Labyrinths of the sleeping mind

Last night's sleep was an odyssey of fragments. Countless times I awoke hot and disoriented from one dream or nightmare to stumble to the kitchen, drain a cold glass of water in a matter of seconds, and then fall back down the rabbithole again. I don't remember everything but I'm trying, although I'm still a little sleepy, to gather up what little that hasn't slipped away in the morning light and write it down. At times it felt almost revelatory.

In the most vivid of them I met you for the first time in years. It was, for some reason known only to the dream and its logic, at the bottom of my mother's garden, on the slope under the apple trees and it was warm. The sun laid down a lattice of light and shade as it fell through the leaves, the same way that it does on one of my favourite streets to drive through in this place where I live now. The garden wasn't as it is now - there was no chicken coop for instance and that old shed, with its cobwebs and asbestos, was still standing there in its place. It was the garden from my childhood, the one I grew up in.

I was sitting with a friend, someone I have never known and someone who in all likelihood does not, has never, and will never exist. I'm not sure how I know that, but they don't seem like a composite drawn from memory but somehow external, as if they never came from my mind in the first place. I can't even remember their face. They're not really important. You came and sat next to us, not even noticing we were there. My friend was rude to you - I can't remember what she said - but as you made to leave I said something conciliatory and you stopped. I noticed then that you were almost blind (that was why you had not seen us) and I felt a strange protective urge - something that I knew you'd find very patronising and probably become indignant about if I expressed it. I don't know why you were blind, but it seemed as if you looked right at me even so, and your eyes were the same as they were. You looked older but also in a way the same as you did years ago. You looked good.

We talked. I can't remember most of it. You said you were to go to Miami or you had just come from there, doing something important for work or for university or something. I remember thinking that it might have had something to do with dolphins. I didn't ask, didn't want to betray my ignorance through some cringeworthy slip-up and make myself appear stupid but it didn't really matter. It was nice just to talk.

I don't really remember how it ended. I think you got up and walked away. All I recall is that pretty soon afterwards I was back in the framing narrative with a dry mouth and bleary eyes. Is waking life the story from which dreams spring tangentially or is it the other way around? Not sure. The latter seemed more lucid then than the former, sharper and clearer and more important anyway than trudging in the dark toward the fridge for the thousandth time that night.

I can only scrape together a little of what else I dreamed about. In one I was working at a law firm again, doing a familiar job involving boxes and files and stacks of paper, except the place was more like a castle or a school or a mansion or a prison and I didn't leave at the end of the day (which never occurred because it was always night) and nobody did and I stared out of the windows at floodlit fields far away and crept across wooden-floored corridors quietly so as not to disturb anyone and invite their wrath. I could not understand why I was there or what I was supposed to be doing but I knew that I had to be there. There was an oppressive stillness and I didn't like it.

In another I was in a gigantic department store and I had been instructed to buy a machine that attached to the kitchen sink and made icecream and desserts of many kinds but there was only the display model left and I didn't take it and I wandered around and saw many strange but on the other hand relatively mundane things.

At a different point in the night (I can't remember if it was part of another dream or discrete) I found myself at a number of airports but there was a war on or something and nobody would let me through. I don't remember anything but the departure gates, always departure gates, but they were the places at which I arrived. Each airport led to a different place, not the place or country in which it was based, perhaps not even the same reality. Finally my desperate band and I crashed through security in a hail of bullets and I think we escaped into the jungle but I'm not sure.

Hoping I sleep a bit better tonight.