Echoes of Flavio's Ghost Dreaming

When you wake up longing for the world you were inhabiting in that dream, but the dream vanishes, more quickly the more you try to grasp it.

Waking up with the vivid sensation of a dream that was if anything more 'real' than anything in the waking world -and in seconds it is gone; the sensation still is there but you have no memory of the dream itself, of what was happening in it or the world in it but are still kind of overwhelmed by it -not necessarily badly, not like waking up from a nightmare, but the intensity of it, the numinosity of it.

In the real world, waiting to have a couple of medical appointments at UCLH. I have many questions for them. Also worried about the summer and how much work I will have then -it normally does go quiet and I get no income from the schools for August, etc The school in Highb. still remains a source of stress but also a source of nearly half my income, so.... I'll put up with it. Trying to help my street artist homeless friend but this sometimes gets a bit tricky or prickly. Life marches on.

Dreams. Endless streams of parallel lives I never lived, outcomes of present and past situations, all glimpsed through that numinous mist, at the same time so fuzzy at the edges and so vividly bright. All the journeys I never made, the houses I never lived in, the people I never met, the solutions (so clear, so obvious) to problems I never knew were so pressing but which vanish on contact with the waking world.

Another day, another early train to Watford. Sleepy. Woke up several times in the night, the second time escaping from a dream in which I was trying to escape... what was it, it was a version of the Evil dream, in which this all-powerful, all-encompassing entity, if it is an entity which is a sum of all evil (but is other things as well) is going to come, I will have to fight it and apparently win at first, to inevitably lose in the end. A lot of people were packed in a building with leaky roofs, praying and in terror while getting soaked from the dripping ceiling, we were outside and I had a glimpse of what was coming and was trying to persuade my sister that we (a small group of five or six) had to escape before it came. It was difficult, everybody in the group wanted to gather their things, wanted to go back to the house where most of our things were but there was no time to do that. I had a small car in which I couldn't fit all of our group, it wasn't clear whether we had another vehicle or whether the car would take us far away enough in time. I realised it wouldn't... and made myself wake up, annoyed because I only had six hours to sleep and had already wasted at least one when I'd woken up the first time. And at the same time, still frozen in dread from the dream.

Lull myself to sleep with Ted talks on astrophysics or consciousness, at very low volume so I cannot make out alll they're actually saying (which would otherwise be interesting and therefore not conducive to falling asleep. Float downstream still not quite half asleep, thinking that for all the outer space stories my laptop may be telling, of black hoes circling around each other until they crash, or of the intricately complex workings of the constituent parts of our transient brains, my dreams are most often predictable and rather pedestrian and only those abstract images that form in my mind as I'm falling asleep would seem to evoke anything of what I'm not quite any longer listening to. Will probably wake up a couple of times in the night; at some point I'll sort of half-wake up, turn around, put down the lid of the laptop, check the time. Only one hour and a half's sleep. Four and a half hours before I get up. Is that enough sleep? Of course not. But if you think too much about it you'll get even less sleep.

Dreams seldom stray from a dozen or so themes with variations. They often involve a journey that doesn't go quite as planned, through strange places that I've been to before but have changed and don't quite function as expected. The journey back from those places often takes the rest of the night and several different dreams, in which most often I lose or have lost something important, often my guitar which has been left behind. Other dreams, as I have mentioned before (and put in a blog where I keep account of some of those dreams) involve my old house in West Caracas, crumbling down as it always was, often much worse, with leaks and fallen brickwork and broken toilets but also with new rooms and occupants -and that enormous yellow moon coming out from behind the Avila mountains. I'm often back there to live but not of my own volition; some circumstance has brought me back and I cannot leave. Very often the house has been sold and I'm given a room that I will pay a rent for, a bare room with little of the things central to my life then or now.

How those dreams may come about and what meaning they may have in my mind is perhaps clear enough but... I don't like to analyse them too much. I prefer to see them as vistas into misty, half-unknown worlds inside my head, or perhaps sometimes glimpses of parallel lives that I could have lived but didn't. They're part of my story but I don't like to take them apart -it feels as though they might unravel and disappear, taking with them an important part of that story.

It is so clear when you think about it in your dreams. Everything connects beautifully. There is a reason that you can clearly see, a purpose and a means to work it out it and work along with it. Then you wake up and it.. still is there, clear as crystal and it all makes sense. You stop the alarm, get up, set the coffee maker on, grab the toothbrush... and it slowly begins to melt into the reality of the world; grasping at it while you can still see it is of no avail. It goes and by the time you come out of the shower it's gone. What shreds of it you can still grasp make no sense, they're just the workings of the brain repairing itself from the previous day, or those of the obscurest chemistry of the mind, as remote from our understanding as Andromeda. Never mind, it will come back in the next night's sleep and then maybe we can keep hold of it. Maybe that once.

Getting those dreams again in which I never came to the UK but instead went to study (and stayed) in some town in Northern Italy. I'm never actually there in the dreams -I'm always somewhere else (normally Caracas) and something prevents me from going back -and my guitars, my computers and my books, as well as my working life, are all back there, so it is almost a nightmare although not quite. But I could describe in detail my room in the house I share there (in the dream) with another musician, the little balcony, the battered garden set in it, the plants, the old music stand I have (don't know where that comes from, never had a wooden music stand). Like peeking into a world that could have been, or into that multi-dimensional shift-space of possible lives that never were....

I didn't sleep all that well last night, again -and there were lots of interesting dreams of which the only thing I can recall is that they were interesting, which is a bit frustrating. Worse, I wake up remembering one vividly and then it dawns on me that I won't remember it in the morning so I keep repeating to myself what was happening in the dream. To no use: I still don't remember it in the morning....

In my dreams' blog: a horrific dream (although nothing much happens in it) a couple of nights ago... and an earlier iteration of the same dream or, rather, the same general story.

Strange dream last night, involving some of the people that'd been to the St George dinner. I suppose there is a connection.


( cut to avoid excessive annoyance )