Dream, Reality

I seem to have been dreaming more in the last few weeks - literally, not in any "visioning the future" kind of a way. I get these periods of vivid, remembered dreaming periodically: sometimes I think it's something to do with a certain mood state, or a certain time of year, and sometimes I think it's the relative intensity of short-term alcohol consumption tipping my brain over into a particularly feverish, intensely associative and Technicolor state.

Whatever the cause, I always enjoy these sequences of tight-packed, detailed, sense-rich picture shows spooling through my sleeping consciousness: last week I scored a superb left-footed volley in a floodlit night match at a 1980s Upton Park - Paul Goddard's shot came back off the cross-bar, and the ball was falling in front of me; I knew as soon as I swung my leg that my shot would beat the goalkeeper. I couldn't have struck the ball any more sweetly or truly and, in my consciousness-within-the-dream, I knew that we would win the game, and that I would be the root of that victory.

But what really thrills me is waking up in the night, or in the pre-dawn gloom, with the roads dead quiet outside, and only the first few isolated birds starting to call, and feeling the residual sense of physical and emotional conviction still echoing in your body and mind: the complete - if only short-lived - conviction that the dream state, the dream imagery, the dream self you inhabited - that all of these things were/are real. As real as any other thought or sense-based representation of external reality that ghosts across your consciousness. That delicious conviction, there in the darkness-shrouded semi-consciousness, that the dreamed-of lover was real, was flesh; that the loved, missed, deceased relative is still alive, and that you can touch their hand, feel the texture of their skin against your fingers, hear the distinctive twist and echo of their laughter, smell the smell of the harshly chemical soap they used to use.

It's amazing - to me, still - how those dream-born trigger memories can then unravel a whole fabric of associations you had hidden away in the darkness of your brain, tightly folded and tucked between the neurons, where they might have stayed, lost forever, had not the chance synaptic firings darted down this particular pathway. And then there it all is, a Proustian reconstruction drawn up out of the dark and built, for a few minutes, and lit, sharply, for a short while.

And there's something especially powerful, it seems to me, in the way that a dream-driven revelation of emotional or erotic connection can surprise you - really surprise you - with its intensity. How the attraction and love that's suddenly-realised in a dream can persist into wakefulness, and leave you with an amazed smile on your face as you lie there, slowly waking up: that feeling that something deep, and hidden, and profoundly true has been revealed to you, as if sprung from some mysterious place where that truth has lived for years, and which you could have accessed, if only you had known. The peculiar feeling that you've been blind not to have seen it; the feeling that this revealed truth is undeniable - it's now deeply planted and fully rooted in your mind. It's as if its been there in your head for years, and now it's fully-formed and alive in the banal reality of your everyday life, and you're carrying it around in your mind, although you don't really want to acknowledge it and let it in now that you're dressed and driving to work. That's the kind of dream I had last night: in the dream, I met up, in London, with someone I've known for a few years, and who I've been mates with. In the dream, we were on a London Underground platform - one of the overground ones, like West Acton - with the suburbs stretching away in the sunlit evening, and we were listening to someone (a management figure of some kind) rattling on about something empty and uninteresting. My friend and I were standing side by side, and could sense each other smiling, and as we shuffled our feet to assuage our boredom, her hand brushed against mine and she slipped her fingers between mine. And that's when that fully-formed world of attraction and revelatory emotion sprang into life, and I woke up with the beautiful surprise of that revelation fresh in my mind and fingers. Lovely. And feeling so ridiculously true and yet unattainable.