Yesterday Night, I Had a Dream...

It seems like a tremendously long time since I’ve made an entry, and gaps like those always discourage making further entries, because there’s an onus on you to make up for all of the lost time. The other problem is that I seem to have gotten into the habit of writing blogs, not uploading them, and later reading over them, thoroughly unsatisfied, before deleting them. It’s hardly an ideal state, so I thought I’d just recount this dream I had, and then upload it immediately.

Yesterday evening, I went to bed a little later than usual. It being a cold day, I’d decided it would probably be for the best if I just crammed in as much sleep as possible, but when I got to bed I just sat there and browsed the old internet for a while.

Anyway, I’m not sure if any of this was the cause, I’m just setting the scene, you understand. My dream went roughly along these lines.

I “awoke” in a doctor’s surgery, lying on what appears to be a dentist’s chair. The whole thing was very grim, a kind of 1930s view of what a future-gone-wrong might look like. The whole room was in shadow, and the only light source was a far-too-bright ER style lamp hung low over my face, so that the doctor/dentist can see what he’s doing. Thanks to the severity of the lamp, he’s just a shadow, backlit with an intense white light. I remember thinking that it was like sunlight, only colder.

Arrayed on a tray attached to the chair were a collection of various un-doctorly tools. From left to right; a scalpel, a scissors (black), a drill (Black & Decker), a hammer (claw) and a screwdriver (Philips head). All caked in a combination of blood, dust and flies. Just as I heard the sound of the drill whining to life, I woke up with a kind of relieved shiver. I’m not sure if anyone ever wakes up with a jolt, but I never do.

Relieved to have woken up from such a strange dream, and admittedly a little curious as to what kind of operation could possibly have involved such bizarre accoutrements, I rolled over onto my back ( I sleep on my side, not sure why, just how I am I guess).

As soon as I rolled over I noticed that some industrious spider had spent the night constructing a fairly large and twisted web around eight inches above my face. I looked at the web distractedly for a while, before noticing the sunlight from my window (which is broken in such a way that it’s always just a little open) picking out flecks of moisture from my breath as it condensed on the web. At this point it came to me that whatever spider had assembled the web must have been freakishly big.

Each strand, hung heavy with my breath and drooping towards my face, seemed as wide as thread. Having lived with insects for twenty-odd years, I resolved not to be bothered by it, and gently detached the web from the wall and the opposite side of my bed with my left hand, feeling the strength of its construction as I did so.

I got up and got dressed, realising how cold it was despite the sun shining through the window, I smacked on a too-big, bright orange hat and went downstairs to see what there was to be had for breakfast. It’s often the case that I “check what’s to be had for breakfast”, look at it for a while, and then decide I’ll just have tea. This was one of those mornings.

As I flicked on the kettle I noticed that there are two tiny snails crawling along the outside of it, their shells perfect beige-on-brown spirals, each the reverse of the other. The red button on the kettle lit up and, for a second I wondered to myself what will happen to those two snails, but the thought was cut short by the need to get a mug and a teabag.

I read whatever article happens to be left on the page on which my father left the newspaper open before heading to work. It was something about the economic slump and Iceland, though I’d be hard pressed to remember anything more than that. The came to the boil and clicked off twice (it’s developed a strange pre-click that always throws me), and as I picked it up I saw that the two snails had vanished, without a trace. For some reason, the thought that they’d just left cheered me up. I like snails, I don’t like the idea of boiling them; that’s probably the size of it.

Having dropped a tea bag into my mug (it has a polar bear on it), I went to grab some milk from the fridge. On opening it, I was greeted by its usual acrid tang… no matter what we do, that fridge smells dreadful. I stretched my hand in (better not to maintain any more contact than absolutely necessary) and noticed as I picked up the milk that it’s surrounded by a cloudy whitish liquid, to a depth of around half an inch.

As I extricated the milk, I realised that whatever the gak was that had surrounded it, it was all over the innards of the fridge. Furthermore, the stuff proved to be so viscous that when I did pull the milk from its cloying grasp, tendrils seemed to be dragged with the carton. The stuff left on the floor of the fridge made no effort to close the perfect square left by the milk. When I returned the milk to the fridge, it slotted right back into the hole it had left before… disconcertingly easily, as though being welcomed back.

As I finished making my tea (a half turn anti-clockwise to make sure the milk and tea combine properly), I caught sight of my backlit reflection/silhouette in its surface, and turned to check if the father had left the kitchen light on. Apparently not.

I walked into the front room (where the downstairs mirror lives) to see what was up. My previously day-glo orange hat had acquired something far closer to an ordinary glow. I pulled it from my head, shocked and a little afraid of why a hat would be so illuminated. Looking at myself in the mirror, my head was limned with blazing, holy light. Ringed by an old-school Christian halo, just as you might see in stained glass on church windows wherever you might go.

[Edit: At this point, I remember my sister(s) (a strange combination of the two) walking by the door, pausing long enough to say, "You do know you have a complex, don't you?" Dream criticism is the worst, I feel.

I groped around the back of my head, looking for anything that might make sense of what was going on, and felt something achingly strange and vaguely familiar. I’m not sure if anyone else has every felt a deer’s antler before; they’re a strange combination of incredibly tough and very smooth, and at the same time, porous where they join the skull. That weird combination of textures was embedded at the junction of my neck and spine.

Immediately, and in a manner that never quite happens outside dreams, I knew that some mad doctor had nailed (or otherwise grafted, I wasn’t able to fully investigate) a halo to my neck…

It was alright though, because at just that moment I woke up.

I wonder if I can persuade Adam and Ross to let us do a song about it…

I seem to have had a great many dogs...

It seems to me, in the manner of so many things remembered from when I was young, that myself and my siblings spent a great deal of time asking the father if he would appropriate a dog.

It didn’t have to be a particular kind of dog; as with all small children, we weren’t picky. The most scabrous and mangy of dogs would have been welcomed with open arms, but alas, ours was a house surrounded by “cat people” – just the kind of environment that would have little or no effect on a dog, but which would deliver noticeable recoil to a dog owner.

Not willing to draw the ire of our neighbours, my father was good enough to acquire from our Aunt (Waa, as previously mentioned) a cat that any would-be dog owner should have been happy to own. He lacked a cat’s natural skittishness, being possessed instead of a very canine will to scavenge and beg for attention. In truth though, he was an odd-eyed (one green, one blue) and scatter-brained thing, and when his death eventually found him, it would prove to be kidney failure, caused by a rat bite.

His wasn’t a death we felt keenly, by then bored with his essentially feline nature, we had paid him little enough attention that, when he eventually died, we noticed not because he hadn’t been home in some time, but because a neighbour informed us he had (kindly) dealt with the remains.

My father, in a fit we would later come to recognise as the pattern reasserted itself, named him Basil, with just a little less deliberation than he would later employ in the naming of his iPod (it’s Angela). We would remain petless then for some years before the siblings found a border-collie pup while on holiday and managed to wrangle enough sentiment from the father that he let us keep it. Again the father’s will to name things leapt to the fore and we were gifted with a dog named Raptor. He was named, not after a dinosaur or jet, but after a firewall in the father’s workplace.

Raptor was well loved though, and while his incessant and shrill barking had seemed initially to mark him a potentially short-lived addition to the family, our love for him overcame a series of potentially fatal flaws. He took a destructive dislike to strangers, children, furniture, deer and other dogs. At this point, worried that our dog might be bored, and thrilled with ourselves over the success of raising a puppy which had yet to destroy anything but furniture, we introduced a second collie, who was promptly named Wendy. She came to us through my sister Jane, who then worked in a pound.

It would however soon come to light that Wendy was addled by some strange malaise. She had spent some time as a stray dog, and, while picking the ticks from her fur (at great length), the brother would find large black lumps, each the size of half a golf ball, all along her abdomen. Within two months of adopting her, a vet would confirm that somehow, miraculously, she had cancer of pretty much every organ a dog needs to live. As an act of mercy, we had her put to sleep.

Soon afterward, Jane found another puppy, a soft brown and with darker lines around her eyes that gave her a perpetually disappointed look, we named her Fran. At this point though, Raptor’s slow boil aggression had turned him from a relatively hospitable animal into one that would eventually snap at one of the sisters on her return from a trip, and so he too would be put to sleep.

While the brother was the one to walk him to the pound, it would be Jane who had the last two interactions with him. Working in the pound often necessitated actions it would prove a little hard to justify allowing a sixteen year old girl to carry out. In this line were the two last times Jane saw our dog. The first was when a vet asked if she would help shave and restrain a dog that was to be put down, which would turn out to be Raptor – a task to which Jane was uniquely suited.

Stranger still, there were times, in the height of summer, when collections for “organic waste” were so few and far between that it became necessary to store the corpses of disposed-of dogs in a shed designed to act as a meat locker. I’d been told that on the hottest of days, blood would trickle from beneath the walls of the shed, as the mass of collected dogs within began to defrost. While decanting dogs from out-building to shed, Jane chanced to come across Raptor’s chilled and stiff self – an experience I find singularly unsettling.

And now, sadly, we find ourselves entering the same phase with Fran. Fran has been, by and large, the best of our dogs. She’s lacked Wendy’s general cancer-patient status and neatly avoided Raptor’s steadily growing aggression, but she’s just as neatly avoided any semblance of house training. Indeed, years after her adoption she’s still prone to just plain peeing all over the place for attention.

Part of the problem this time though, is that in as many ways as we managed to train Raptor and Wendy (indeed, in as many ways as I failed to train Fran) Fran has managed to train me. For every command she doesn’t quite understand, there’s a behaviour in me that’s become second nature, without any apparent effort on her part.

The problem is that I know now that when my house is no longer occupied by the sound of her scrabbling against the walls, chasing whatever it is dogs chase when they’re alone, I will still spend time making sure every door in the house is closed and sealed before I leave, for fear she’ll sleep in someone else’s bed. I know I’ll still leave the thick crust from the end of a loaf of bread behind. I know I’ll set aside the crisps from a bag that fall just short of edible, and saddest of all I know that I’ll keep doing these things long after it sinks in that she won’t be around.

I’ve been trained so well by this dog that, even when I don’t expect her to be there, I tense my stomach on entering a room, wary of exuberant introductions. I may, in every meaningful way, have failed spectacularly to train her to do, or not to do, anything and simultaneously, she’s trained me to behave in ways most conducive to her. In many ways, it’s like a bad marriage. Every time she decides to go a bit “rock star” and turn the room upside down for attention, I sit there and take it… like an abused spouse, I love the poor girl despite her little episodes.

Of course, what all of this boils down to is, I’m not sure I make the best of dog owners. I’ve yet to had a dog last more than three years before overwhelming evidence has presented itself that the dog really would be better off far away from me (at the very least), and while I can’t take sole responsibility, it’s hard to deny the mounting evidence that there’s a very good case for me not to be given sole dominion over anything’s life.

I suppose the saddest part of all of this is that soon there will be another collar nailed to the wall beside Raptor’s, bearing mute testament to the fact that, for some reason, even the dog I’ve loved the most has ended up so irrevocably broken by the experience of being my dog that she too is now gone.

I either need to get some kind of dog-caring lessons, or I need to think about keeping fish.