Night time (part 1)

Night time is a strange time. It’s too… fuzzy. Anything happening overnight becomes very unsure in the morning. Did it actually happen or have I dreamt it? Often it lays somewhere in between. Say you are very thirsty. You sort of wake up, think that you should get up and go to the bathroom. Can’t because it’s way too comfy and nice and warm and there you go: you’re asleep again. But your nose is blocked so you’re breathing through your mouth and you are seriously thirsty. You can barely swallow, it feels like the inside of your mouth is turning solid and is going to shatter if you try and close it. As you’re thinking that, you realize with terror this is truly happening. Well it’s not shattering per se but when you closed your mouth your inside cheeks started flaking off. Your try to spit out the flakes but your mouth is too dry and it feels numb. You can’t control your muscles anymore. You try and try again but cannot spit. You’re actually making it worse and your mouth is filling up with more and more flakes. You can feel your cheeks wearing thin. Perhaps it will be better in a second: as your cheeks tear out all the flakes might take off through the gaps. Instead, in a moment of panic you have breathed in too heavily, gasping for air and a cluster of flakes got stuck in your throat.

You wake up coughing. Something feels indeed stuck in your throat but it’s just you being ill and congested. You are really thirsty though, your dreams too are telling you you really should go have some water. Ok this time you will get up. In a second. The bathroom tiling is going to feel so cold under the bare sole of your feet, and the bed sheets will have lost all their warmth when you come back. You know you will have no choice but to go at some point, though. The more you wait the worse you will feel, so you might as well go now. As you gather your will and strength and are just about to drag yourself out of bed, you mum walks in with a pint of water on a tray. ‘You’re ok honey? I heard you cough I thought you might need some water’. She sits down on the edge of your bed and starts stroking your hair. You sit down sleepily and start drinking but the thirst remains. You keep on gulping but no water gets swallowed. Your throat remains thick and dry. You feel like an owl unable to regurgitate its pellets. The glass seems not to empty out, the water remains level. You want to ask your mum what’s going on but your bed lays between dunes and she’s nowhere to be seen. You get out of bed and start sinking through the sand. Slowly it engulfs you. Swallows you. As your head is just about to sink in you wake up in choc. Of course. You fell asleep again.

That’s the time when you were thirsty. There’s the one when foxes fought in the street, the one when you felt too exhausted to brush your teeth before going to bed, the one when you needed to go grab some tissues and woke up set out to blow your nose in your bed sheets. And there’s last night.

I’ve been thinking about it all day. It’s bound to be a dream, it just doesn’t make sense. Yet... It feels so real, it feels so much like it did happened. My mind is playing tricks on me I don’t know what to believe. My instincts are adamant it happened, no doubts, not for a second. But it can’t be real, I know it can’t and it’s distressing as hell. The feeling of this dream reality is so potent it has leaked through my awake life and I’ve been restless since this morning. It feels like I’m losing my mind a bit. I’m going slightly mad. I had the song in mind all day. Oh dear.

Yet the dream wasn’t so horrifying, it was very mundane actually. I had dreams before of a tyrannosaurus devouring me in a swimming pool, of chasing nazi communists who wanted to murder me, of that girl in the girls dorms and showers who was slicing everyone’s wrists. That one was two nights ago actually and it didn’t affect me for a second. I happened to remember bits of it, random sensations while I was having breakfast and simply went ‘blimey, I just had the most horrible dream’. But last night’s... It was unremarkable but it still feels too real.