Addressing the Concerns of the Inconsolable

Leon’s eyes popped open.
He looked around excitedly, nervously, acutely aware that he needed to be very careful if he was to remember the dream, so he lay there in his bed, wondering how to get up and record it.
He lay there for what? Ten minutes?
Ten minutes he spent revelling in the dream’s meandering, abstract beauty, regarding it as better than any film he’d seen, trying his damnedest to put the pieces together as they came to him, knowing that each moment he spent in delay was a moment taking him further away from the dream’s true recording.
The thought of forgetting it altogether wasn’t helping matters.
‘Worrying only makes things worse,’ he whispered to himself, careful not to wake the dream’s creator, so he lay for a while longer to steady his nerves.
But this turned into a juggling act with the three balls of consciousness; reveal, protect and destroy.
Crucial parts of the dream plucked from his mind could soon be lost forever, and Leon would be none the wiser.
Looking towards his slow and ageing laptop, Leon elected to use paper to record it.
‘Paper and a good old-fashioned pen, that’s how I’ll write it.’
Deciding that the time was right, if not all too late, Leon carefully rose from his bed as if not to wake a partner.
Even with this million pound dream laying in wait for execution, Leon knew he could never write it down without a morning cup of tea, so he made his way down the stairs and switched on the kettle, keeping his mind as numb as possible to his surroundings.
When he opened the fridge door, he immediately noticed that someone from the house had moved his little carton of milk from where he had put it the night before, and the nightmare of shared living fell upon him again.
‘I bet they spat in it,’ he muttered to himself. ‘Why do people do that?’
Resentment, he knew, was a filthy habit and one that drew him away from himself, so he quietly made his way back to the kettle, which had boiled, and picked it up to fill his mug.
A member of staff and the kitchen fitter were having an early morning chat about eating habits in the living room, but then the member of staff came in to make herself some tea.
‘Hello, Leon,’ she said.
‘Hi,’ he replied, eyes fixed on his mug.
Luckily, her mind was elsewhere as well, which pleased him as he squeezed his teabag against the side of the mug and flicked it into the bin.
Free to go back upstairs, Leon was aware that the dream had fractured into quite nonsensical little pieces, vaguely recoverable but like patchwork that needed sewing and hemming, a big budget film lost somewhere in the wastebasket of his mind.
He placed the mug on the desk and went to a drawer to get some pieces of paper and pen.
Quickly rolling a cigarette, he began to write, hoping that it would all come back to him…

He was playing in a huge football match, but there were only two players on each side.
The opposing team were losing and Leon was in high spirits.
As a gesture of goodwill, and to please or perhaps tease the other team’s supporters, Leon asked his team-mate to play for the other team.
‘Just to make a match of it,’ he said, ‘just for a while’.
His team-mate agreed, and the other team started scoring freely against him.
When Leon asked his team-mate to come back to his side, he acted as if he couldn’t hear and carried on playing against him.
Feeling at a loss, Leon found himself in a huge mansion standing at the foot of a marbled staircase.
He could hear his team-mate talking to someone upstairs so he shouted but no answer came back.
Looking around him, there seemed little else to do but go up and confront him so he walked up the stairs.
When he arrived at the room from where the commotion was coming, he found a woman on a large bed surrounded by four babies and his team-mate.
Not wanting to disturb the happy family, he turned and left the room without saying a word.
On the landing, he heard a noise that seemed to be coming from the floor above, but instead of going up the next flight of stairs, Leon decided to climb a ladder (which had miraculously appeared) to the ceiling and put his ear to the place where the noise, a scratching sound, seemed to be coming from.
He decided that the scratching noise was some sort of code and that he would never be able to understand it, so he came back down from the ladder.
Stood alone on the landing, he noticed that Amanda, a girlfriend that he had not seen for some twenty years and who had broken his heart, was standing in a pink night gown by a door. She wore a fixed, sultry smile and her eyes beckoned him towards her.
He wanted to greet her from where he stood but words failed him. As he walked slowly and timidly towards her, she turned and went into the room.
Leon naturally assumed that this was another bedroom and that she would be sat on a huge bed waiting for him, but when he entered the room she was nowhere to be seen.
He walked over to the window and looked down, imagining that Amanda must have fallen.
To his surprise, all he could see was water. The house was surrounded by a murky, grey sea.
He turned, confused, and ran to the room where his team-mate had been with the four children and their mother to warn them that they were at sea, but the room was full of cardboard boxes.
Alone with the boxes, Leon was transported back to the football stadium.
The crowd roared his name in jubilation as he approached a huge silver cup. A smiling man beckoned him to take the cup, so Leon took it and held it high above his shoulders.
The crowd roared with delight, and that was how Leon remembered the dream.

He went to lie down on his bed to read what he had written. It seemed to him as if he’d done quite a good job of piecing it together, although it was obvious by the look on his face that he’d failed to uncover its meaning.
With a sigh, he dropped the pieces of paper to the floor and looked at the ceiling for a few minutes.
A knock sounded at the door.
‘Can I come in, Leon?’ asked the member of staff from downstairs.
‘Yes, come in,’ said Leon.
She entered the room and closed the door behind her. ‘Mr Wan’s coming to see you at ten so you best get yourself ready,’ she said, looking at the floor and the pieces of paper. ‘Have you been writing again?’
Leon nodded mechanically.
‘Will you show Mr Tan what you’ve written when he comes this time? It might help.’
Leon said anything.
She went over to his window and looked outside. ‘ It’s a lovely day out there.’ Leon said nothing. ‘How are you finding the pills the doctor prescribed? Do you think we’ve found the right ones for you now?’ she asked carefully.
‘They seem to be working alright,’ he said, his eyes glued to the ceiling in shame.
‘That’s good, isn’t it?’
Leon said nothing.
‘I’ll be downstairs if you need me.’
‘I’ll be fine.’
When she’d gone, Leon got up from his bed and began the familiar exercise of tearing up the pieces of paper into the size of postage stamps and dropping them into his sink.
Pouring the remainder of his tea over them, he gathered them up, squeezed them into a little ball and then lazily threw it into the bin.