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.

Sam, the Croatian guy from W, was expecting me for a lesson and I was already late. His wait must have lasted all night: there had been travels, the usual dream mishaps where I get lost in a train (a double decker train with many people and things happening in it) on the eternal journey south-east and at some point I misplace my guitar and have to spend much time and many adventures retrieving it; finally I'm there but S's lesson still has to wait, there is some sort of gathering and She is there. Beautiful as she once was, we hug and I can feel the shape of her body under her loose robes. She wants me to stay but S's lesson is waiting. The cat next to her makes some guttural noises and she says she, too, has to attend to something. Now she has become just a head on a sort of little box, I' concerned that the cat may attack her as she's vulnerable without arms or legs and in that tiny size; I light a candle and put it next to her but then I worry that the candle may tumble and burn her -even though she tells me she'll be ok, she's ok and can look after herself. The cat seems bigger now and is making some half-purring, half-growling noises, while the candle has become very narrow and thin and keeps falling and I have to re-position it. S is still waiting for his guitar lesson.

up and away

I only remember the end, but there was much before.we seemed to have defeated the alien, whatever it was, and you and I had found the ship, which was in a lot full of rubbish behind the house in Catia, It wasn't an alien, though, but some sort of demonic (to all it something) entity and, as we found the tiny ship and were going to go into it, then suddenly my point of view changes and I'm both flavio entering the little ship and my friend coming after and the Entity, watching it all from some sort of undead state outside and triggering the ship, which I now see from the house rising int the sky with me inside, which I cannot see from that point of view but I know I'm screaming and futilely punching the door latch as the ship disappears up into the sky.

brief

She was very much as she was then. Slender, olive skinned, with flowing brown hair and a fresh face. She had been standing next to me, explaining who she was until I told her I knew, how could I not know. I smiled, turned over and made as if to sleep. She came down behind and put her arms around me. I could feel her smile. We were together. Then I woke up with that terrible longing for irretrievable times long past.

after the rainstorm

Ah. Still hadn't written out those two dreams. The one about the disturbance after the rainstorm still vivid in my head, but the other one is gone,can't remember it now. My room on that top floor, a roof more or less, on top of a tall building. The leaks. My sister had been there earlier, but she wasn't there now. I check to make sure the guitar and the bed are not under the leaks, the many leaks letting in lots of rain into the room. The noises of disturbances outside, the thunderstorm but also shots and shouting.I come out onto the roof to see what is happening. There were two naked men with guns hijacking cars during the riot. A lot of shouting and cursing, could see people looking out from windows and balconies and hurrying back in. There were people lying on the street, injured or dead, bloodied, very still; people driving madly in all directions. Sirens, police cars; the two naked men hijacking a very lime green volkswagen beetle. I heard angry voices near and knew some people were coming to get me, but there was nowhere to hide on that roof. I made for an entrance to an emergency stairs and crouched in a nook… What was the other dream about, what was it...

Pinwheel

The many sets of coordinates, the infinite configuration spaces that contain us and define us and the vst array of possible us, the blurry demarcations, the uncertain limits and borders of what we are. I open my eyes in the middle of the night, I think 'it is night, it is I, what does all that mean'. Outside, the vast pinwheel firework of the universe continues its blind careening burning itself in a mad dash of entropy towards oblivion, one that is too slow for us to register, perhaps mercifully. Beyond that, who knows. In the meantime, I stare at the ceiling in the dark, I think of many things to do with impermanence and the transience of life and of being, I sigh and turn around and try to sleep again.