I’ve always led a highly disappointing dream life. Not that I remember many dreams. The ones I do recall tend to be rather mundane, parallel lifetime sequences when my brain plays out what could / could have happened had something / someone been different.
I’ve always been envious of people who go star-hopping or dragon-slaying or fronting a reformed Smiths at Glastonbury. {laughs} Hmm. Thinking about it, I’ve even tried various things to give me more interesting dreams — cheese, drugs, malaysian food.… But still nothing happens.
I’ve often thought I’m a relatively light sleeper. I used to be able to train myself to wake up at certain times. Perhaps symptomatic of other control issues. During one relationship I had trained myself to wake when I heard a particular bicycle free wheel down the alley. At other times it’s been the sound of the letterbox snapping shut, a key scraping on a lock, footsteps on paving stones.…
Sleep has always been traumatic for me. When I was very young, my father would say ‘until tomorrow, if God wills it’. Which, even coming from such a committed atheist as my Dad, would wind me up into an anxious toddler-ball of guilt. School hardly improved things — constant anxiety about doing my best, or more frequently, about not doing my best. Countless days, especially Mondays, I would wake at 5am to finish off some assignment or other so that my formative progress could be safely ticked off on a chart.
A second phase of anxiety developed when I moved to my first house with more than one level. Or more pertinently, when I moved away from my parents. Suddenly I couldn’t simply run down the corridor to my their bedroom. Nor feel safe that I wouldn’t be trapped upstairs by a fire (or in later years, cows). I would spend endless hours thinking of all the various ways harm could come to me in my upstairs bedroom — with robbers climbing through the upstairs bathroom window a recurring nightmare.
I’ve had some odd sleeping habits over the years. For a while, in the two storey house, I would sleep in the gap between the wall and the bed. I used to sleep with a menagerie of stuffed animals — I guess over time I ran out of room.… I remember that I liked the coolness of the wall, but I don’t recall why I didn’t kick them out, or sleep under the bed or something. My granny would come in to check that I was asleep and I would sit up straight and talk to her, eyes open wide, with no recollection of doing so the morning after. Which is infinitely preferable to her only remembering me at that age in later years.
Years later I moved my bed into a walk in wardrobe, but that was just teenage attention-seeking. And possibly related to my Belinda Carlisle shrine.
And yet it’s at night that I come up with most of my writing ideas. Lying there, unable to sleep, in the shadow-time before dawn, with dialogue pouring itself into my head. And I lie there, knowing that these moments don’t come often enough, and try to repeat the words to myself until I know them off by heart. And hope against hope that I will remember them in the morning.
And usually, I don’t.
