Perchance To Dream
Nightnight, people … sweet …
Oh, who am I kidding?
Like everyone, I have, over the years, had occasion to describe some of my dreams.
Almost invariably, people have recoiled in alarm at my depiction of them
… to which I have been obliged to explain “Oh, no … that was just an uncomfortable dream— If you want horrific, you should try having my nightmares.”
I’ve been having some pretty disturbing ones recently — not in and of themselves ¹ so much as for what they say about my current state of mind
But I really cannot even begin to describe my concern about the implications of dreaming that I’m eating chicken-wings whilst ice-skating.
Frankly, I can’t remember ever being so alarmed about a dream in my entire life.
Not even when I dreamt I had Parkinson’s Disease and was trapped in a wheelchair in the basement of an abandoned building that was on fire and had to escape carrying a fifty foot high stack of plates whilst being hunted across open country by robots with superpowerful auditory senses — stressful.
Still … at least there was no supernatural element this time — no witches cheating by playing the ‘nine’ variant of the playground/schoolyard game, without informing me beforehand, denying me my victory and obliging me to save my two young charges’ souls by performing a miracle involving the pressing of flesh and the physical exchange of my perfectly good limb for one of her sisters’ club feet instead — nasty.
Or people with inflatable noses, that expand and float away like sausage-balloons, sitting in rocking-chairs and having blazing rows … (with other people walking in through doors that don’t exist in the same spacetime dimension, walking down stairs that don’t exist in the same dimension and then walking back into the room via the same door that doesn’t exist in the same dimension ad infinitum ³ ) … glaring at me all the while, through the window I’m trying to climb in so I can chase after someone, to save them from a dreadful fate in the rest of the mansion (that isn’t there, because this is a one-room bungalow!), counting the noses that have floated up to the ceiling as they do so — that one was particularly unsettling.
Or people shooting at me in the no-man’s land between West and East Germany — most disconcerting …. not least because the party I had been obliged to flee when the Police raided it had been taking place in the UK, a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and all I did was pass through the railway turnstile (that isn’t) at the end of the road, only to find myself in a really rather dangerous part of the World at a really dangerous time in its history.
But it was still the most alarming dream I have ever had … even including the one in which I travelled to the (boarding ⁴) school at centre of my own psyche and nearly found the source (and, therefore, explanation) of all my childhood dreams and nightmares, only for a scary toy to turn seriously nasty on me at the vital moment of revelation — I woke up screaming from that one!
So … on that note, I shan’t insult you by suggesting that you dream sweetly — what would I know about sweet dreams?
Instead, I shall suggest you try not to have nightmares — like walking into your local pub and finding your dad dancing, on a table, in lingerie stuffed with dirty five pound notes.
I think that one was a dream.
Yes, I’m sure it was just a dream.
Pretty sure.
—
¹ I’m no stranger to dreams of acts of such extreme violence that they would be more appropriately described as ‘atrocities’ than ‘violence’ — in fact, some of them are dearly held fantasies ².
² Well … a man can dream, can’t he? 😉
³ No pun intended …
⁴ Weird … because I never went to a boarding school.