These Are Nigh Times.
We’re drifting off together (she may already be asleep) at the same time as standing outside cemetery gates together, somehow in a jovial mood. There’s a hint of apprehension about entering but I know I’m dreaming and decide to demonstrate this. We walk into the cemetery and I lift off the ground about a foot or two, my legs together and my arms out to either side, cruciform (the preferred form of this graveyard, it would seem). I hover forward quite quickly and she runs to keep up with me, skipping every now and then like an excited child. I remain aware of us cuddling on the bed and seem to be able to hear thoughts from her sleepy head manifest as excitable comments within the dream. I close my arms around her dream-body and decide/say: “Let’s do it!” and shoot us up into the air (I’m sure at this point she giggles out loud). As we get higher I become aware of these huge shadowy protean shapes, giant monsters whose duty it is to stop such flagrant violations of the rules. I decide not to heed them. We soar ever upwards beyond the grip of the beasts until I sense the beginning of some kind of fainting, wilting dissolution – as if dream-space is curved… at this point I think she changes position and I wake feeling slightly disappointed. In the morning when I tell her the dream she is amazed – she was just about to ask if we “did anything together last night”!
(30th October 2005)
The dream you just read was my first proper lucid dream since childhood. Back then I remember looking forward to sleep: wondering what never-to-be-invented sweets I might eat (for free!) in the shop of my dreams… yearning to ride my flying armchair on red-arrow-heatwaves… to swim about in our submerged house. This ability to dream lucidly faded gradually as I entered my teens, and I can think of only one good reason it’s surfaced again recently: I’ve been keeping a dream diary.
Dreams are funny things, they interact with and reference the waking world in such endlessly inventive ways. When I look back at some of the dreams I’ve experienced over the years it’s clear there’s no real line between them and the waking events they emerged from and became entangled with – they are part of a continuum, part of a process. Dreams happen as much as anything happens, in so far as they happen to us. Memory is a dream, and so is imagination. Part of you is dreaming now.
As a child I couldn’t fall asleep listening to my heartbeat. It scared me. (I’d sculpt a little hollow in the pillow in which to lay my ear so as not to let pressure amplify the booming.) There was the discomfort of the beat like the ticking of a clock, counting time, and the worry that paying too much attention would cause it to skip – but there was something more: each beat was the soft but ominous thud of a Wolf’s paw, advancing on me steadily from afar, so far away that it wouldn’t have bothered me were it not for the fact that each beat drew him one step nearer. I had the sense that when my head left the pillow the Wolf just froze, and lay waiting for my heartbeat to reawaken him. I experienced this fear for the best part of a year; until one day, sleeping in my dad’s old bed at my grandparent’s house, I forced myself to keep listening to the beats. The Wolf started running as the adrenaline flooded my heart, coming at me out of the dark woods with burning eyes and matted fur, I held my ground as he came closer and closer, close enough to kill me. The last I saw of him before he disappeared were his open jaws, right in my face.
Just a dream? Or the conquering of a real fear?
Both, neither, and nothing so clear…
These are Nigh Times:
Immanent, imminent,
And already here.
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