DREAMS AND REALITY

I can tell that my sleep patterns have gone all awry again because I’m having dreams again, or rather I’m having dreams which I can actually remember having, and that usually implies that I’m waking up far too soon after I’ve been in my deepest sleep cycle. Not that I really need my subconscious to be telling me that, because the generally staggering about and early morning clumsiness is enough to demonstrate the fact quite clearly, even to my addled early-morning self.

Still the dreams themselves are interesting enough and I seem to get to visit people and places about which I haven’t thought in a very long time, and the fact that they’re all acting rather oddly doesn’t seem to matter to me all that much because I think I’ve got to a stage in my life when I’ve finally realised that “behaving oddly” is what people actually do, and their oddness can do me far less harm in a fantasy world that it ever does in the real one.

A few nights ago, for example, I was visited by a brace of Marilyns Monroe and, although this strange “out-of-time” visitation might possibly have been the perfect fantasy for a lot of the members of other generations, my own virtual experience was not, I suppose, the strange wish-fulfillment-fest that some people might, rather wickedly, now be imagining it might have been.

No, instead, “my” Marilyns seemed mostly concerned about their hair and which hairstyle I preferred. Younger Marilyn with her tight blonde curls seemed more than a little distressed when the more mature Marilyn with longer, straighter hair seemed to be getting all of the attention, which probably should be telling me something or other about something or other, but I’m not sure what.

Perhaps I was just overdue for a shave…?

Last night’s journey into the world of the undermind was far more esoteric, however, and dated back to the days when our little band of busy bees who worked in the Yellow Pages hive were being bought and sold to various companies as if we were so many pieces of fruit and vegetables.

This time we were trudging around our new home which turned out to be some kind of death-trap filled version of a supermarket – possibly “Fine Fare” - in which you had to constantly be on your guard to stay out of danger (sorry, Mo, but you plummeted off the edge of a non-staircase at one point… In my defence, you got better later…!), in a situation that was, quite literally I suppose, a health and safety nightmare.

Worries about the future interspersed with far too many episodes of “The Avengers” (and just a smidgen of “South Park”) I fear…

Or perhaps it was something I ate: “There’s more gravy than grave about you, Marilyn, and you too, Marilyn…”

There was something else, too… another distinct event involving “Twitter” that came into my mind on a couple of nights, the second one specifically to remind me of the first, but it’s now drifted away again on the morning air, just leaving the slightest hint of ennui behind it to find me wondering whether I’ve forgotten something that once seemed to be very, very important…

Still, as with most things experienced in a dream-state, I was never to know how any of these situations unfolded because my natural internal alarm clock found me wide awake and watching those red digital numbers dance around in what is, at least, the darkness once again, and I was soon up and about and demonstrating both the shuffling gait and the clumsiness as another typical day started to unfold.

And so the average day consists of getting up, taking pills, making a packed lunch, attempting to write some nonsense dressed up as a blog entry, breakfast, a drive to the station, the morning commute during “drive-time”, a morning’s work, eating that packed lunch, an afternoon’s work, the evening commute during “school-run” time, home, a drive out to the station and back again, the evening meal, a bit of telly and… and they’re all (more or less) exactly the same, and rarely involve dead celebrities rowing with themselves, or orientation days in deadly supermarkets…

There are, naturally, variations within this sad routine. Different things do happen. From the choice of cereal or sandwich filling, to playing a CD instead of listening to the radio, the days do manage to be different despite the obvious similarities, and I suppose it’s those little variations that do make all of the difference in the end.

Perhaps that’s why we do need the dreams, to make the banality of everyday existence seem at least a little more bearable, and it’s from the dark corners of the imagination and the ideas formed in dreams that, in my case at any rate, my “creative” writing emerges, transformed by my own ineptitudes into something far more banal than those unfettered flights of fancy by the process of my ham-fisted word-wrangling.

The Marilyns have already been transformed and reappeared in the “Blog Tag” exchanges, and those angst-filled career worries and distorted memories of people and places will no doubt get filtered into another entry in these sad little pages sometime fairly soon.

There, that’s something to look forward to, isn’t it boys and girls?

Stay tuned…

I’m sure even the prospect of that will be sending you all off to dreamland in an effort to escape, so sleep well, my angels, don’t let your own inner demons bite you, and tell the Marilyns that I said “Hi…”

They’ll know who you mean.