Dreams, illusions and beautiful cannibals!

I had this from MG the other day:

“They are strange, those worlds of dreams. The places we go when our eyes close and oblivion takes us. And yet, sometimes that oblivion dresses itself in a different suit, a multi-coloured suit, of psychedelia and presents an altogether strange take on the reality that makes up the waking part of our lives.

I do not, on the whole, remember my dreams. Perhaps once a month, often less and many times those dreams are the same or the same but from a different angle, perspective. The same unknown places, the same unknown faces. Is it possible to dream of places you’ve never seen? Faces, people, you’ve never met? Are these amalgams of different experiences which our brains coalesce into new forms or are they in some sense real? Virtual lovers, friends, enemies just waiting for their opportunity to wink into existence when the energy becomes available only to return to their nether world of possibility when the time comes to pay back what has been borrowed from the energy pool of the universe.

I had a strange dream last night. I was in a world of two three-part dioramas. I was in one diorama and all I could see was the other diorama in front of me. Behind me was only solid rock and beyond each part of the diorama to the left and right was nothing.

What was strange was that although I could pass to the left and the right and in front, only the middle section of the diorama I was in, I realized, after some time had passed in the dream, was ‘real’. Everything else was a simulation of reality. I could touch the people, the artefacts, the stone of these simulations and they felt and sounded and smelt real and yet I knew they were just illusions. It was like being stranded on a desert island with nowhere to go but into the sea.

And yet. At one part of the dream an old (malicious and conniving) colleague appeared in the company of a man I do not/did not know. As the unknown man turned and ran, I levelled a rifle with a glass magazine of large ball bearings at my erstwhile colleague and pulled the trigger. The steel ball missed him by a wide margin and followed a trajectory towards the running, unknown man. It missed him too and bounced harmlessly into the sea where it bounced across the ocean like Barnes-Wallis’ bomb or the pebbles we bounce across a lake.

For reasons that I do not know, or at least cannot remember, I pursued the running man stopping every so often to aim a ball bearing at him from my strange metal and glass gun. Each one missed, bouncing wildly into the sea and careering across the ocean in leaps and bounds just as the first one had. Finally as I looked below and saw the top of his head no more than 12 feet immediately below where I was standing, I saw that the magazine was empty.

It was at that point that a strange creature, in the guise of a young woman approached me and offered to guide me back to where I had come from. Reality? I’m not sure. I do not know how I knew that she wasn’t human, such things are seldom explained in dreams, but as she took my hand and raised it to her lips, It was clear that I was going to be dinner! “I will guide you when I have eaten,” she said. “In which case, let me buy you lunch,” I replied. She dropped my hand and we retraced the steps I had taken in pursuit of the unknown man.

We arrived back at the diorama where I had first taken a pot shot at my old colleague but it had changed. It was however the same place. Everything was different but it was the same place. As I stepped from the first part of the diorama into the centre section, I knew that part one with my cannibal guide was but an illusion and the lion sleeping in the cave to my left was likewise unreal, although I tossed him a toy rabbit just in case he awoke and became peckish.

The gift-wrapped presents in front of me in part 3 of this weird diorama were likewise unreal but I unwrapped them nonetheless. Small packets of fruit, blue shelves from Tescos, a chocolate glued to a pretty greetings card, a spray of lavender . As a small woman walked passed me, I do not where she came from, only that she was only about a metre tall and greeted me with a smile, I woke up.

Now I’m sure we could all play amateur Freuds with this one and I am sorely tempted to do so, especially with my carnivorous guide, but I will not. I will leave it as an insight into a diseased mind and hope that one day/night I’ll get to buy my strange little friend lunch!”

Sometimes I do wonder about what all the booze and fags is doing to his brain :)