Back From Blowout

Howdy peeps, I feel a lot better today. I’ve shrugged off the difficulty of thought which arises from a blowout. It was hard yesterday, I have to admit. I was getting a lot of intrusive mind patterns. It was highly uncomfortable. This morning I’ve had my regular debriefing from my mate The Badger, who is currently serving time in a mental institution. We enjoy daily conversations on the phone most mornings, apart from when I’m off my head. It was good to catch up after three days away.

It’s so good to be back so soon after feeling completely debilitated. I’ve got another blowout lined up for midweek but I go forward towards that toss-up happening very reluctantly. Do I really need another one so quickly? The bliss from the coke only lasts a couple of minutes. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a heavenly feeling, but it’s too ephemeral. The comedown, on the other hand, lasts for at least 48 hours.

I had some terrific dreams last night, on the astral plain. That’s why I feel restored and refreshed. They had happy endings, I was crying in my sleep at one of them. I could hear a woman playing a violin, and the beauty of it brought me to tears. One of my dreams had a voice-over too, like a DVD commentary. I feel so alive at the moment, so happy to be here with you again, that it is almost unreal. I’ve got my precious songs playing, I’m about to enjoy a few scoops of jar, and then the rest of the day will take care of itself. What’s to complain about?

I value things a bit more now, after my current spate of sin born of fap and drug and porn. I value long-lasting dopamine in the brain, which I’ve just learned, in my case, I get from interacting with people. Fellowship. It’s what it’s all about. I love conversing with God’s children, they’re the most valuable commodity in the whole of the known universe. They’re incredibly remarkable & inconceivably unique & unbelievably spectacular & overwhelmingly noteworthy & unconditionally loveable. That’s what I think about the human race today, whereas yesterday I was thinking they were just a bunch of sinister arseholes. Strange, the law of perception, isn’t it? I value that as well. My perception, my fellowship, and my long-lasting dopamine.

My mate Courtney, who now goes by the name Cee, told me about long-lasting dopamine last week, in Peer Support group. She said that it comes about from writing stories or finishing pictures and stuff like that, rather than a 5-minute buzz from a line of coke, which in turn leaves you depleted. I know which I prefer from now on in. She was showing her boobs off last week, she has a fantastic rack, but because of how gifted she is and how the light of God shines from her, I can’t look at her sexually. She’s above and beyond the degradation and base carnality which comes from sexual desire. She’s more like a much-wished for soul mate. Thanks for the wake-up call, Cee x 

 

Dreamworld 4

We were in a scrapyard, me and my mates, dossing about. Suddenly someone shouted, “There’s a rattyatty!” so I run and jumped on a wall. “You blagger, you’re just scaring me!” I shouted back – but, unbelievably, there was not one but three giant rats roaming around the scruffy floor. My stomach lurched. I felt sick and scared. As I looked down, I realised that my hand was on top of a rat. I screamed and fell off the wall, straight into a deep black well. My mates followed me down the well to help me. At the bottom of the well was a steep hill. We started running up the hill that led into a bright countryside. In the countryside was a high fence. We climbed up and looked over and saw loads of busy village people all working away like the Amish. We found a hole in the wall and sneaked thru towards a bunch of older kids playing football. One of them said let the little kids join in, so we joined in, but the first time I kicked the ball it froze in midair. “Game’s paused,” one of the older kids said, so we stopped playing. “Hey, let me show you my favourite teachers,” he added. He was a big boy. He led us into the local school and escorted us into the staffroom. It was full of sofas with teachers on them just lazing about. They looked so relaxed and peaceful. I stood there admiring them with total respect and reverence. “These are all my favourite teachers,” the big boy stated. “I’ll never forget them when I leave.” But just then the headmaster came in and cleared the room. She chased me and my mates away into a small dorm. I climbed onto the top bunk and started eating some biscuits that were up there. The headmaster phoned the armed police to get me down. Soon I was surrounded and being issued scary orders to come down and receive punishment. My mate climbed up with me and shouted down, “Stop telling him what to do. Let him come down in his own time.” Then my mate went back down because he said his girlfriend was pregnant. As soon as he went down some beautiful Amish girls come up and asked me to help them organise some photographs. They have many photographs which we start arranging into piles. I am on some of them. In one, I am in a family portrait, even though I don’t have a family yet. In another, I am posed in front of a wall of all my artwork. The photographs are glowing, as if they have their own natural light. “Come down and meet my newborn baby,” my mate calls up to me, so finally I do go down and start playing with his baby. The baby is walking around and copying whatever I do. He is also pooing everywhere. My mate follows him around, cleaning up the poo. “I’ll give you a lift back now,” one of the beautiful Amish girls says to me, and we get in her car. She plays the music very loud, and we drive very fast all the way home.

Dreamworld 1

I’m lying in a trench. I am with many other people. It’s dark, so dark. Everyone seems to be in stasis, not quite asleep, but dormant. I peered up to see a balcony with a warden keeping watch on it. He peered out over the mass of bodies with indifference, as if he had been there a very long time. He didn’t look in my direction. I tried to get up, to free myself from the other slumped carcasses and face the truth of what the surface had to offer. But the person next to me held me back. The person next to me held me back with a hook. The person next to me didn’t have a hand, the person next to me had a hook for a hand. But its touch was warm, a tender touch, a kind hook, a loving hook. It didn’t want me to wake up yet, it felt it best that I reside in the quagmire of sleepy ignorant kinsmen. What was above the surface? I must have been sleepwalking because I found myself up and out of that desolate pit of which I never wanted to be reacquainted with again for the whole of my life. I didn’t know where home was but I followed my gut and headed for the brightest star. I followed it until it sank into the twilight, and ended up in a train station. A single carriage pulled up. The warden from the murky hollow cavity in the ground where I had escaped from was driving. He asked me would I like to go back to Sovereign Pit. He said my return was eventually inevitable. Eventually inevitable. I spun on my heels and calmly strolled away into the other direction, leaving the station and its single lonely carriage behind me. It remained there, waiting for me to change my mind. I then found myself in the countryside, lost and confused. I pushed on, no direction in mind, no hurry in my heart, just all of eternity, it felt like, to peruse where I was and how I had gotten there. I was not surprised when a black stallion crossed my path, twice as tall as a regular black stallion. Its underside was covered in nipple-teats, like a pregnant pig. I was also not surprised when it spoke to another horse, behind a bush. The horse it was speaking to spoke back. I couldn’t suppress the notion that they were both conspiring about me. In a brief show of bravado, I told them to fuck off. The wind told me to fuck off back, a disembodied voice across the ether. I glanced down at my feet then, and realised I had no shoes on. This was when I began to get very concerned about my situation. It only just occurred to me that I might be dreaming. Startled, I ducked my head into the nearest stream. To my dismay, this plan failed to work. I was still there in the Dreamworld. The warden from Sovereign Pit drove by in a limousine . He seemed to take pleasure in my aghast reaction to this forlorn wilderness. I could not understand why. I had to wake up though, so I shook my head violently from side to side, shaking in a state of distressed denial. It worked. I awoke in my bed. And that was the end of the Dreamworld. For now. Until I next closed my eyes. Sometimes, I’m afraid to close my eyes.

Rubik's Cube

The municipal building in the centre of Widnes looks like a Rubik’s cube. I used to play on the top of this as a kid. I was all over it last night in my dreams. There was a running track built onto the side of it halfway up and I was getting some fitness in during break times from office hours.

It’s occurred to me that maybe the highest places or principal landmarks from our childhood territories linger in our subconscious for many an old devil moon.

I told my cousin A.Michael, the Horror Apprentice, that I’ve been dreaming every single night without fail for months. He said that’s really excellent, and confided in me 3 new dream secrets of his own.

1. He paused a dream once, like a videotape.

2. He blacked out in a dream, then came back to, still in the dream.

3. He got shot in a dream.

Not to mention a nightmare he can still remember from when he was under 10 years old, featuring a chimpanzee on a coach.

He’s no expert on ASTRAL PROJECTION, but here’s what he said about flying.

Focus on a point ahead, or on the skyline, or where you want to be, but don’t will yourself too hard. The harder you try, the more you’ll skim the floor. It’s all about 100 percent total concentration. It’s a form of meditation, of visualization. You need to be able to picture the scenery from miles around. Once you start to create that landscape, you can look down on it. There are several kinds of dream flight – this hovering, bird’s eye view kind, or the much harder, run and take off from a standstill kind.

No wonder they write whole books about it.

Do you believe in this kind of talk, or are your rests like a black, blank slate?

The Dream Is Real

Sex in church. Lions on the roof. Driving backwards down the motorway in glue. Anything goes in dreams. It’s like the brain is only half on. I had a dream within a dream the other night, like in the movie Inception, only they had to go too far and have a dream within a dream within a dream. By a dream within a dream, I mean that I was telling people about my dream so far before I had even woken up. A kind of running commentary, to other people in the dream, as it went along. It was in chapters. Do you ever dream in chapters?

There can be as many as six or seven different scenes or stages in one night’s rest. Vivid ones, vague ones. Sometimes, just a mention of something on the news late in the evening can trigger the memory of a dream the night before. It’s treacherous territory even discussing them. The subconscious is pure and genuine. It does not repress, deceive, lie, shirk away, cover up, exaggerate or forget. It’s a mishmash of unexecuted ideas and thoughts waiting to flourish when you switch to standby. It’s the signal behind the TV set. You may only watch one during the day, but come bedtime, all those hundreds of channels flicker on behind the scenes. Even the ones you never watch, and sometimes the ones you don’t want to watch.

Kevin Levrone, legend Bodybuilder turned front man, sings: “I see faces in my dreams, looking back at me, the strangest faces in my dreams…”

Now I’m certainly not about to go into the star headliners, side attractions, bit part players and cameos who appear in my dreamscapes, which are all in high definition full colour with surround sound by the way, but I will share with you a stranger or two who I don’t recognize. I wake up with a sense of wonder. Who was that person? I think. Often, when someone is hazy, we assign someone we know to fit the role, but now and again there will be a complete unrecognisable stranger who we have never met in our lives. Do you agree? Just nod and say yes if in doubt.

Funny old world innit. The mind boggles.

Plain Jane (below) aka ‘Indecipherable’ appears in a character’s dreams. She’s one of those lovable murderer types. I’ll tell you all about her and her story in another post. Until then, thanks for reading, come again for some more of my repetitive claptrap about enduring creativity, stay true, and may your God go with you.

Art Till Death

Audio Dreams

My cousin A.Michael once suffered from regular night terrors, even as an adult. Now he has the occasional nightmare.

"I wonder why," he says, speaking to me on the train as he heads to the city to enjoy Manchester Day. "Maybe it's because of the dark stuff I've written. I think that by tapping into 'the other side' for material and research it leaves its mark with you. I believe its psychic phenomenon, to some extent. I'm not afraid to say that I think I have had a vision. Yes, I was half asleep, and that detracts from my validity, but in my own experience, this particular insight stands out above everything else with its own psychic quality."

I asked him about his most recent nightmare, for the sake of any Blob of Glob™ readers who might occasionally fancy dipping their feet into the world of chills n spills.

"Last night," he replied instantly. "The sound of a woman screaming woke me up. Fortunately, it was just getting light, but I opened the window and stuck the light on anyway. That's the best thing to do, put the light on. And the radio. It works. I used to just sweat it out in the dark. No more. Anyway, this screaming was definitely female, and it was regular, every one or two seconds. The sound of it was so rich in all the wrong ways though. There was a real inner grunting depth to it, a liquid aspect almost, and my mind conjured up notions of true violent horror. I thought of Jack the Ripper, to be blatantly honest."

I asked him if he could really hear the sound of a woman screaming.

"In my head, oh yeah. That's what was strange about it. There was no accompanying visuals at all. I was left imagining what on Earth might have caused such an awfully timed and rhythmic harrowing noise. I wasn't dreaming in the traditional sense, for 12 seconds in black & white. I could just hear them in my snoozing head. Just as I was waking the woman threw a 'f******g hell!' in there, which I was absolutely delighted about, because it meant that at least that she could still talk."

I told him this was a bit full on. I was watching CBeebies at the time.

"I don't know where it came from. I haven't watched or read anything lately that might have provoked it. I believe it's a side effect from writing horror, in all truth, although I don't even write splatter or gore, never have. There's a price to pay for regurgitating all the scary stuff from head to page. But to finish, once the light was on I was fine, plus dawn was breaking as well, but just as I'm nodding off again, I hear what could only be the screaming woman's voice, perfectly calm now, over her ordeal, and she whispers 'Goodnight'."

Is he making this up? you may ask. I doubt it. Having noted some dreams down myself several years back, I can testify that any writer who has to 'invent' his dreams must lead a very dull subconscious life, not to mention real one. The MANCUNIAN NOVELIST NICHOLAS ROYLE, who I met and judged a competition with in 2008, edited a book called THE TIGER GARDEN, which is a collection of writers dreams. He has a blog under the same name.

My cousin's above account gives a whole new meaning to the e-zine SCREAMING DREAMS, where I was first published on-line. This is run by STEVE UPHAM, who has been short-listed for the 2010 British Fantasy Awards, for work including the edition in which my story appeared (and which links me to the awards, in a way, cool!). WARRINGTON WRITER CONRAD WILLIAMS, who beat the big man STEPHEN KING back in 2007, tries to outdo him a second time.

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