First day back

Having dreams make forays into my still-awake mind is like having still-animated eyes pecked by impatient crows.

The shock-troops of my sleeping-pill make bold assaults, only to be beaten back over and over at the moment of my submission.  Each time, I am once again roused.  I am reminded of the night of delirium in a remote hut on the shore of Lake Malawi.  Short lapses into a sleep far too energetic to be sustained.

I recall from somewhere that dreams occur towards the end of sleep – towards morning.  Bullshit!

Each dream mocks me with some underlying theme of otherplaceness before turning me roughly out on the pillow.  I've been struggling for a week now.  I seem to have lost my pattern while on leave – hence the sleeping tablet.

Throwing off the duvet, a full bladder affords me the excuse to stand up and stagger in the darkness towards the door.  I am barely orientated to the room, whose walls seem strange to me.

As I stand in the glare of the bathroom, I struggle to recall even one scrap of the hundreds of fragments of dreams that occupied me only moments before.

Again I lie in the ink-blackness, twisting first this way, then that – looking for the sweet-spot where I might lose myself.  Held in jaw-tight tension I try to draw back my consciousness for sleep to fill the void, feeling its advances grow, only to be cut back, die and re-grow.

A girl with long dark hair walks the corridors, knocking at doors.  I ask what she wants.  She answers “Nothing” and walks on.

My fear is that someone will call us all to order, drifting into silence in the emptiness of years.

And now I am finally here. 

3 a.m.

Sleep.

05:50  The alarm explodes in the middle of the night.  I reach out and grope – grapple to find the switch and silence the noise.

Simultaneous disarray as a world in its entirety, peopled with familiar faces I never before met (with the exception of M) is lost to a dream Armageddon.  An Apocalypse upon my pillow.

The family. 

The sprawling house that I knew so well. 

The multitude of guests. 

The mates who invented a table game in the back room and were busy playing it. 

My girl/boyfriend's stepfather, whose elder brother inherited a peerage; whose technicians worked at machine-tools in the barn. 

The sweet, apologetic mother whose home was turned over to partying hordes; who showed me innocently to the en-suite. 

The band at the bottom of the garden. 

The festival atmosphere – walking along with M.

All obliterated by the piercing signal of the alarm in the darkness.  The unexpected darkness.

My first day at work for two weeks.

I would give anything to roll over and go back.