Nightmares.

Nightmares.

The seeds of nightmares invariably lie dormant, only to bloom into upsetting episodes weeks or months later, just when they have been forgotten about.

I've had a run of them since the weekend, most of which involve falling from a high structure and hurtling through the atmosphere at terminal velocity.

I am interested in what it is that causes nightmares to be frightening - when I was four years old I had one whose engine was obvious, and yet still continues to puzzle me. A girl, sitting beneath a tree, smiling, and as innocent-looking as you would expect the dream-contents of a child to be - and yet I woke up, more-or-less screaming the house down.

As I try to articulate it now (I remember the nightmare vividly) the best I can manage is that there was 'something evil' about the girl beneath the tree. Despite the exterior appearance of harmlessness, the 'dreamscape' pulsated with imminent terror and destruction - at which point my sleep came to an abrupt halt.

In the case of my falling off the tops of high buildings and bridges etc. (did I jump? was I pushed?) it is the sense of acceleration towards the ground, experienced as a sinking feeling in the stomach, which jolts me awake.

For now, the only common ground I can find between every nightmare I can recall (I'm told that the ones which leave no imprint on the waking mind are the worst) is the loss of control - the mind with which I act is temporarily hijacked, and I am forced to endure images which I have no wish to be exposed to. It is the process of the nightmare at all, as opposed to specific details, which causes feelings of distress.

I ask, in addition, why the 'seeds' of the nightmare choose to discharge their unpleasantness now and not at some other point in time? Is it to do with the departure of Bluefish, and this is a delayed reaction? Is it hinting at some internal crisis, the nature of which I can only guess? Or is it 'just' the periodic fluctuations of an over-worked imagination?

Perhaps admitting their existence in the public domain is merely fuel to the fire, and I shall now be dogged with nightmares for months on end as revenge for tipping out the dustbin of the unconscious. But I hold the view that these processes are fair game for discussion, and take the decision to publish and be damned.