Creating

After a fairly sleepless night, I fell asleep shortly before my alarm clock went off. Prior to this, I was bouncing around an idea to make a little film about my medicines and that thought was bouncing in my brain as I slipped into this dream. It could have only lasted a minute or two, but in that way dreams do, it seemed to last an age.

A man with a floppy mop of brilliant white hair is sitting in front of myself and a small audience (no more than a dozen people), an electronic piano keyboard in front of him. He is dressed all in black and has what seems to be a very ancient cell phone strapped on his waist band.

He is playing the piano, eyes closed, and singing the most beautiful song. The room sits in revered silence whilst he plays. Once he finishes, everyone is too stunned to break into applause - it would be a crude racket following that beautiful music. Instead, a gentle murmur of appreciation bubbles around the room and the man looks up from his keyboard, opens his eyes and smiles at us. His eyes are piercing, brilliant blue.

He begins speaking, about himself and his music and why he does it. He holds up one of his CDs and laughs as he tosses it aside saying that isn't why he makes music. It's not for fame, or money. He does it for the simple act of creating. He has no interest in the material trappings that tag along with his life, just in the purity of creating.

Another hushed babble of whispers passes around the room and I lean forward slightly wishing to ask him questions, so many questions. He fixes me with those eyes, smiles and I go to speak but can't and with a wave of frustration (or perhaps panic?) I feel the folds of sleep falling away from me and my last vision before I wake is of him, smiling at me.

It was an interesting one this, and whilst I'm probably the least spiritual person on the planet, someone (most likely myself) was giving me a message in this. It was a message to get 'creating' just for the sake of doing it. It's a good thing to do!

Oh and if you want to know what his eyes looked like, I've been listening to a lot of Nirvana again coming over a bit sombre for poor Kurt Cobain. I spent most of my mid to late teens hung up on their music and sported Kurt's haircut for that time. In their Unplugged show, where he sings 'Where did you sleep last night?' -THAT- look... as he screams out the last line and in that moment, pauses and opens his beautiful blue eyes... those were the eyes the pianist had, only his eyes had hope and happiness in them. Kurt's didn't, and every time I hear that song, it makes me sad I'll never hear him sing it.

Too Many Rooms

This house has too many rooms. None of them seem happy either. As the day wares on, they shuffle and jostle for positions, all trying to get the best view out of their windows.

I've given up trying to navigate them in any sort of orderly manner and now just open a door at random with no idea where I will be going.

This door leads to a bathroom, of sorts. It's cluttered with boxes and papers piled in every corner and I have to clear some to make my way to the sink. As I turn on the tap, the view out of the window shifts from hills and fields, to being square on to another window in what I can only suppose is the house opposite.

I sigh, and sigh again as after a few minutes, I realise there is no hot water coming from the tap. I can only suppose trivial details such as plumbing fall by the wayside in the house with too many rooms.

Fires in the Long Grass

It's an unnaturally hot day and crowds of people are sitting about on a green, enclosed by crumbling red brick walls. They're sitting and chatting and sipping cool drinks as they complain about the heat.

I'm trying to play with my dog, but he isn't really interested in running about. Instead he prefers you to turn the garden hose on him and will only run after his ball when he's wet. He also has his eye on a Malamute puppy that is bouncing about around a group of people sat on chequered picnic blankets.

In a corner, under the shade of a tree, my father is cutting the grass, which is unusually long for the time of year. He is very happy with the fuel efficiency of the lawnmower he is using, particularly seen as small mowers like this generally don't get many 'cuts to the litre' (or so he tells me).

Then comes the alarm bell and it's a fire evacuation drill. Everyone looks suddenly confused by the fact the grass has turned into the wooden floor of a school hall and they're all now wearing a curious assortment of uniform bits and pieces. No-one is quite sure where to go, although the general thinking is we should be outside on the grass.

We make our way outside and form semi-orderly lines behind small pink/purple circular signposts that are lined up in a flower bed. No-one is quite sure if they're stood in the right line and all are hoping for someone in authority to tell them whether or not they are in the right place.

I find it all very frustrating and just wish I could be back out on the grass with my dog and his ball.

Rock and Roll, Rashes and Car Crashes

A somewhat disjointed night of strangeness that involved heavy metal, car parks, waterproof rubber leggings and confused people with towels in their ears.

The sequence of events were all over the place, and the fog of the morning has scrambled them up somewhat, but here's the highlights.

1. A rock concert with Slipknot playing and running around the stage with a giant mechanical phallus - go see Rammstein doing a live version of 'Pussy' and it's a cut/paste but with a different band;

2. Some sort of strange party in a newly constructed house in the middle of nowhere, where the main aim of the event was to drink heavily and then gang up on people and then throw them into a deep mud puddle in the garden;

3. A set of blue, rubber, waterproof clothes that appeared after the 'mud party' - they were somewhat poorly fitting - the person wearing them was unable to hear my comments though as they had green hand towels jammed into their ears for some reason, which was not immediately apparent;

4. A crowded car park where a red car was trying squeeze out of a space but kept (literally) tripping up over a car that had parked next to it and left the steering wheel turned hard right, with the front wheels stuck out;

5. People developing curious rashes all over their bodies.

And then I woke up!

As an aside, the car thing comes from someone who lives up the road from me and who has a big 4x4 and who -always- parks like this. The rubber waterproofs were what I had as a kid when I used to go deliver newspapers before school. Mine were green though. And the rash, well, that comes from one of the medications I've been asked to consider. It frequently causes a rash in people, which can develop into something very unpleasant that quite literally causes your skin to shrivel up and die! Has been somewhat playing on my mind lately the thought of that as otherwise, it sounds like quite a good drug.

Swimming and Cycling

A curious, mixed up affair that involved being lost in a town (no clue which) trying to catch up with a lady who was a swimming champion. She and a bunch of other ladies had swum the circumference of the Earth and were now being hailed as heroes by the gathered media.

Curiously, though they seemed very happy about this, they didn't come out of the rather shabby office block in which they had gone to get changed. Inside, they were all sat in an open plan office dressed in pink jeans and pink t-shirts with red ribbons in their hair.

Throughout this, I was wandering around admiring the chaos that the media was creating and had decided that I too needed to circumnavigate the globe. However, I'm not much of a swimmer, so I thought I'd cycle it. The weather wasn't very nice though, so I decided to do it all on an exercise bike.

Crushed

Lying in a bed with grey sheets, my head on a grey pillow. The room is grey and a silver/grey light is coming in through the window. A man stands by the side of the bed, wearing a grey coat and a dark grey suit. His eyes are sunken in and surrounded by deep black rings.

I'm trying to move, but I can't. Something is crushing me against the bed, forcing me down into the mattress. My body shudders with the effort of trying to move, but I remain crushed, pinned and immobile.

Then my brain clicks in and tells me I'm dreaming. It's telling me I don't need to move, I just need to wake up. I grit my teeth and tense up again, this time trying to drag myself to consciousness and with an almighty effort, I pop back into the world face down on my pillow, blinking blearily at the morning light that is creeping through the curtains.

For the scientifically minded, this is a phenomenon known as sleep paralysis that I've had on and off for most of my life. It's thought to be one of the explanations behind UFO abductions as you are always immobile, and generally there is someone or something, looking over you. I've seen the grey man many times there, and the first time it ever happened to me, he was peering in through the window of the door. I've also had a strange, twisted, hag like creature that stood in a cloud of darkness in the corner of my room (possibly my own 'Night Hag') and two silver, ghost like creatures that floated and peered at me with owl-like eyes.

And then there was the dog... In one episode I've never managed to explain, I had a session of this, only a large black dog was crawling over me and raking me with it's paws. When I woke up, I literally 'peeled' from the sheets as I turned over and I found three cuts running across my back, each about 30cm long. They were too far apart for them to have been made by my fingernails, unless each was done separately, and the best explanation I could come up with was I had scratched myself on the poppers on the duvet cover, but that isn't much of an explanation. To this day, I've no clue how it happened.