In recent days, the nightmares have started again with a vengeance - I fear that my consignment is to have them repeated eternally.
I started having them when I was four years old: innocent, everyday images which held no obvious threat were subverted, causing me to wake up screaming in the small hours of the morning. A girl sitting smiling beneath a tree was sufficient to invoke terror.
Similar to one of Dalí's confusing paranoiac works, the obvious surface image needs some thought and attention devoting to it before its disturbing counter-argument is pulled into the light. Such is the case with the girl and the tree: I suspect that she represents life and vitality, overwhelmed and undermined by the tendrils of a crisis - death or misery or conflict - which is rooted in herself and exists dormantly.
The nightmare, then, always needs work before its full horror is revealed; and its constituents are always a handful of the same half-forgotten experiences, latent ambitions, and the transience of existing as a human.
As the unconscious slab of meat that I am strives to unravel the puzzles that my own mind is setting for itself, one characteristic is apparent - the more difficult the 'puzzle' which has been set, and the more effort needed to solve it or part-solve it, the less I am able to remember when I snap back into the real world. All that remains is a fuzzy certainty that something caused a lot of discomfort, and shook me back to life before its narrative had been concluded.
