Dream Not Dream

[reiver33]

I'm not sure if this will end up as part of 'Memory Mine' given its surreal tinges, or just as at attempt to capture the memory of yet another painkiller-fuelled dream. This is as much of it as remains clear...


When is a dream not a dream?

I don’t mean anything trite or pseudo-philosophical like ‘When it’s a nightmare’, but at what point do you have to knuckle-down and engage with the reality that’s in your face, no matter how bizarre?

A friend who works in the field of mental health once told me that’s the major problem with a lot of her patients; some aspect of their illness so distorts their appreciation of reality – as the rest of us would recognise it – that they reject the whole thing as some twisted hallucination and retreat into themselves while waiting for the world to get its act together.

I didn’t have that luxury.

Looking over my glass of wine I could see a video presentation, sans sound, about an old piece of software I’d written years ago for a distributed PC network and how it shaped up against its main-frame counterpart. The title of the piece was ‘JCL (something) Versus (missed it)’, and I heard myself telling the woman standing beside me how the original software had been written in a version of Basic such that I’d been able to port it over virtually line-for-line.

Never happened.

Over the years I’d written systems and then managed to reproduce the look and feel on more modern platforms, but this ‘JCL’ nonsense was like someone had taken the chapter headings from my life and was filling them in with plausible detail. What really threw me, though, was who I was talking to.

Karen Love.

A girl from high school who a blind man would notice; she wore the school uniform like a model and was naturally alluring without the need for makeup or a striking hairstyle. Not so much out of my league as in the stratosphere, just one of those girls who sail on by, oblivious to the hungry eyes following their every step.

This incarnation of her was older though, maybe late twenties, with just the suggestion of hair on her upper lip but still possessed of that same pale, oval face, framed by shoulder-length brown hair. That would make this the mid-to-late eighties, which really didn’t gel with my supposed software exploits, but the shear intimacy of the situation was shouting down any nagging doubts some overly-rational part of my brain was trying to bring to my attention.

The two of us had moved outside and were leaning on the railings down by the river; late afternoon in what was obviously our home town although the Whitesands (a large expanse of tarmac, obviously), seemed strangely devoid of traffic in a barren, pedestrianised, way. We were standing almost at right angles to each other and she was way too close, her left shoulder almost brushing against me as she discussed how this ‘resurrected suite of programs was an important artefact’.

She could have been telling me how the river water had been replaced by Cremola Foam for all I cared, as the scent, that musky scent of her, made my chest tight like a drum and I didn’t trust myself to reply without gabbling. She paused, brushing the hair away from her left ear to expose the side of her neck.

Often, in real life, you hesitate to do something and the moment passes by, never to be repeated. I’d never dared approach Karen at high school as it was a certain shot-down-in-flames sucker play, but in this here and now some small inner voice was goading me on with contradictory arguments; you’ll never get another chance like this and, hey, it can’t possibly be real anyway.

I leant in and my lips brushed across the satin sheen of her skin. She quivered, silent, but didn’t pull away, so I kissed her twice on the neck and once on her ear lobe. Her head turned towards me and our cheeks touched, gently; nuzzling, caressing each other and then our lips met, my eyes closing for the duration of the kiss as she was too close to focus properly.

We pulled apart and although nothing was said there was an ache of intimacy in the air that made it hard to breath. I remember nothing of our conversation as we walked diagonally across the Whitesands towards the row of buildings facing the river, but the glint of light on slowing turning glass suddenly brought my attention into sharp focus.

We were approaching a wood-and-glass carousel style door, still moving from its last occupant although there was no one in sight, and I knew, with a sickening sense of déjà vu bordering on fear, what was about to happen. She would go through first and at the far side would come out as a small duckling.

Just stay with me on this one.

She entered, it turned, I followed, the light flared on the glass panel and when I could see clearly again she had disappeared - to be replaced by a small down-covered duckling running ahead of me across the carpet. I paused, finding myself in the foyer of a restaurant or hotel; an old building, all worn wood panelling and inexpert recent repairs. I pegged it as a restaurant as the guy behind the desk was in his shirt-sleeves, stock checking a delivery of boxes in a manner no hotel receptionist would undertake, no matter how lackadaisical.

The main area of the building seemed to be on my left, but the ducking run off down a corridor beside the desk and I followed. It stayed ahead of me no matter how hard I tried to catch up, passing through two sets of open swing doors before turning round a corner to the right. I pursued through the right-left dogleg and found myself in the rear garden, with no sign of the bird.

There were several couples dotted about on the grass, some standing motionless, others slowly walking or sitting at small wrought-iron tables. Each couple consisted of a man or woman wearing night clothes and slippers under a heavy overcoat, accompanied by a figure in more conventional attire.

Not a restaurant then, or an hotel but perhaps a hospice, even an asylum – and these were its inmates and attendants.

I could hardly bring myself to look down in case I too was wearing pyjamas and this whole episode would suddenly become an all too lucid moment in a sea of fantasy, but I remained safe within my gabardine suit. Despite this textile reassurance I was unwilling to move closer to those unfortunates ahead of me, in case their predicament should prove infectious, so instead I concentrated on my immediate surroundings.

To my left were three stone structures, like small colonnades in the classical Greek style, which seemed to serve as the backdrop for examples of artwork. Beyond this the ground dropped away sharply to a gully containing a wide stream or small river, then rose almost vertically to a high bluff. On this was a replica of the Brandenburg Tor, complete with ‘Winged Victory’, back lit by the setting sun.

Before I could swing my gaze round I was seized by a sense of forward motion, as if I was a fixed point and reality was streaming past me, only for it to halt and race backwards in a blur of colourless light and shadow.

“Where the hell did you get to? I’ve got enough trouble trying to find Michelob without you swaning off as well.”

I was sitting at a small wrought-iron table in the corner of the dog-leg corridor, fully dressed, a half-finished cup of coffee and fedora in front of me. Karen was standing, hands on hips, all hint of any earlier intimacy replaced by clear exasperation. Going down the ‘You turned into a duckling and I was chasing you’ route didn’t hold much appeal so I simply shrugged and mumbled some inane reply.

She turned and strode off in the direction of the garden, and I admit I took my own sweet time in following, as it gave me a prime view of her retreating rear – the high heels accentuating the natural sway of her hips and provoking in me a long hiss of appreciation. Grabbing the hat which I hadn’t had previously I hurried round the corner and joined her on the lawn. She was clearly looking for this ‘Michelob’ who I didn’t know from Adam, so I just concentrated on seeing if the surroundings had changed any.

The three ‘art walls’ were still there, and I noticed one carried a bas-relief sculpture which looked a lot like the naff London Olympics logo, but it was the date and inscription carved across the brooding Tor which drew my gaze. Although it was now falling into shadow there was something terribly wrong about it that no onset of dark could disguise. Given the evident age of the stonework the date simply had to be ‘1898’, but no matter how hard I looked, no matter how hard I squinted and strained my eyes against the twilight, it stubbornly remained ‘1998’.

Suddenly I felt cold and confused, and Karen didn’t look so much like the girl of fond memory as just some curvy brunette who’d been cozying up to a boozy guest and keeping him sweet.

I no longer knew anything for sure, and panic curled round me like a shroud.

[pyan]

You've got that surrealness of a dream caught there, reiver - nice, nice work.

A couple of spellings:

shear intimacy - sheer

swaning off - swanning

but that's all I could pick up.

[reiver33]

In my defence I've been up since 7am (its now 5.50am the next day) having travelled back from a funeral straight to a nightshift (9 hours there, stayed overnight, 7 hours back) - rail journey screwed by the weather in north Scotland.

My back was stiff from all the sitting about, plus it was an unfamiliar bed, so last night I took some painkillers in advance and had one of the worst nights sleep in a long time; dozing between a series of frustrating dreams - the kind that don't make sense but you're sure they should, somehow.

I actually think I had the dream as described above more-or-less twice, hence the deja vu sensation, and at one point 'Karen' seemed more like a similar ex-girlfriend. It was like my subconcious was slotting in those I had regrets about, just to wind me up! I jolted myself awake at the '1998' stage as everything seemed to be getting out of hand and the 'inmates' were staring to creep me out.

I'm sure there is some sense to be made of this dream, I just need to know what happened next (or previously).

Or I need therapy!

PS I'm now at the 'so tired it hurts' stage and taken more Solpadeine...

[pyan]

Ah - the modern heir to Tom de Quincey and Sam Coleridge - with the added bonus of no headaches afterwards...