Dreams

"Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together.”

- Anais Nin.

The problem with weaving your dreams in with your actions is that it`s thoroughly exhausting. By the time I woke up this morning, I had fought a tiger, taken it to a pub for a beer and then been half eaten by it (the bottom half: legs and chest); I had climbed some kind of knitting needle, chatted to a postman who wasn`t there, and then - for good measure - pulled gremlins out of my wardrobe. Three times, because they kept coming back. And if that`s not a good reason to be tired, I don`t know what is.

I`ve always been a strange sleeper. As a newborn baby, the nurses in the hospital called me "the mouse" because I squeaked while I was dreaming; when I could walk, my mum would wake up in the middle of the night to find me standing in the centre of the kitchen, fast asleep, or on a window sill with the window open, flapping my arms. Throughout my entire childhood I walked, I talked, I fell out of bed: I regularly got dressed and woke up while doing up my shoe laces, and had horrific reoccurring dreams in which my dad was wearing a bear suit and the bear was wearing my dad suit, or I was being shot repeatedly.

Everyone assumed I would grow out of it - as, statistically, most children do - but I didn`t: in fact, with age the strange night behaviour only got worse. I soon found that I very regularly had dreams that were both real and not real: where I was fast asleep, but could see both the real world and my dream world at the same time; could not only see them, in fact, but converse with both of them. A fact which - obviously - absolutely terrified the living daylights out of my family and, when I got to the appropriate age, every boyfriend I have ever had.

"Who are you talking to?" one demanded, six weeks into our relationship. I had apparently sat bolt up right in bed and was chatting quite happily to somebody in the corner of the Devon Bed and Breakfast we were staying in.
"Oh, just some lady," I told him. I can remember all of this vividly, incidentally: the dream and my boyfriend were both equally real to me (and - after 24 years at that point - I was completely used to negotiating two different dimensions at the same time).
"A lady?" he repeated faintly. And then, to his eternal credit, he said with quite a lot of curiosity: "what does she look like?"
"She`s very old, and she`s very kind looking, and she`s wearing a white nightie."
"Umm. Okay. And what are you talking about?"
"She just popped by to ask me if we were having a nice time, and to see if we needed anything."
The lady, thinking it was her que, then chirpily waved at my boyfriend.
"Uh," the poor boy said. "Who is she?"
"I don`t know. Let me just ask." I looked straight at the lady, who had moved towards the window. "Who are you?"
"I used to live here a long time ago," she said. "I love it here."
So I told my boyfriend what she had said, and I remember he fell back on the pillow and put his hand over his eyes.
"If you don`t mind," he said eventually, "I would really appreciate it if you could ask her to come back another time because we both need to sleep now."
"Okay," I said, apologised for our rudeness, and then - when she had gone - fell back on my own pillow and straight back into oblivion.

"I did warn you," I told him the next morning. "I`m sorry, but I did. Before we started dating, I told you that it happens. I told you it was one of the many prices of going out with me."
"I know, but I didn`t know it was going to be so creepy," he told me, shuddering. "Seriously, you scared the crap out of me."
"It wasn`t real, though," I tried to explain. "It was just my imagination. I don`t see dead people or anything. My head just thinks that I should."
"You and your bloody imagination," my boyfriend said tiredly, but we stayed together for another three years so I guess that eventually he got used to it (or just stopped trying to talk to me in the middle of them).

And it`s back. I`m on my own now, of course - which is better for everybody concerned - but it`s back with a vengeance.

"What are you all doing there?" I asked the gremlins at about 4am this morning, opening my cupboard door and seeing them all crammed in, staring at me with faintly puzzled expressions.
"Hmm?" the gremlins said. "What?"
"What are you doing in my cupboard?"
"Oh." They all looked at each other and then shrugged. "Don`t know. It seemed like a good place to be."
"Well get out, please. I can`t sleep with you all in there, and I`m very tired."
"No, we like it."
"Get out!"
"No."
"Get out."
"Nu-uh."
"Get out, get out, get out," I said, trying to pull them by the hands, and when I came to my senses every piece of clothing I own was lying on the floor and I was attacking the air with a coat hanger.

I don`t know what has prompted this new batch of night trouble - although I know where the gremlin image came from (it`s the opening scene of The Labryinth) - but I`d like it to stop now, because it`s been four nights in a row and I`m exhausted. Weaving together your life and your dreams only works as long as you are capable of separating them back out again, and I can`t. I`m still seeing gremlins and fighting tigers, even though I`m wide awake, and I`m waking up in the morning more tired than I was when I went to bed. Which sort of defeats the point of bothering at all: my brain is resting far more efficiently at work, when I`m being paid for it not to be.

Whatever I see tonight - whatever wants to fight me - I`m telling it to go away so that I can sleep in peace. Following my dreams is very important, after all, but I`d really prefer it if they didn`t follow me.