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…