Half Remembered

Half-remembered Waking Dreams

Sleep, that enigmatic world of mysterious shadows that contains many and varied states of unconsciousness and a blurred line between the perceived waking world of reality and a shrouded mystery of ethereal confusion that some called sleep.  One of my favourite lines from an ELO song (a voice synthesized prologue to ‘Twilight’) is “Just round the corners of your waking mind…” and that stands out for me and that transitional state I once feared, but now embrace. I cannot comprehend how my mind conveys me from one state to another, but like anything if experienced enough it becomes less alarming; yet ever more fascinating.

What I love about sleep and the journey to and from it is the link between the two. It remains elusive and indefatigable; a phantom in the truest sense ‘a thing insubstantial of the mind…’ as Shakespeare’s Macbeth once put it.  I wish my brain had a record & playback facility so I could go back and reimagine or relive (not sure which in that ethereal transitory state), but the vaguely felt emotions belong to those moments, not upon waking reflection.  Like holiday snaps such images could only tell part of what was going on at the time.  Older readers of this will also remember Noel Harrison singing ‘Windmills of Your Mind and ‘half remembered names and faces….’ That neatly sums up those moments for me.

I have never actually somnambulated and given my clumsiness would have probably disappeared off some precipice by now.  Yet in a true dreamworld I have travelled many miles…I just wish I could have captured those times and frozen them fresh from the moment.