In a recent, rather self-indulgent blog, I lamented the fact that I don’t have surreal dreams. Mine are relentlessly and disappointingly realistic.
For almost all my life up until I went into hospital in 2020, I only very very rarely was aware of any dreams. I think this was because I went very quickly into deep sleep, then woke up very slowly in the morning.
I only remembered dreams – and only very rarely – if I was suddenly woken up from a very deep sleep and happened to be in mid-dream.
For the last couple of years, I have been waking up throughout the night. I go to sleep, wake up after two hours dehydrated in my mouth, drink some water, go back to sleep… then wake up dehydrated in my mouth every hour throughout the night. So I think I never really go into a deep sleep.
Last night, I was in a lot of searing pain – at the base of the spine, in my left hip and down the outside of my left leg. But I did manage to get fairly long patches of sleep which meant that, when I woke up, for the first time in a couple of months or so I actually remembered my dreams.
Last night, there were two narrative dreams coming and going throughout the night.
In one, I drove to a small, isolated English village in the middle of nowhere up a narrow back lane, where they were celebrating some sort of pagan festival. Not in any Hammer Horror way… just because it was a tradition in their village.
They were generally very amiable people though a shopkeeper ignored me when I was trying to pay six pence for a giant Aero chocolate bar. He kept interacting instead with sundry people connected with the set-up of the pagan festival.
I had arrived at the small village in a bright red Toyota Corolla car I used to own. It was a very vivid red in my dream whereas all the other colours – of the people, the village, the vegetation, the sky – everything – were muted, dull browns and greens and greys etc. It looked as if it was dusk the whole time in the village; but the Toyota was bright red.
In the other dream, I was finishing up at work in some large hall and a group of four men dressed in blue came in and started performing their variety act which involved leaping about, singing, dancing and generally trying to be visual and entertaining.
They just arrived unannounced and were auditioning for me on their own whim. I had never seen them before. They were auditioning for some TV show. They didn’t announce themselves when they arrived and, when they finished, they just left without talking to me.
Later, they came back and there were more of them – about seven or eight – men and women – and I was suggesting to them that the act possibly wouldn’t work on television because sometimes acts which work well live (and are therefore viewed in 3D) don’t work in 2D on a TV screen.
They took it all very well, it seemed.
Both the village dream and the variety act dream progressed in chronological narrative chunks throughout the night.
I would be having the dream, wake up, go back to sleep and the dream would carry on narratively progressing.
So at least I am again having dreams which I remember, which must mean I am getting into deeper sleep which is welcome, though I could do without the pain.
Sadly, I am still not getting any truly surreal dreams; they are all relentlessly realistic – very physically and visually detailed.
Like many dreams, this blog has no satisfactory ending.
Life is a bitch.
SO IT GOES - John Fleming's blog 