The Dreamtime

In the summertime there are often nights where I’m too warm to sleep. I suppose that’s true of everyone, but for a very long time it would frustrate me that, where clearly other people can snatch enough sleep to operate, I would lie awake worry that I’m missing out on something.

I used often to lie awake, staring at the slightly rusted springs of the bed above mine, and wonder how other people deal with the same situation. By some awkward confluence of books, the vaguest readings of yoga and an abundance of video games I came to construct the beginnings of a dream that would relax me into sleep.

Where guided meditation recommends a slow staircase approach (counting down from ten, slowly into a trancelike state and other such half-sense I’m not entirely sure I believe in), I’ve always found it doesn’t quite suit the maddening rush of colours that fills my subconscious. As I lay in bed, clammy with sweat and feverish with the balmy heat of a fetid midsummer’s night, I unwittingly pioneered what I would later term "turbo-meditation".

Beginning with the realisation that, if lying still for long enough the human body begins to feel like it’s in motion, I began to construct various dreamscapes with which that feeling of motion wouldn’t interfere.

Despite a vague feeling of uneasiness I tend to get around any body of water deep enough that I might be entirely immersed, I’ve begun more and more to imagine myself lying in a small open canoe (as opposed to a kayak, which I believe implies a canopy or covering). This canoe drifts lazily downstream on a broad river, the banks of which are lined with an assortment of unspecified greenery; trees forming a canopy that roofs the lapping river below just thinly enough that the occasional glints of sunlight that do filter through are soft highlights on the crests of the water’s wavelets, rather than a blinding glare.

The river itself is deep, clear, and with the slightest hint of blue, entirely artificial, running over a bed of small brown-grey rocks, each softened and rounded by the flow around it. I’ve often wondered if, in my half-dreaming state I might swim in it and breathe comfortably… sadly though, I’ve never tried.

I’d imagine there’s no sadder place to asphyxiate than in your own dreams.

That’s too sad a note to end a blog about so happy a place on though. I truly love that calm place where I end up so often before I find sleep.

Marc “Silly sentimental blog” Mac

Today there are coffee beans in my pockets. I stole them from a display in a chocolatier’s; I’d hoped they might make the change in my pockets smell less sour, but I guess there was only so much my meagre stolen goods could manage. My change smells as though someone spilled coffee on it once, but still powerfully of metal.