They come and stay once in a while but most of the time I forget them or sleep is so utilitarian that I totally forget them. And dreams come and go. There’s a few memorable ones that stick out in my mind over the years and these ones usually involve queen spiders with human heads haunting my aunt’s house, riding around the transit system late at night with not another soul in sight, playing cards with tall legs walking on stiletto heels, and playground slides that lead into mysterious other dimensions. Well, those are some pretty specific details and just small fragments of a bigger picture.
At this point I awoke early in the morning with memories of that most feared dream we all loath; the one where everyone you know and love despises you. It’s an absolutely depressing aftertaste to have when it’s fresh on your mind but in most cases turns to hilarity later in the day. What was I thinking? you say. I felt like an alien in my own skin. My nose hated my face and retaliated with congestion. I really needed to brush my teeth.
The usual practice is to give myself as little time as possible between getting up to leaving the house. You feel like a crusty druggy leaving your own home. Your legs don’t feel like their yours. On this particular morning it felt like elements of the dream were still there. The clouds lay low and gnarled; especially weird after being blindingly hot for a few weeks. As I walked out of my block of flats there’s a rough-edged middle-aged man growling in a Slavic language into his beat up mobile phone.
Walking down the wide sidewalk past the early morning human assembly line of street markets in the making, I found myself looking at the skyline of the city and the random chattering of voices around me. To my left I detected a couple of men approaching and walking toward me. I wasn’t really paying attention but I thought I heard one of them say; “Hey man, you look like the future!”
Was this directed toward me? I’m not sure if it was a jab at me or not. If so it’s a bit of a strange one. It leaves you feeling curious way more than being annoyed if anything. I was once called a “fucktard” out of a passing pick-up truck in Olympia WA and was told to “roll down my trousers [trouser legs]” in Epping Forest once. The former sounded like a group of kids trying to invent new swearwords in a scientific manner. The latter sounded more like something a concerned mother would say to her teenage son.
I wasn’t wearing a feather light silicon jumpsuit nor any futuristic shades equiped with flashing lights or infrared imaging technology. I was wearing a black jacket, glasses, and a button up shirt. Perhaps this announcement wasn’t addressed for me. Perhaps this might be the start to my own personal episode of the Twilight Zone.
The Underground station comes up on my right. People swarm in and out of the entrance like badly-dressed bees with no regard for one another. London isn’t a place where most people are making their flight paths with others in their vision of transit. I cut across and head down the stairs to the ticket turnstiles.
Right ahead of me is the back of a man that looked like he was dropped out of the West Indies circa 1750. The first thing that catches my eye is his long braided looks coming out of the back of a battered three-cornered “pirate” head. The rest of this man’s get-up fit the role well — working the whole One Eyed Willy look quite well. Tailed overcoat, breeches, tall boots with the foldover cuffs at the top. I turned to see him holding a plastic bucket collecting piece o’ eight for charity. At 7.30am no less. He wasn’t saying anything. Just aggressively shaking a bucket and jingling a tiny comical bell.
As an isolated incident I may have just taken a look and chuckled at the context of it all but given the low lying chain of events and moods that prevailed in my short time awake I started to feel more and more askew.
The only way to shake it off was to keep going and get some blood to that head of mine. I clocked through the turnstile and crossed the overhead walkway to the platform. My train was waiting and I seemlessly walked across that platform and onto the train, took a seat, and sat down. The brief journey from here to there at this particular time usually sees me closing my eyes and clearing my head — for some reason it seemed to be more than needed today…
