Wednesday, February 13, 2019

The slippery slope of sleep


To sleep, perchance to dream. Over dosing on cheese that comes with it's own formidable streams of bacteria and mould, as it was designed to be by years of food science. Built to interrupt sleep with lurid visions of past, present and future worlds. None that make sense but all are strangely recognizable and familiar. I move through this peculiar world as if it was my home and it may well be but I simply cannot be sure. It has a life. All references are understood though they jar and disturb, but on a nightly basis I volunteer to enter this wild and unregulated domain where Dali meets Warhol meets Dante and Bosch. Each one battles for supremacy and influence and I awake, slowly, blinking, memories of cheese and bright colours, or monochrome, film noir and blank spaces. 

There's a broken narrative, a series of senseless jump cuts, great panoramas and vistas and a falling away of reason. Things I see that I cannot touch, all trapped on the edge of place I can never return to in the same way, not ever, though it might yet happen one day. My head clears, I have a cup of tea and take account of my surroundings, stable and hazy in the early morning's winter gloom. There will be news of Brexit, celebrity deaths and adventures, sports results, economic changes and predictions, wars, crimes and misery. Something happy or light weight might make it through as a temporary antidote. They'll all be as real and as sensible as my dreams and most as quickly forgotten as another juggernaut of information passes my way on whatever side of darkness I reside. 

This is overload but I have my filter, my touch stone, that manufactured fungus on the cheese that opens up the doorway to those other places. Should all of that dissolve and decay and become lost to me then I may well discover some purer fungus on the jam as I twist and pop the lid and use it for my own little taste experiments. The jam underneath will be fine, no doubt.

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