The Floor-Moons Are Angry

Way back in the dawn of days, someone told me that everyone remembers their entire life, but that nobody can access all their memories. Dreams, this person said, were the result of our subconsciousness having a rummage, and so while we might perceive a narrative in dreams, it was really just our brains churning out different things at random. Often, I think this holds true. At various times, I've been able to pick out familiar pieces from my dreams, realising this image of a beach and palm trees came from a mural I saw earlier in the week, that image of disembowlement from a pig slaughtered in a documentary, these bits of scenery cut from various video games. But I don't think it's the whole story.

There's argument to suggest that dreaming is different for everyone. In my case, I tend to fall asleep by thinking about one thing or another, and as I drift off, the links between different ideas grows stranger and more tenuous before eventually morphing into dream. I know this happens, because whenever I'm disturbed on the brink of sleep, I realise two things:

1. Until I'd been woken up, I hadn't realised I was sleeping - my thoughts had rambled along as usual, so part of me had taken this to mean I was properly awake; and

2. Until I'd been woken up, I hadn't realised how bizarre my thoughts had become. In fact, they seemed perfectly normal.

Occasionally, this process happens in reverse. As a teenager, I remember waking up at a friend's house on New Year's Day, quasi-hungover and uncomfortable owing to the fact that not only had I been sleeping on a wooden floor, but I'd been using a plastic computer cover as a blanket. My 'bed' was near a pair of glass doors leading onto the patio, through which, with scant regard for my welfare, the morning sun was shining. Lurching up, I retained one impression from my startled transition to wakefulness, half-dream and half-first-thought-of-the-day, and it was this: Help! Help! The floor-moons are angry!

As I rubbed my forehead and came fully awake (noticing, with some small comfort, that I'd at least slept on the floor because all the lounges were taken, rather than having passed out mindlessly), I pondered these words. What on Earth had I meant? Slowly, as dawn winked bitterly through the glass, I remembered. The sun coming in had cast lines of light on the floor, warm where it hit me and otherwise making pretty patterns with the shadows. These had been the 'floor-moons' - bits of sunlight moving over the timber, which I'd glimpsed over the past hour by half-opening my eyes whenever I rolled over. As the sun rose, my computer-cover had been heating up, making me even more uncomfortable; hence, the floor-moons were 'angry' - by this, I'd meant they were hot. Finally, I'd wanted help because, still alseep, my brain couldn't figure out why I was sweating, and had concluded - somewhat wrongly - that I was in danger. With the house utterly silent and everyone else still asleep, it was the direct sunlight which had woken me up, and my garbled, disjointed thoughts, while meaningless without context, had been a genuine (though semi-conscious) effort at explaining it.

There are lots of different kinds of dream: anxiety, running-late-for-school-slash-work-oh-god-I'm-naked dreams; repetitive, word-oriented dreams where a given phrase gets stuck in your head and rattles around until you wake up; macabre dreams, where things you'd find disturbing in real life are just part of the scenery; nightmares, where the distinguishing feature from macabre dreams has nothing to do with scenery and everything to do with fear; absurd dreams, where you go fishing with Arnold Schwarzzeneger, the sea turns to ice and then you have to harpoon a blue weasel because it has your house keys; forgotten dreams, where you wake up knowing you've dreamt something largely unremarkable but can't remember what it was; flying dreams, falling dreams, sex dreams, death dreams - Freudian wonderlands every colour of the rainbow; dreams where you're someone else...

My imaginative schtick has always been fantasy dreams (knights and dragons rather than sexual kinks), with a whack of Boy's Own Adventure, sci-fi, mythology and aburdism thrown in. My dreams not only have plots, they have ensemble casts with names, relationships, backgrounds and motives. The perspective flips between bird's-eye and that of various characters, some of whom I 'am' and others of which I'm not, even when I'm looking out from behind their eyes. In dreams, I've been men, women, children, middle-aged and elderly; I've played the part of a robot, an alien, a shape-changer, a witch, a ghost and a menagerie full of animals; and the best part of it is, this doesn't make me unique. Because dreams aren't just limited to a lifetime's worth of memories, but a person's-worth of wondering 'what if?'

But even so, the one about the entire universe existing in the eye of a giant cosmic fur-seal was pretty weird.