eight minutes

Some days it is harder than others to wake up, today is one of those. Had set an alarm early as although I didn't have to go to school today I do have to go and teach a private lesson early. Had forgotten to deactivate the school alarm, though, so I ended up sending the alarm (which these days is my mobile phone) to snooze some fifteen times, each time falling asleep straight away and dreaming brief, labyrinthine dreams full of mysteries and puzzles, which as always go down the washbasin as I wash my face and thus vanish, the harder to keep hold of the more I try to grasp them. Then it is coffee and the day taking over the night and replacing it with its own ghosts.

drifting in the sea of dreams

Early morning suburban train, those free newspapers with lurid headlines ("11 year olds who swap sex for drugs"). I wince, who can possibly want to read those things, can they possibly be true. It's way too early, it still is dark outside; I have been reading a story that has the feel of a dream, while trying to remember my own dreams of last night but they refuse to reappear.  There is a journey in them (oh, ok, there always is) and a getting lost in a strange unknown city and trying to find my way in a maze of a building where I should find somebody important to me and a walking into people I hadn't seen for many years and they're still young and beautiful, as if they'd been travelling so fast that time had almost stopped for them, but it is me who has been travelling.

It's me who is travelling now, too, in a suburban train moving slowly out away from the city, filling up with tired looking people in heavy winter coats; outside, the world is still dark, although the sky is beginning to clear. The day is slowly getting going.

shiver

A night that lasted years, full of rolling, roiling confused dreams. The first half of the night has me half-awake, shivering cold, moving between states of consciousness in which I am aware of being cold, of getting cramps in the muscles behind my knees as I keep my legs clamped together against my body, while my dreams move through visits to those cities in the South East (the south east of which part of the world, though) in which I only find recently vacated ruins, derelict towns with torn posters on the walls, bits of paper whirling in little swirls in street corners, while I still shiver. Then I go into a building and find a classroom, a tall female teacher is dictating something I don't understand -ah, it's Miss Olivieri, it's been so long. She looks younger than I am now, though, which is odd -she'd be eighty now if not more. Ok, I have to wake up, it is too cold. There are several layers of dreams left unsolved but I must do something about this. I take a long swig of cold water from the little fridge and dig out, in the dark, some winter long-johns from a drawer. Ah, that's better. The rest of the night takes forever, too, waiting for the alarm bell to come up at 5:20 am (it must be near that, surely, it's been so long) but much much better; I am aware of not being cold any longer as I move across fields of dreams, from that flat that belongs to my uncle that is so much like a museum and so much like a labyrinth, up there on that tenth floor in the building with the strange side-ways lift, to the old house in Catia which keeps sprouting new rooms and people -and also new cracks and leaks. Finally, the alarm bell goes off -a quite soothing new-agey sound from the smart phone. I make it snooze and lie there in the dark, breathing in this being here, this being alive, right now.

wrong plane, wrong bus

More dreams of travel gone slightly wrong.

I was travelling back home -but now I'm not sure where home was. I was in a bus station in an unknown city somewhere abroad, realising that I'm in the wrong one (in fact, I have travelled here by mistake and I am in the wrong country) and I have to get to the airport.  I can't find anyone to give me directions until I realise there are several levels to this place and the one I need is the floor below. There are no stairs or lifts that I can see, so when I see the woman that is supposed to help me I just slide down the wall, hoping I won't break a bone or two on the descent. I don't, she tells me I'm in the wrong place (but I knew that) and I have to get out on foot towards that airport, across a city unknown to me, full of dangerous looking slums and gangs of youths in street corners...

outside

She was sitting outside, she had a large black box that looked like some sort of gadget; a radio, or an instrument amplifier. She was beautiful that morning, in a blue jumper and her hair cascading over a red scarf.  I went in the building -I had to continue dreaming my previous dream, needed some resolution to the travel thing in it. When I came out, she wasn't there, but she'd left the box. I touched it and it came to life with a talk BBC  radio program or something similar. Then she came out and I was embarrassed. She clearly was not happy to see me but was trying not to show it. I said to her it was lovely, lovely to see her but I had to go, maybe it would be good to see her some place else other than a dream. She stared at me, her lips now very thin. No point in me staying there so I woke up in mid-morning, feeling washed up on a strange beach, the surf and the sand getting to me, the glare of the sun and the sand a bit too much. Better to really wake up, then and hope it is not another layer of dream with something beautiful, something red, something disappointing in it.

first light

The morning light was coming through the curtains. I wasn't awake but could feel it sipping in, bathing the room in a sort of milky semi-darkness.  Dreams came and went, all things had the strange flavour of distant worlds far away. I lived a whole lifetime in a dream in just a few hours of objective time (what `_is_ 'objective'?) and woke up with a longing for those lives that I was living in worlds far away, the same me but different, under perhaps a different sun -or the same sun, on a different set of coordinates on the shift-space.

resonances 1

In the dream there were something like songs that one could manipulate like physical objects and, in so doing, have an effect on real world objects. There were four parameters for this, which were carefully and patiently explained to me by this man who I couldn't see but I knew was there in the dark Song Room with me. Of course then I woke up and couldn't understand what these parameters were or how they affected the music -which you could mould in your hands like plasticine or see data about on some sort of screen- or the objects in the world that the music was supposed to affect. I turned around on the bed; had to get up at quarter to six and didn't want to spend the night tossing and turning and pondering over the absurdity of dreams.

Then I was there in the room of the songs again and the man who I couldn't see but whose face I knew was again guiding me through some convoluted set of procedures to extract the meaning out of the songs and try different possible effects on the real world. I was half expecting dire words of warning about music being able to bring about untold destruction ut the man laughed. It didn't work like that; it wasn't impossible but the chances of me hitting by mistake or by fumbling around with the right sequence of procedures that would produce such a result were unimaginably small. 

I asked whether all music had an effect and whether I could use any song or piece of music or whether there were specific effects from certain musics. He said that, again, all music could be made to have any effect possible but that there were  degrees of difficulty and the composition of the music, its structure, what scales and chords and frequencies and timbres it contained, would have a bearing on what was practically possible to achieve.

Then he said "now you're going back and it will be some time before we can resume your education in this, but this will happen". And I woke up as the 5:45 am alarm bell rang. It would be  another busy day, I better got going...

fuzzy

The boundaries are fuzzier every day, and yet it is clear that I, what I am, ends 'here' and the world begins 'there'. Or is it. Can one separate one's self from one's circumstance? I am the age I am, have this background that often haunts me in dreams, I play the guitar, have minor or otherwise habits that I can't easily shake off (although I do try), I yearn and dream but also can be lazy and pedestrian and base -half way between a monkey and an angel, who was it that coined that phrase? 

Getting up in the morning is difficult -it always was and it is not getting easier aasí get older. Would love to be able o change my daily routines -or are they rituals? but I'm a prisoner of past mistakes in so many small ways. My tooth brushing routine takes nearly ten minutes these days, even though I've only got two thirds of the teeth I was born with (well, I wasn't actually born with any teeth, but you know what I mean and you're not a stickler, are you). Again, belated payment for all those years during which I thought that eight seconds of dragging a toothbrush across my teeth was all the teeth brushing I needed. That, like so many other small and not so small things. And yet I still tell myself I'm lucky in many ways; I'm still alive, for a start. I still can play the guitar, go out and dance,  I can read and, to the small extent I ever could, I can write.  I still can play in front of an audience and be quite scared and yet deliver at least a good chunk of what the music I play means for me. On the other hand... I still search for meanings and purposes even though I should have plenty enough, I still, this late in the game, yearn for company and <i>the special person </i>even though I know that is an illusion.  I'm not depressed but I do sometimes feel desperately lonely. Like last Saturday night, although I know what the trigger for that was and that it was irrational.

Inevitably, we go round in circles -but these are moving targets, too, just like we go round together with the planet but it moves around the star and this moves towards Vega and the whole galaxy that contains us all moves towards Andromeda and the whole lot moves towards oblivion....

Phobia

Not a very -what's the word, transcendent dream. One with bugs. Maybe it came about because of the item in the news about the UN telling people to eat bugs, maybe it is just a way of channeling stress that can't find other ways to resolve. In my dream I was in my room, which I think was downstairs in the house in Catia, and was clearing some shelves that were full of old stuff, yellow moth-eaten books, bits of indecipherable paper and, in the bottom shelf, behind a pile of other stuff, piles and piles of sweets; blue and red and orange balls of sugar that must have lain there for years and years. And, in attendance, cockroaches which, their environment disturbed, were coming out in droves, as well as bits of dead insect everywhere. Now, if you know me you will realise that even writing the previous paragraph was difficult: I have an overwhelming life long phobia of those bugs, cannot even bring myself to think about them anyway. I tried to clean the shelf with a little dust pan and brush (that I was planning to throw away after, of course), but there was always more. And then I realised it was very late and I needed to sleep but how could I sleep in a room full of those things. So I covered the entire room with thick white blankets and just lied on that bed -but sleep was going to be impossible and I was shivering in cold and revulsion as I woke up (for real) in my North London room, blissfully un-infested...

I'm walking next to the slow moving current… what is it. It's not a river, what flows in it is a dense, viscose substance that swirls as it goes, making a low humming, scratching noise. It goes all the way down the highland valley and falls down, unseen from here, off the cliff at the end in the distance. A little bit like a glacier -but glaciers are not red and mauve and purple and don't swirl as they go. I have no idea what would happen if I fell in that stream but I have no wish to find out, so I walk down a few hundred meters to the bridge ahead, the flimsy rickety bridge that should take me to the other side, where the mists begin and where up far away I am awaited. Over the hum of the stream and the distant muffled roar of the cascade, I can hear the sound of a horn in the distance. The pitch of the long, long note goes up and then drops at the end, then they play again, each note at least half a minute. It is a summons. I'm near the bridge now; as I step on it, it wobbles from side to side and I very carefully walk, stopping every few steps when it feels too unsteady. On the other side of the bridge, the grass appears and disappears in the mist, the slow ascent will begin. The horn sounds again. Then I notice the star; in the middle of the misty day, I can still make out a red dot in the sky, like an ominous eye surveying over the world. As I leave the bridge behind, I hear it crack, bits of it fall in the stream. I will have been the last one to cross here, I think, as I walk into the mist, up the low gradient towards the mountains at the end of the valley. The horn sounds again, its echo lingering. Today the world will change.

book

I was reading a book, a large and complicated story. Sometimes I had to go back a few chapters to understand some complex development, sometimes I even had to go forward to find out other things. As soon as I was reading a chapter I got immersed in it, it'd become real, vivid and I could not only see and hear but also feel the world I was in. At some point I realised I wasn't reading somebody else's book, I was making up the story and I needed to write it. But then I woke up and all I could remember was this I have written, the sort of structure of the dream and the book but nothing of the contents, lost and vanished forever in the void.

Corridor

There I am again, moving down corridors somewhere unknown, although it may be the Building and I may be trying to make my way to the tenth floor, like so many times. Or perhaps I'm coming back from it and trying to find my way out on to the street. At this point I don't know; I can only plod on, open ever new door and hatch that appears in my way, follow the many twists and turns down the corridors and hope they take me somewhere. There are side doors but I feel I ought not to try those. I give in and open one of those: a service pit or well, metal stairways or ladders as far up and down as I can see, as well as valves and tube joints letting off a sort of steam. It is dizzying and does not appear to offer a better possibility of getting out of here than the corridors.

Another hatch which opens only with some effort then clunks and puffs open with a sigh. Beyond, the corridor splits into many corridors. No way to tell one from another or which can get me out of here. If this is a dream, I tell myself, this is a good moment to try and wake up.

fuse

I had been doing something upstairs for quite a long time. ‘Upstairs’ was my old house in Catia, the one I grew up with. I came downstairs into my Granddad’s kitchen to .. make coffee, I think. The hub was very hot, couldn’t touch it, there was a pan with something already black on it. I had a glass semi-hidden up a pipe that ran outside a wall; it wasn’t clear to me why I had hidden the glass but I think I didn’t trust the other occupants of the house to clean the crockery properly. There was another glass in the place where I’d put mine, but one that was very dirty. Needed to get the hub going but it wouldn’t start. Then I realised it was very dark. Flicking the light switch on wasn’t easy, it was very hard to push -and it didn’t do anything, no lights came up. Came out of the kitchen, realising this was a house-wide problem, maybe the cooker had been left on for a very long time and had made the fuses blow. I called out even though I knew my granddad wasn’t in the house. It was darker now and getting very very cold and I had no idea where the fusebox was (it would be fuses, 1940s style, not breakers) and getting so dark that I couldn’t negotiate my way through the furniture strewn along the corridor.. Then the bell started tolling in the distance...

Still here. She was still here. She smiled, her long beautiful wavy long blond mane tumbling to one side as she reclined in the back seat of the car looking up into my face -outside, a group of young girls (her sisters? I thought she only had one, older sister) were trying to catch her attention. She looked at me and smiled, made a gesture that meant 'wait' to the girls who were peering into the car through the windows. I had to resist the temptation -she seemed to be inviting me to kiss her, but that was forbidden and would break the spell. She closed her eyes, I moved down, hid my face in her neck, kissed her neck and instantly woke up, awash in a flood of longing for things impossible which never had been there.