Women are for Witchcraft Men are for Money

And there we were, walking along a road in one of those dream journeys where the person beside you is sortakinda your best buddy but also an amalgamation of others. There was also a woman with a hot air balloon, which she held on to as you might any balloon, through the streets of what felt like North London, Colindale, High Barnet that sort of area, in fact I checked it on a dream metro map (had I been lucid dreaming, I'd have extended that check to all the other fab places we might reach) it felt like the Northern line but with a loop around the right side of the top end, like the Central line as it approaches Epping. This was however, nowhere near the Central line.

Sometimes the woman and I went above the streets in her hot air balloon, but as the wind picked up she seemed less keen on that. Then I saw a pretty amazing piece of astral art; a whole collection of clouds delineated in silver on the sky to look like emissions from the exhaust pipe of a steampunk broomstick come sky submarine. It looked very cool indeed. We walked on and somehow I was not with the balloon woman anymore but with R. We saw some Roman ruins, or a theme park designed around the same, and a gorgeous area where men were working on a rail track. R tried to get them to help us in a way that could cut off a bit of time from our walk, but they couldn't as they were due in church. I didn't mind, I was fine with walking on. It was a cool dream.

Church and the Witch's Art struck a chord with me; the whole Salem thing is interesting, and I've been doing some very rudimentary research on it. It has a lot to teach me, mainly that behind every woman's drama waits a man's umbrage. OK, maybe that's not strictly true, but it is interesting how when all the colour and catastrophe is scraped off, we find two men, both of whom though not poor, felt cheated by fortune. Money may have played as great a part in the tragedy as tribe attacks, repressed sexuality and ergot poisoning.

And of course, there might well have been some form of folk magic around. It would be stupid to practice it, given the times, but the presence of humans always means sympathetic magic, and occultists/serious ghost hunters would warn that where you find young adolescents you can almost guarantee poltergeist activity. No idea why or what causes it, it's just a thing that turns up and eventually goes when they, er, calm down.

Anyway it's worth a day trip to Danvers/Salem if I am ever in the vicinity of Boston, though I expect hokum levels verging on the astronomical. A New England tour, heading into Lovecraft and Stephen King land might be excellent. Natch there will be no horror there at all, nor ever is when you visit someone else's nightmare country. Inevitably one finds oneself blinking at the view thinking But this is charming! What's his problem? With those gentlemen it's the inner landscapes that call. Salem was something else.

My nightmare country is creaky old Englishville, which has been done to bits. This may be why I am not an efficient horror writer (yes, that must be it!) But I'm an excellent traveller, so let's see what happens in time to come.