But how weird when I think back that I began sleepwalking after having a trauma around that time.

So I began looking up the meaning behind sleep walking, you know going down a rabbit hole as you do, to find out why we do it and low and behold there it was in front of me. Parasomniac, that was me. I used to have nightmares and was very anxious as a child because I was molested by an old man in our neighbourhood when I was about nine.

I stopped sleepwalking as most kids do in their early teens.

But does that mean I buried my fears and anxiety. I think I did. They certainly weren’t dealt with.

I find it fascinating how things want to escape your body and mind and if you let them, they find a way, sometimes in the most peculiar unexpected ways.