Notes from the Black Diary:
On dreams and the real
Dream Event 1: I close my eyes and from the darkness a paler patch arises. It squares off into a corner. The corner is the edge of a door. I am in a room. Shades of grey. From patch to corner to door to room. I am in a room. I am waiting. For what? So things start.
Dream Event 2: I am awake and my eyes open, and the room is identical to that I would see. But it is not the room. I am facing the wrong way.1
Dream Event 3: I am asleep in the dark. I am awake with eyes closed. All the difference is a slight lightening, like a layer of thick felt being removed. I am not awake.
Dream Event 4: Listening to the radio, I dose. Someone, in my dream-state, says "Shoe-up, shoe-up, shoe-up". I wake, and the voice on the radio says "Schumann".2
12 Dec 2018
03 Apr 2019
10 Aug 2021
21 July 2024
Notes:
1 I should say, this was during the first 100 days of breakdown I had, when I went through periods of drifting between waking screaming and crashed-out post-panic sleep; but at one point I reached a halfway house of recurring open-eyed hallucinations of infinite white walls, holes in the ground, bramble twigs, and a room that was an exact and visually indistinguishable replica of my bedroom.
2 As far as I'm concerned this was definitely causally later. I appreciate the likelihood of post-hoc memory, but this was as clear as any temporally sequential experience of reality I've had. I have mixed feelings about the precognitive or otherwise content of dreams, but I can give one strange example. At school in the 80s, I dreamt a friend had a party, and didn't invite a bunch of friends, instead inviting an unlikely bunch of jocks and popular kids. In the dream, I told our friend group, and everyone fell out. Now, we never had parties, and all got on well, so I told the group at lunchtime, thinking they'd laugh about it. There was an uncomfortable silence from the friend, followed by an general querying of what the hell I was playing at, and then endless fallout across the group – turned out they had, just that day, invited a select group of exactly those people round for a secret party and not told any of us.