Series 2, Post 1: Nightmares

“These dreams go on when I close my eyes, every second of the night I live another life
.”
– Bernie Taupin

Never a truer word was written by Bernie Taupin rightly celebrated as one of the 20th Century’s greatest lyricists. For all my life I have lived a dual identity, one in the waking world and another when I’m asleep. My waking life is consistent and orderly but my dreams are fractured and dysfunctional. Sometimes this makes my dreams exhilarating but on other occasions it is terrifying. The worst part is that more often than not, I’m not in control of my dreams. Rationally most dreams can be explained as the mind replaying something which is relevant to the waking world. Then there are the other dreams, ones born out of the abstract part of another dimension. You know the ones I’m talking about, they have no rational explanation.

If you combine a dream that has no rational explanation with one that you are not able to control, add in an unpleasant scenario and repeat this dream every night for over a decade you have the perfect storm. This is the purest form of a nightmare, my very earliest nightmare involved frogs. I actually quite like frogs, unlike my beloved great aunt who had a morbid phobia, but in this particular scenario they were my nemesis.

The nightmare was always played out the same way in the same exact place, like a broken recording of an event that was physically impossible. My childhood bedroom was on the upper floor of my parents house. It was next to the stairs but separated by a narrow landing which served little purpose except to throw light into the stairwell from an offset window. My bed was pushed up against a plasterboard wall which separated my room from the landing. The walls of my room were wallpapered with a series of cartoonish vehicles on a plain white background. It was the late 80s-early 90s and typically restrained in the British middle class fashion. The carpet was a magnolia mid-length pile with a hole burnt into it by a spotlight which had fallen over while switched on.

In the waking world my bedroom was redecorated several times, but in my dreams it always reverted to its original design except for a few “additional” features. The window handle had disappeared meaning it was sealed shut, the door was off its hinges leaving just the frame, and the bookcase next to the bed slid back to reveal a hidden compartment. In reality the compartment was impossible as it would be the aforementioned landing space. In my dreams the bookcase would slide on its own accord, opening up a black void behind.

The space was not empty but filled with hundreds of glove puppets in the form of frogs. The glove puppets spilled out of the space like a mighty flood that I tried to hold back by sliding the bookcase back into place. I usually woke up from my dream before discovering whether I was successful or not. This unpleasant feeling always followed me after waking, and for a time I dreaded going to sleep knowing this dream was coming.

Over time this dream faded into the memory of a nightmare. Occasionally I still think about it but my brain has never been able to process its origin or its meaning. Perhaps there was neither, it was a self perpetuating fear of nightmares. I still have nightmares but I cope with them better. What I now dread is not being able to sleep enough or sleeping too much! Doubtless this fear shall also pass in time.