Thursday, April 14, 2005

Eternal recurrence


I used to have a recurring dream about being chased by bears. I think there were three of them when I was a child. Latterly, this dream has morphed into my being threatened by a tiger: it's outside the door, gradually scratching its way through the wood. Its power is terrifying, remorseless, pitiless. If I open the door, I will die. I will die anyway, once the claws break through. In its 'bear' iteration, I think this dream was probably about generalised fear and anxiety; the later version, in tiger form, is about death, I suspect.

My second recurring dream is about glass: I wake up, imagining that I have just crunched up a wine glass in my mouth; the whole of my gob space is full of shards and powder -- I can't even move my jaw, lest the bits move about and cut me, or I swallow some.

My third recurring dream motif is 'crashing planes'. These dreams way predate 9/11 or the Concorde crash, and they're always set in the West London suburbia where I grew up: I hear a labouring engine, or catch sight of a wing flashing in the sun, tipped up at the wrong angle. As I watch the plane dives/sinks/flops down into a space behind the rooftops, and then there's the inevitable bloom of flame, the mushrooming cloud of smoke.

I have some good dreams, too.

1 comment:

Andy said...

...or have a neurosisectomy?