Tempestuous nights

In a rare moment of clarity and putting things mildly, I must confess to having spent the last three nights restless in fitful dreams, waking in starts before relaxing slightly to watch the light streaming in through the window and determine the time. Two, three, four, five a.m. I’m adept at this guessing game. Switch the mobile on to corroborate my story (yes, I sleep with the phone next to me on the bed or sometimes clutched in my sweating palm, what of it?) and it turns out my natural time-telling ability is surprisingly accurate. I detest clocks, but I always long for time, so I make excuses for telling it. Don’t ask after the days of the week or month, those artificial constructs, I can only measure time’s passing in bits by studying our daily revolutions.

So I return to that restless half-awake, half-dreaming state and the fanciful flights I’ve heard we all share: making war with the hairy monster of a thousand heads or running from the chimera in the slow-motion, thick honey air, always wearing that pair of cement-block shoes that’s so fashionable in dreams. Later (or earlier, one never knows) I’m communing with snakes and as they slither across my torso, herbivorous dinosaurs sniff my skin with idle curiosity. Clearly, I’m some twisted Snow White, loving all the mind’s creatures she attracts. And surrounded, always surrounded. Surrounded by everyone I’ve ever known or wanted to know or thought I knew or heard of long ago. I’m naked and must urinate desperately, but I’m trapped in this godforsaken primeval garden without proper plumbing (I guess there are still some limits to my love of nature). So it is, more or less, that I’ve spent the last three nights carousing through my own delightfully perverse (I haven’t told you everything) version of a Hieronymus I-can-spell-you-but-could-never-pronounce-you Bosch painting.

Now, normally I’d find all this nonsense of the mind most agreeable to pass the time, dwelling upon and analysing for hours, seeing as I (somewhat pretentiously… oh, alright, completely pretentiously) fancy myself some sort of uneducated surrealist. The thought that I’m meant to be resting, however - escaping for a few hours from the horrors that crowd my mind all the waking day - this thought hangs over the entire dreaming landscape dark-clouding it.

Finally, ten minutes before the alarm clock on my mobile signals the end of this designated ‘restful’ period, I freefall through darkness and wake at the point of impact. The irrevocable loss of these invaluable ten minutes sets me off worse than any alarm bell ever encountered and I rise in the foulest of moods; arguably the perfect way to begin any day. Cross me at that moment and a single sleepy half-look will send you six feet under quick, electrified and turned to dust.

Fortuitous, we find it then, that I don’t usually experience tempestuous nights in the company of others. Not this particular brand, anyway. I’m far too preoccupied with you - or more precisely - what you’ll think of me, to allow certain small aggravations to prevent our enjoyment. One day, when I soak my nightmares through your sheets and I bolt upright awake and spit and curse this wretched body and diseased mind, you might say you know me and together we can balk and sulk at this sudden realisation.