the naughty bits and other dreams

It is very rare that I have a dream with ‘naughty bits’. I had one last night, or this morning. Unfortunately the only parts of the dream I remember are precisely the norty bits and those are not really very interesting to relate. I was away in some course -perhaps a guitar course, I think, but guitars didn’t make any appearance in this.

There was another dream -or perhaps the same? where I was meeting some friends for some sort of fest at the big labyrinthical building, which was mostly blue this time. They wanted to go to a different place, for which we had to take a complicated series of underground trains, some of which went apparently through water, outside the windows you could see something like sea weeds swaying as the train passed. All the while I was worried about having left my car in that place, at the Labyrinth Building, and that I would never be able to trace my way back. How was I going to recover my car? It was in the train that I ran into the girl. She didn’t seem particularly friendly and she didn’t make advances of any kind. We crossed paths a few times and on the third time or so she pulled me along to a bathroom on the side. It was rather clean and shiny but the toilet hadn’t been flushed. She just pulled her skirt up and bent over. The contents of the toilet bowl, bright yellow, swayed with the movement of the train. The tiles were shiny, the window blinds closed. I knew what she expected me to do, but hesitated -then I woke up to the radio whispering the voice of John Humphrys interviewing some pundit about financial crises and collapsing governments. I rolled over to switch the radio off, thinking ‘this should be the dream...’ but, curiously, still concerned about how could I have retrieved my car in the dream.

There is a house that belongs to my uncle, my mother’s brother. He’s been dead for a few years now, but here he’s still alive. I seem to be sharing the house with him. It is far away in Venezuela, in some place that ‘feels’ to be on the coast near Caracas, with a long garden or a glade, although I’ve never seen it in the daytime. I always have some difficulty getting there, the route is not clear in my head. My room is untidy, full of things I don’t always recognise. Some are like ancient versions of things I have here in my rooms in London: video recorders, electronic musical instruments, a couple of computers that seem to be Apple IIGS rather than Macs or PCs. It is a place where hardly anyone ever goes apart from me; even my uncle I’ve never seen in the house although I ‘know’ he lives there. It is a quiet place, though, and I can work there. I also can waste a lot of time: the video recorders and the black and white television seem to have an inexhaustible supply of very old movies. It can be a little bit scary on my own there, when I realise it is the middle of the night, I’m in the middle of nowhere and I see a flickering light outside, as of a torch. Then I turn the television/monitor off and listen, holding my breath -and wake up.

There would seem to be many worlds in those dreams, that interconnect by subterranean passages unavailable to me..

The Evil, swift return

It was outside. It was as big as the world or bigger, but we could sense it, it spoke to us and its voice froze the blood in our veins. I was in my old house in Catia, exploring some rooms I’d never seen before for some reason. A friend was with me, a female friend dressed in rather little, not provocatively in that she was not attired like that to tease me, it was just the way it was. It still was arousing but there was nothing to it. In the room there was rotten furniture, bits of wood would flake off the large desk as we touched it. There were drawers full of yellowing, curling papers and small ordinary things; paper clips, staples, bits of ribbon, old odd looking plastic credit cards, the flotsam of past lives. There was a book which I picked up -raising a cloud of dust- when my friend stopped me. “Leave that where it is”, she said. “It is not meant to be seen by you”. Her voice was changing as she said this and I could see that she was part of It now. It was too late, picking the book seemed to have been enough, now I ‘knew’. I made for the door, she called out my name but her voice had changed and I knew she no longer was there, it was something else. It’d become night outside, the yellow moon climbing over the Avila mountain, black clouds with silver rims running across the sky. But I knew this was not real, it was an illusion to prevent me from seeing what really was there. I ran downstairs, the earth shook, the voice -it wasn’t a voice, it wasn’t sound waves breaking through the air, but I could clearly hear it, whatever it was- called out again, filling the whole space. I had some idea that I could fight it but was very afraid. I knew instantly that all over the city people were hiding in basements, everybody had heard it as clearly as I had. I could also ‘see’, across the city, people being picked from their hiding places and disappearing screaming, up into nothingness. But that was not my fate. I knew I was of the same nature as It, although infinitely less powerful. I was afraid and trying unsuccessfully to wake up. There were things to do and I did not know what. Please, let me wake up, let me wake up...

with blue and red blotches of paint

It was my house but it no longer was my house. I was sitting at the azotea terrace together with them. It seemed to me like Jaqui owned the house but someone else, an old man, seemed to be in charge. We were sitting, looking at the traffic. There appeared this little wizened old man, who sat at the furthest end, in the shadow. “That’s X”, the old man who seemed to be in charge of the house said, “you may have seen him around. You don’t know this but he lives in this house, in little nooks and crannies, his room is just a little space between walls. You wouldn’t believe it”. I knew it was true. The man gruffed and stirred in his seat, apparently uncomfortable.

I stood up and looked into the distance, at the mountain, barely visible in the dark. “I wish I could buy back this house. There’s too much of me seeped into the walls of this place. Of my history, of that of my folk. Then again, selling it was something that needed to be done at the time and that’s pretty much that”. I stared at the brim of the short wall, covered in small blotches of paint in blue and red. Looked deliberate and like it would have taken a lot of work to do. I didn’t like it much, though. I was tired and wanted to be back in my room but I didn’t even know which one was my room -or, indeed, and I only thought of it then, whether I had a room at all in the house. In the distance, a big round yellow moon was beginning to appear from behind the mountains. This was indeed my house, had always been. But now it was no longer my house and I couldn’t make it so. Maybe I was dreaming and I just needed to wake up. At this point I knew this was what was happening but it only made me sadder, because I was seeing my house as it had been so many years ago (apart from the paint work and the strange occupants) and it no longer was that and I no longer had anything to do with it and I wasn’t there but thousands of miles away, living a different life...

a dress of green

Of course I can't remember the dream
I woke up worried about bills and bank things and envelopes with red writing on them. I couldn't possibly remember anything as flimsy and insubstantial as a dream. There was so much to do today, so little time. Dreams don't get much of a look in.

I couldn't remember anything about the dream but something in it was still nagging me, I couldn't think of the dream without becoming a little disturbed and uneasy, even though I couldn't really remember anything at all about the plot of the dream itself or any characters in it.

It took me quite a while to wake up enough to gather some resolve and finally get up. Of course, lessons at the school were suspended today as it was exam week so I didn't have to get up at six in the morning. I looked at the watch but it returned an opaque face in which I couldn't make out the hands. I reached for the iPod touch and clicked. 8:17 am. It's quite early really, I don't know that I want to get up just yet. I'll be busy enough later on, there's a whole pile of things that need doing. I think I can afford ten minutes' sleep more, though.

I woke up startled, with my heart in my mouth as they say back home. I gulped a large lungful of air and tried to think what that was about. Slowly my breathing and my pulse rate started to go back to normal. I could only think of the many errands, the uncomfortable visit to the bank that awaited me, the many phone calls to make, the near vicinity of total financial disaster. What was it? Something I'd dreamt, probably. Something ....

That was it. Just thinking about it was the scariest thing, it would send my skin up in goose-bumps. It was the woman in the dream, tall and slim and inviting. And deadly. Who was she?

I just couldn't bear to think about the dream. At the same time, though, it kept tugging at me, calling for my attention whenever my attention was wandering somewhere else. I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror. My hair is finally going grey. It had to happen one day. Well, that day is here. Boo. I breathed in deeply, running the razor across my chin, thinking I'd forgotten to change the blade. Again. Scrape, scrape. I really have to make that phone call today. then, for a fraction of a second, I saw her in the mirror. It was like a blow across my face, I was physically hurting when I opened my eyes again a few seconds later and dared look in the mirror. It was only me there, looking older, looking startled and, curiously, looking scared.

There was such a long queue at the bank. It'd take the whole morning. Then the phone rang I took it out of my pocket but the call was missed, no number registered. 'New text message'. I open it. 'It was lovely making love to you last night. Do not forget me or you'll regret it'. What is this? No sender's number. 'Sir, the queue', said the man behind me. The queue had kept moving forward while I stood there, dumbstruck,

The interview with the bank people was pretty much a disaster. I was in trouble and they appreciated my custom of twenty years but could do nothing to help me, so very sorry sir. Come again when you have money. I woke back home, thinking of what course of action was left. Not a lot. This really would be the end, the next step a cardboard box under Waterloo Bridge. I coughed again, that heavy deep cough that had woken me up several times in the night but not during that.. no, don't think about that, put that thought away.

What was that that triggered the panic again? A display in the local Turkish café, just some prepared dished sitting on an ornamental bed of lettuce.. Why lettuce? It sent me in a wild terror. I'll have to do something about this and go to a shrink or something. It is not normal at all to freak out because of a vegetable...

When I came back home thre was a soft knock on the door. I ran downstairs, opened the door. For a fraction of a second.. but no, it was her, all was well. She looked at me in a puzzled way "Are you alright?", "yes, Im ok"

But I wasn't entirely ok..

last before waking up

Lots of things had happened but I couldn't remember any of them, even though it'd been only minutes before. Then we went in the church. I asked why we had to go in there but there was no answer and Marianella was not there with me anymore, although there were a couple of other people I knew; these went to different ends of the dark church, only dimly lit by the scant light coming through the stained glass ogival windows.

That's when I saw them. From behind a pew, a silvery transparent figure sat up straight and extended its arms sideways and then laid back straight, disappearing behind the back of the pew. Another figure did the same, and a third one. They would open up their mouths, spread their arms, then fall back. Then I noticed the people who were sitting on those pews. I looked at the sweet little old lady and something prompted me to exclaim "But , you're dead, too!" and she looked at me and said "Really? That's frightfully inconvenient, my dear. Yes, I suppose I am dead..." she said, wistfully..

Behind her, the silver translucent figures kept doing their strange dance, sitting up with their hollow eyes and mouth very open, spreading their arms wide and falling back. A thunder cracked in the distance..

the cycles of time

The last descendant of what once had been Man, this thing without a body that we could recognise, perhaps a pure intelligence entity, faces the final collapse of the universe. He too must go with it, he wants his rest, but he now realises that he will wake up all will begin again and, in the end, after the final dark, there was the light. He set in motion the cosmic alarm clock of creation and then he welcomed the oblivion, the brief sleep of the eons...

dreams

I find frustrating waking up from what I know was a beautiful significant or disturbing dream and not be able to recall more than the sensation it leaves you with, none of the plot and hardly any of the imagery, as it were.

There are recurrent themes and features in my dreams, although I don't have recurrent dreams in the sense of exactly the same dream appearing repeatedly. Some can be so very obviously 'interpreted' that it bores me extraordinarily to do so. The fact that my old house in Catia in Caracas keeps growing new rooms which I have to explore, the problems with the toilets and the stairs in that house are a reflection of both the problems that we had with that house slowly crumbling away and of any present difficulties of those and other kinds, but it is boring for me to think of that in those terms. The new rooms always have both promise and danger and some element of disgustedness (sorry about the neologism), if I can cal it that. I often look over the azotea to see my current car, the Peugeot, parked in front of the laundry shop of the Sicilian family with the brother and sister standing wobbling looking at the street, he rocking from side to side, she turning her head sideways continuously in a tic that I used to find perturbing. They ended up being vastly more successful than I was, they seemed to despise us for being sort of poor (or so I perceived it, but have learnt since how bad a judge of those things I am) and we thought they were sort of naff. It all often is a night scene, with the yellow moon surging from above the Avila mountains, making the sky deep, deep blue and the mountains deep, deep black. In the distance, the 'super blocks' two miles away on the hills of 23 de Enero, twinkled with the thousands of lights of the flats. I, in the meantime, would have to struggle with my room having become a patchwork of overflowing toilets on platforms at different levels, the floor flooded in clear blue water in which you could see shoals of small golden fish darting by, while I swore and swore..

I was thinking about those Caracas skies of my dreams (and my memories, although these are never as vivid as the dreams) yesterday evening as I was walking back home. It was a beautiful evening here, with deep deep blue sky above, bright orange at the horizon. And freezing.

I often dream of getting lost while travelling. Most often it is about something wrong having taken place while travelling. For quite a few years after I came here, it would be going back to Caracas for a few months and then finding myself unable to come back here, which would make me lose my flat, my guitar (which would have stayed here), my computer and my pupils. I had, in return, a nice little '40s or '50s house -like a cottage, in some place that wasn't Los Magallanes but was a bit like it before it became a slum. Light green paint, a front garden with a gate of wooden slats. But that doesn't happen often. It is most often my old house, gone good or gone wrong.

I lost my car last night. I had parked it in a street with recessed parking spaces, with trees and cute shops and restaurants, somewhere like perhaps some bits of Chelsea. It wasn't the Peugeot this time, it was my old Chevrolet Malibu. Of course, after a whole night's dreams that I can't remember I went back to that street and the car wasn't there. I kind of knew I was dreaming but didn't want to wake up to having lost my car.

There's nothing so boring as somebody else's dreams, I know.

My hair was falling down in big clumps, mostly from the right side of my head. No, the left side of my head, only the right as I looked in the mirror. It was strange and ominous, I would pass my hand to comb my hair in the old man's tradition of trying to cover the bald bits, but my hair -black and shiny, far more so than it is in 'real life'- would come off in my hands. Big clumps of it. Outside, a world of doom and grey awaited. I leaned on the washbasin towards the mirror, I was so, so very tired and I knew this wasn't real, it couldn't be. I touch a bit of what was left of my hair on that half of my head and another, almost final clump of black lustrous hair came off in my hand. But my skin was looking healthy and my wrinkles and lines had disappeared. I felt very ill: the world was going wrong very quickly, as I looked at that image in the mirror that was me and yet wasn't, that younger and healthier but at the same time fatally wounded self, mortally ill me. I needed to put my head down and sleep, even if I knew that what was left of my hair would be left in the pillow.

Outside, in the distance, explosions and police sirens criss-crossed the city in stereo Doppler effect.. there was smell of something like gun-powder in the air, but the window gave me only a calm urban night vista. I knew, though, that he world was about to end.

melismas and horses

There were horses. Indoors. There was hay on the floor on the carpets. Some of the rooms had cement floors, like I had not seen since the days of my childhood in Catia in West Caracas so many years ago. I had to pick up my things from behind the back of where one of this enormous horses was. I was afraid it would kick back when it sensed the proximity of a stranger behind. He raised a foot, carefully tapping against my leg. I said something in very low woice, almost whispering, trying to calm it. Grabbed my bag and went to the next room, where there was a sort of party. This room gave to a garden that was deep in darkness and very little could be made of it. There were a few people sitting, walking and milling around. Then I knew (although I never saw them) that the choir were behind me and I started to sing a Venezuelan song from the Llanos, with the choir accompanying me with a spine tingling boca chiusa intrincate set of vocal harmonies. I didn't know the song but I somehow knew what I had to sing. It was the most fantastic, beautiful music. The people around, fat men in suits with loosened ties and blonde-dyed women in red dresses with gold jewelry, ignored the music and just chatted in a louder voice. I finished. There wasn't a sign of acknowledgment from the audience. I then told myself.. I have to wake up now...

distant dream (1978)

hexagons

Monday; September 17, 2007 4:44 PM

...there was also my father's apartment, I think probably in the same building whose tenth floor had the strange lift arrangement and which I've visited now so many times over the years. The rooms were hexagonal, there were stairs going up and down the place and there were people in almost all the rooms. I couldn't find my father and ran into Mark 'untermensch', who would ask me what I would have with my dad, did I think he wanted to speak to me and I had to reply I didn't know but needed urgently to speak to him. The fact that I was holding a conversation in Spanish with Mark was not remarkable, I knew he'd learnt some while travelling round South America, but the fact that he was speaking on behalf of my father who I couldn't get hold of and who apparently didn't want to speak to me was more strange. He kept asking me what I wanted and I would ask back, as I did not know, where my room was, I did not know which room had been assigned to me in this labyrinth of rooms and stairs, all hexagonal and all leading in many seemingly impossible directions. And every time I walked in a room there would be people in it, engaged in different things and glaring at me for the intrusion. Obscurely, this was my house. More obscurely, I was definitely not welcome..

A dream of water

Saturday; June 16, 2007 4:34 PM

a dream with water

I was on the coast, towards the East of the country.. She was with me but she wasn't, I could just make her out getting in the choppy grey waters under the murky grey skies and swim towards the West, presumably towards the City in the centre of the coast. At the same time I was her, struggling in the water to make way ahead and breath, the many miles of water ahead of me condensed into a single experience.

I was walking alongside on the coast, barely able to get an occasional glimpse of her in the water, struggling forward, while I, who had it so much easier just having to walk that many miles, was already panting and sweating... I could just about make him out there, walking near the water-line; I knew he'd be more tired than I was. The sky was gathering big grey lumps rolling together very low, the storm was coming, the water was the colour of steel, there were many, many miles of this ahead of me.

outside the classrooms

Monday; March 26, 2007 9:16 PM

Why do I have these fragments of memories of Liceo Luis Espelozin bathed in electric light, at night, with me lurking in corridors, going up and down stairways. I lurk, indeed, and look for something I don't know what...

Maybe I was looking for B. I was still in love with her. She was as far away from me as a star in a distant galaxy and was just as out of my reach. And yet I still pined for her...

But some things don't match. I very, very seldom went to that place at night. It was not even the same high school. In the evenings it was Liceo Jose Gregorio Hernandez and was an adult education secondary school. with much older pupils than the daytime constituency. A couple of my friends attended it, though, as they were working in the day.

Why am I here tonight? I should be many miles away. It can't be 1970 all over again. Please tell me this isn't so. I check in my pocket for my mobile phone: these gadgets did not exist then, if it stilll is in my pocket I'll be ok. It isn't. But then I remember having left it behind when I changed clothes earlier. It is a vague memory, though. I was in a rush, somebody was speaking to me while I was fetching my things, changing my clothes. Did Ireally leave it behind? And, in any case, where is that? I think it was my room in Catia -but we sold that house over twenty years ago. Someone crosses my path in the stairs, cannot clearly see them in the shadow. "Excuse me, what year is this?" I feel compelled to ask and immediately realise the absurdity of asking such a question. "W-what? what?" is the only answer I get before the person whose face I could not see disappears downstairs.

I walk down the corridors and look in the classrooms. The rooms have the daytime class labels on the doors: "3A", "4B'. That was my class. I peer into that room, half expecting to see myself sitting there, in that odious khaki uniform. There is a class, they look pretty much like daytime students to me, rather than adults, but their uniform is different, the girls don't wear the green and white uniform of the Ezpelosin liceo but a blue and white blazer. The boys wear white shirts and blue jeans. Blue jeans, imagine.

I stand on the corridor and look into the distance, remembering the gigantic flames and the plume of fat black smoke coming up when the petrol station down in Avenida Sucre caught fire. People used to smoke even in gas station courtyards, in those days.

Walk down the second floor corridor, down some unlit stairs -there's small piles of rubbish under the stairs, chunks of granite missing from the steps, stains. I nearly trip up over a cleaner's trolley. Had forgotten about these. I can see the car park now. Is my car there? Hold on, my car would be four thousand miles away, parked in Bartholomew Road, not here in Gato Negro. But I'm seeing a dark green Peugeot 405 in the car park which can only be my current car. I strain to try and see the plate number but cannot from this angle. Why am I in this place, anyway?

Sometimes my father would drive me to school. That was pretty embarrassing as he had an old car, a bottom of the range Chevrolet Biscayne which looked far much older than its six years. Well, in those days cars changed much more from year to year. My dad wasn't very good at keeping cars spic-and-span, something that everyone who's been in my car will agree I have inherited. So the car had a collection of scrapes, scratches and grazes, the wheel lids were missing on a couple of tyres, it was quite dirty. And I would leave the car without saying thanks or pretty much anything, mortified, and join the group of my classmates even though I felt myself an outsider and so did they, me in silence while they would go about their coarse teen-age joking and bragging.

The place would have been full of people.. not so tonight. There is something ghostly about this place. But then I don't know whether I am really here or even what this place really is. Mind you, I didn't know then either, when I used to be the outsider kid who didn't quite fit in....

wong phone

Friday; March 2, 2007 5:07 PM

Dreams continue flowing underneath the level of the waking mind, I breath in deep, change position and look at the alarm clock. I don't have to get up at six. It is 4:37. A moment ago I was struggling trying to make a phone call and realising I had taken the wrong mobile phone with me. I was in Catia and I knew my phone wouldn't work with the local telephone network but it would, curiously, work on wi-fi wireless network and that I would find a signal, but then I had realised I had brought the wrong phone by mistake and this one didn't have wi-fi or internet capabilities. I was in the old house in Catia. I had the horrible feeling I also had brought the wrong guitar. I opened my guitar case. There was no guitar in it. I head the laughter and chirpy natter of girls in the distance.

I'm always losing things. I'm in Caracas at the moment and I'm not sure how to get out and back to Britain since I seem to have lost my passport. When I look for it I only find the Venezuelan one, but it is the Italian one I will need. I've also lost my watch and can only tell the time by reading the display on my phone, but this is broken so I have to move it at certain angles and squint. I go out on the street and people seem to look at me funny. I do certainly look differently, I'm much older, with long hair and dressed in black. A zamuro flies low overhead and crows -never heard a zamuro crowing, is that possible?

Find myself lost in Casalta, in the middle of the estate, tower blocks on either side... I am more than ever an outsider, I should not be here. I now know this to be a dream, I haven't been to this part of the world since nineteen seventy-nine. The shopping centre has not yet been built so it is long before then. I must wake up I must wake up.

I'm back in the house in Catia. I'm in the upstairs room, where someone has built half a dozen toilets, several of which are now overflowing. My phone is on the floor, but it is covered in water. I run to unplug the TV and the betamax. The landline phone rings, I pick it up, a distant voice dictates something in English. This reminds me, when am I due to fly back to London? The date might already have passed.... Then I realised I've lived this occasion a million times, but in dreams. So I am still in a dream. Must wake up, must wake up...

It's misty all round, you can hardly see anything. A ray of sun breaks through the fog but doesn't reveal much more. I hear a soft distant music but I know I must not go in that direction. There is a threat that I cannot see but sense very powerfully. Also I have the feeling that I'm still in Catia but there is nowhere like this in Catia, there could not be. This must be a dream.. wake up please wake up..