Saturday 12 July 2008

Analyse this.

Well at least my mini-series of date dreams ended on a high. Now it's all about the nightmares, thanks to my negative mindset of the last couple of days, and the fact that I'm currently on the Isle of Wight and thus not sleeping in my own bedroom.

Am I the only person that happens to? The moment my subconscious recognises that I'm not in my own bed, it kicks into bad-dream overdrive. Our honeymoon was a prime example – I'd regularly wake up to find myself whacking P round the head as retaliation for his part in yet another kidnap plot. Kidnap is something of a recurring dream-theme, actually. When P & I first moved in together (into a poky studio flat, I should add) the poor sod was once woken up at 4am with a punch on his arm and me yelling, 'You KNOW my Grandad isn't allowed to drive!' (I'd been dreaming that P had kidnapped my Grandad, and made him drive around hairy looking, cliff-edge roads at gunpoint. It deserved a punch.)

It's amazing I was asleep long enough to have that nightmare actually. This was back in P's sleep apnoea days, when getting a bit of shut-eye was about as easy as wading upstream through treacle (thankfully I discovered Touche Éclat at around the same time). And, believe me, a serious lack of sleep will have you doing some weird-ass stuff. Once, I was so sick of P's decibel-defying, unrhythmic snoring that I lifted all 6-foot-2 of him out of bed and dragged him into our tiny bathroom for the night. He woke up in the morning, propped awkwardly against the loo, confused yet refreshed after an uninterrupted seven-hour sleep, and I had the most delicious night's rest in a long time. There was also the night when I found myself in a dangerously dazed and sleep-deprived state, reaching for a knife as a means to getting P to JUST SHUT UP. It's not like I'd have done anything serious (honest, m'lord), but at the time it seemed a perfectly reasonable solution to the snoring. (Somebody once made the mistake of telling my mother-in-law that story. If looks could kill...)

My lengthy point, however, is that P & I are perfectly used to such weird bedtime behaviour (not that kind – well not so much at the moment anyway), so it was no surprise to either of us when I woke myself up crying during the previous two nights.

Nightmare one began as another date dream, this time with Almost Boy, who arranged to meet me in a private box for a football match at Wembley (which, by the way, ranks as a bloody good date in my book). But when I got to the box and admired the view of the stadium, I was disturbed by a coldness behind me. I turned around to see a funeral procession walking by, then two men brought a white coffin into my pitch-side box and left me alone with it. As the realisation of my deceased date dawned on me, the coffin opened with a creak (a bit like in those spooky Scooby Doo episodes) and Dead Almost Boy (or should that be Almost Dead Boy?) explained to me that, no worries, we could reschedule our date 'on the other side', as I'd soon be joining him there.


Then last night I dreamt I'd been to the hospital to see Smiley Surgeon, who informed me that my cancer was untreatable and, while I was in no immediate
danger, my days were definitely numbered. Then, very calmly, I made my way back home, picked up my Mac, logged into Facebook and updated my page with the following: 'L has got between 5 and 10 years to live. Bet you weren't expecting to read that in her status update.'

Make of these dreams what you will. But, whatever they mean, I'm torn between two conclusions: (a) I've got one hell of a dark sense of humour, or (b) I'm just well and truly fucked up. Either way, I'm never eating cheese before bed again.

No comments: