There are ghosts.
*Disclaimer*: I'm a paranoid schizophrenic.
You expect ghosts to appear as white sheets, floating at the end of the bed. But they're everywhere - in objects, in another dimension, in your heart.
People keep dying. My auntie died last week. That night, in the throes of midnight mourning, I said goodbye. I wasn't amazingly close to auntie Ann, but I had a better relationship with her spouse, my uncle Mick, who died a few years ago. My heart goes out to my cousins, Gareth, Kirsten and Cathryn.
What do I do to deserve these dreams? What it must've been, was that I must've spent the day taking notes from the wrong mathematics book. I'm so tired. But I need to give myself a few minutes to readjust. I've just had a terrible nightmare. Let me explain. Let the breath of God fall lightly across my lips.
I wake up, in dream, and I'm dreaming, and there are several scenarios. The first is that I'm in my flat, and I'm playing my Epiphone SG, and I'm writing a new song, and it's got the flavour of a Led Zeppelin ballad. (In fact, I feel like I should be writing that song now, but I had to come here). And my flat is my flat. I notice someone has thrown something through my kitchen window; that is, there is a ball-bearing shaped hole in the pane - the pane seems quite thick, and I can trace the trajectory of the ball-bearing, and at once I do so, and it appears to have come from the nearby mental hospital, across the town. But the hole ceases up, and the hole appears to now have been made from this side of the window. And it is capped with a piece of solder. I know. Very boring. I know.
Yet there I am, in this dark dream on this dark night, and I have a huge house that is haunted. And in dream I am working on this song - I have the chords in my head right now, and I wonder if they really work in real life. But there I am in dream, writing this song, this ballad, like Led Zeppelin.
And halfway through the night, from the moment when I was going to sleep, to the moment I woke up, I was subjected, subdued, subordinated to the crying of my cats, and they kept waking me up, and I was in Catland, where cats themselves have a real life, a real existence, a real internal experience, and theirs is a huge reality, and I myself was drawn into it, and saw, when I woke up several times, that there was a cat in my room other than my own cats, and it was a human-sized cat, like a pirate size, and most frightening. But there you have it.
There you are, and there I was, in dream, playing guitar and writing a song on my Epiphone SG, and old Rob shows up, and there he is, sitting there, Roberto, enjoying the guitar, and my flat is huge and there are steps leading everywhere, like Labyrinth. I want him to get a picture of me hanging on the balcony, and I ask him to take it - because, before, I was hanging on the bannisters, and I had thought, "This would make a good picture!" So I asked him to take it, and I've searched all around the house, for the correct bannister to hang off, and Rob has gone off, looking for it, and he's walking all around the house, and he's then divided into two... and there are now two Robs walking around the house, up and down stairs, and now there's a third... walking up and down the Labyrinth that is my flat, and in any case, I found where I wanted him to take my picture, and I waited, to see if the Three Robs would come together and meet over the other side of the hallway, yet when they came together, they turned into other people, and there was now Rob, and Judy (my dead ex), and another woman - a young girl.
The picture was taken, and now I'm feeling tired. Have you ever felt tired in your sleep? That's dangerous. You might die! But there's a knock at the door, and in comes Eugene, my old best mate, and I'm very thankful, and he's here to skin up and watch the football, and I'm very thankful that he's here, and now Eugene, Rob and Judy are here.
But they're not here for long. The next thing you know, I've gone back to bed, and I'm trying to fall asleep in dream, and that's dangerous - you could end up in hell. But now I'm alone, and it's me, and my guitar, my Epiphone SG, is with me the whole time, and I'm constantly trying to write this song. But there's a weird feeling; an ominous feeling, so I look out the window. And I don't want to be seen looking out the window, because people always look up at me. Yet I look out the window - I peer out the panes - and it is a dark and late night, and there is a man walking down below, among the Autumn trees, and under the dim lights of the streetlamp, and he's walking away to the right, down the road, and he turns back, and takes a look at me - a deliberate look at me, and it is most perturbing, and I'm nonplussed and scared. The man has disappeared (because he walked away). But then I approach the window a second time, still playing this Epiphone SG and writing my song, and I look leftwards down the road, from my high place up here in the window, and there is a woman. "Don't look up! Don't look up!" I think, but as she's walking, she looks up. She stares for a minute. I skulk back inside the room. Don't strange things happen in dreams? Whenever two things happen similarly in a dream, that's something of which to be wary, because that doesn't happen in dreams; that only happens in real life.
Then, there is a woman in my room. I'm playing guitar... well, I'm trying to play... and she is a ghost, and she grabs me and takes me. She hugs me and embraces me. She is a black woman. She kisses me and grabs my balls, and I think, "She's going to rip my balls off!" but it feels good. And I'm still trying to play guitar. The woman disappears.
I walk into the hallway, and there are people there. At a glance, I have seen Jimmy Saville, but I walk past thinking nothing of it. But then, as I go into my bathroom, he is there again in a different guise, and he says, "Why didn't you beat me up?!" So I think, 'Yeah, I should have!' and I push him back, down the hall, and now to the left, in another bedroom, there is another Jimmy Saville, lying on the bed, and a third, and they all look different. It is fucking petrifying.
I try to wake up, and I'm so tired, but I shock myself out of it, and wake up, and there's Chris Cornell standing at the foot of my bed, in pirate gear, looking kind of short, kind of 'Pirates of the Caribbean', and it is fucking petrifying. I get out of bed and I come here.
That's it, that's the experience. But it leaves me wanting to have a black girlfriend, and to write this song on my Epiphone SG.
Daniel
Comments
"The ghosts of my life blew wilder than the wind" (Sylvian, Japan, 1982)
Daniel,
Sorry to hear about your aunt, I hope that she had a good life, extended wishes to your cousins, too.
Hope the physics is going well, for you.
BW
J.