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Thursday, September 11, 2003
18:03 
Dream dreamer
While I was away on holiday last week (not the same holiday as referred to in my last post) I had a nightmare. I don't usually have nightmares, but this was a really wake-you-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night nightmare.
There was a bunch of us moving into a large house, more of a stately home. There was the feel of us being students, and there were 7 or 8 of us. One of them was a girl called Kathy, with whom I went to school. I remember her as an anorexic girl who used to exercise a lot to Jane Fonda audio tapes and dream about reincarnating as a cow.
I went exploring. On the second or third floor there was a large, open space in the centre. It had off-white, yellowish walls. The carpet was vermilion, as was each of the four upholstered, square mushroom things, on in each of the four corners. These were about 3 feet tall, with a thin pedestal and a square top around 8 inches deep and three feet across.
The room was divided north from south by a smoked glass wall. There was an opening in the wall, about door sized, near the east wall and another near the west wall. Everything seemed darker on the other side, as if there were less light.
I made to go through the east opening. There was a breath of cold wind from beyond, and suddenly I was utterly terrified, trying to scream, although I wasn't scared of anything in particular. I stumbled away and the feeling went. Interesting.
Kathy and I then got into an argument over room choice. As I was with Frood, I figured there being two of us meant we should have one of the large rooms, but she was insistent that she had found it first. Rather than fighting about it, I decided there had to be some other large rooms in the other half of the house - we were basically confined to the south half, the only way through being the red room. I went back to the red room, coming down on it from above this time, having completely forgotten what had happened previously.
I got closer to the opening this time (same one). Then I felt the cold wind, thought "Oh crap," but was too late. The fear was even worse, real stomach-twisting, breath-catching, sickening stuff. I was paralysed by it; collapsed on the floor, unable to move. I was trying to scream but no sound would come. I knew I only had to get a short distance away, and some still-sane part of my head was thinking that if I could just get a sound out then someone would hear me and come to help. I would be alright if I could just move away a little bit.
I woke myself up trying to scream, with adrenaline really kicking. It took me quite some time to get back to sleep and I had woken up Frood making small meeping noises.
Fionally got back to sleep. Ended up in some sort of school, or camp. I was either a junior teacher or an advanced student doing some teaching/supervision.
Tom Baker turned up in Dr Who guise. I told him all about my previous encounter, and he was very interested. He hummed and hah-ed but he didn't offer me a jelly baby. He had an incredibly unsettling grin. We set about sorting something out: it bore no resemblance to the mapping of the previous dream and involved going underground, although I can't remember any of the details other than there being some other girls there, students, a boarding school ambience, and it had a definite sense of being related.
Wednesday, September 10, 2003
13:25
Tales of a found paper scrap
I was going through some writing of mine the other day when I came across a scribbled side of A4 about which I had completely forgotten. It's quite an odd little piece, of a sort I haven't written in quite some time:
It's funny how surreality can catch up with you at times. I'm lying on my stomach, naked, on a bed in the Marsh Farm Hotel, just outside Swindon. Murphy's Law is on the TV. I'm a little drunk. I'm just outside Swindon because I am attending a course on Urban Pollution Management (UPM), run by the Water Research Centre (WRc). I am naked because I have just tried the rather disappointing whirlpool bath supplied in the en suite and am too hot to put on the thick, white terrycloth bathrobe; one of a pair that was left on the pillows. I'm a little drunk because I bought a bottle of sauvignon blanc on expenses to share with a colleague and ended up drinking it myself. Murphy's Law is on the TV because James Nesbitt is pleasant enough to look at and I can't face thinking.
I can't face thinking because that means having to deal with the concepts past and future.
You see, I went on holiday recently. I deserved it, needed the break. I took the train to Edinburgh from London, rode Fingal across the Forth Road Bridge and on to my Mum and Dad's house. There I discovered that <snip details of family crisis not for public consumption>. As my Mum, normally a pillar of strength, fragmented before my eyes and I was forced to distil and use that dark, toxic part of my personality that everyone hates except me, I lost sense of past and future. The world drifts by before me and I am disconnected from it. Worse than that, I am actively avoiding reconnection. The lupus (or whatever it is) has flared so I look like I was at ground zero when the H-bomb was detonated. My face is peeling off in chunks.
I lie here naked on a hotel bed near Swindon, traffic noise shushing through the window, eleven functioning channels on the twelve inch TV, the furniture more expensive than the stuff we have at home, having locked the SIM card on my mobile phone today; a little drunk and avoiding immersing myself in my life in case -- well, I don't know what. I lie here and I write, watching the words fall out of the end of my pen, only the occasional scratching out of a word misspelled because my fingers can't keep up and the handwriting telling me that these words are mine. I don't really know what I'm doing here. The room was filled with cobwebs when I came in; long, sticky strands that clung to hair, skin and lips. It seemed appropriate, given the amount of time I've been spending with Spider recently. I'm not going to complain to the hotel staff. I don't think there's anything they could have done.
I don't think. I contemplate whether to have another cigarette - I started smoking again recently. "SMOKING KILLS". Not quickly enough, it seems. Not quickly enough to give me another reason to turn my back on job, research, parents, life and say "La la la la la I'm not listening." I have another cigarette. I didn't decide; it just seems to happen. Just like lung cancer.
I wonder vaguely if Andy's mood has improved now I'm not at home and, if it has, if I can figure out a way not to be at home even when I am at home, just because I can't deal with his emotional issues right now. It's an idle thought, though. That question belongs in the future and the future, in this surreality, doesn't exist. My place as a participant in this universe seems to have been taken over by everything of me that isn't me. I'm just along for the ride. I don't think anyone has noticed, and I don't think it really matters.
Maybe it's time to go to bed, whatever time it is.
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