Taking a Pounding

Woke up in the early hours of the morning conscious of great trauma. I'd dreamt a death. At high speeds, under high pressure, with a flurry of action and a sudden descent of doom. My own death, I think. My heart was pounding; heart rate up, lips dry, sudden fatigue.

And then I slept the sleep of the righteous for a time.

Citadel Miniatures

Tiny plastic figures, set out on the tabletop. In the middle, a great tower rises. Who knows? It might yet make both cross and castle dark. These painted figures, they are all one side. And there is another side.

Is this a game of Warhammer? Does anyone know the score?

The thoughts that flap around my head are like ravens around the Tower of London. No doubt, if they stopped, I would too.

But they are there, and still no king is in sight, and the big cauldron bubbles again and again, whistling and mumbling its song of undeath through the blasted heath.

Nightmares

In all my life, I've had very few extreme horror-movie type nightmares. My nightmares tend to be more subtle, and the subtle ones recur.

Here are two awful motifs.

The first one is the House on the Hill. Sometimes, it's a House on the Cliff. Either way, it's a very familiar house, externally a two-storey sprawling white mansion on a topographical high point. It's home to me, always. I am always comfortable with the house itself; it's not the house that's the enemy, but what happens inside.

I remember at least three of the House dreams in great detail. In one of them, I remember strolling along a long corridor with a lot of classically-executed oil paintings in bronze frames. Idly, I decided to look at them, and then I realised they were all nice portraits of my friends. Beautiful! I was happy until I looked down at the bottom of each frame and realised that the brass tags there said things like, "[Real Name Withheld] Lim, 6 Jan 1967 - 20 Jun 1995, Basal Cell Carcinoma." I woke up feeling rather odd.

The second one is what I call the Long Urban Meeting Sequence. You're doing something pretty normal, like doing your laundry at some Laundromat in a big city. Or shopping. And then... you keep encountering people from your past. It's like a story by Harlan Ellison (some of you will know which one). My most recent one was when I dreamt I was queueing up at a dry cleaners. Then a netball team came in and occupied the whole place. The odd thing was that I knew all the players, from a long, long time ago.

I'm not afraid of the blood and gore and dark terror things as much as I am of the odd human quirk incidents. I think Rod Serling's Twilight Zone TV series has a lot to do with that.

Renaissance Nightmares

The oddest things come to you in the night. You dream of Wilde's Ballad of Reading Gaol (neither word pronounced quite the way you might think), you dream of excellence in wall-decorating graffiti, you dream of endless corridors hacked through the substance of eternity by teams of blind and persistent mice. And from all this conflation of peculiar and disturbing essences, you distil nothing but gibberish. Well, not nothing. You might actually get some doggerel with it. And so, Findhorn Productions LLC present:

The Ballad of the Globalised Student

What brave bright spirit lit your mind
And fired up your eye?
Be this the beacon that defined
The circle of your sky?

Did you divine within your sphere
Of silent crystal wrought
The heavy hands of time and fear
Around the neck of thought?

Were you prepared within your heart
To drink this draught of woe,
To say farewell and then depart
For places none would go?

Yet here you are upon this strand
Of sixfold human strain
Between the roaring ocean and
The land of summer grain;

And here you strive against a host
From castles built in air,
Each lance extended essays past
A token of despair.

And still you parry every blow
And blunt each slashing blade,
Learning more each day to know
From every escapade.

For even as you think you think
And thought that you were taught,
The clever thing to which you drink
Is never getting caught.

And also raise a toast – you must! –
To all your fallen friends
Who missing deadlines came to dust
And other sticky ends.

Give voice to hope and hope to voice,
The sun is gold on blue!
Never regret your childhood choice
To do what you must do.

Remember dauntless heroes now
Who gave their hope to God
And flicked the sweat upon their brow
Upon this humble sod.

Rise up, young student, on the wings
Of eagles carved in stone
And hope the sunlit future brings
More than this rock alone.

For what brave heart and brilliant mind
Can stand the test of time,
Unless with pen and ear refined
They give it up to rhyme?