Nightmares...

Following on from my last upbeat entry, sadly Sarah’s fantastical dream world is not all fun-filled ‘Come Dine with Me’ episodes and getting knocked up by 50 Cent. An overactive psyche is like a bad drug-induced trip – all’s fine while you’re getting high, finding hidden meanings within your exhaled smoke formations, and giggling, but when the subconscious turns nasty on you, that’s then you suddenly find yourself trapped in a hideous, psychedelic, traumatising, inexorable, nightmarish experience from which you physically can’t escape. Which probably explains why the one time I smoked any really strong weed in Cambodia, I ended up hiding under my duvet, rocking back and forth in a state of paranoid frenzy that some sleaze who’d been hitting on me earlier in the evening was going to come back and rape, murder and possibly dismember me in my bed that night. From now on am sticking with excessive amounts of red wine to alter my consciousness, thank you very much.

For example, a few weeks back I had an absolutely horrific dream, which basically started out with me, my Dad, my brother, and for reasons inexplicable also my colleague Max, all on some kind of outdoor retreat in the forest. Presumably to collect wood for a campfire or something, Max was cutting branches off trees with a chainsaw, but accidentally turned around too quickly one way and sliced my brother in the abdomen, then in jumping back from my brother also managed to get my Dad in the neck. Luckily my Dad’s head stayed on if he held it in place, but my brother (who in real life is actually a doctor) was left with a great gaping gap in his side pouring blood and plopping out the odd vital internal organ or two…

We vainly tried to stem the blood as we waited for the ambulance to arrive, which seeing as we were in the middle of the forest, took an absolute eternity, and then when it did turn up could only fit me and my brother, leaving my Dad (still grievously injured with half his head hanging off) waiting in anguish for the next one. And then on top of that, after driving us down from the forest and into town, the bastards then forcibly dropped us off at some dive of a greasy-spoon, saying they had reached the limits of their designated healthcare district, and that another ambulance would be along shortly to take us the rest of the way to hospital. In the meantime, my poor brother had turned pale, unconscious, and with bits of himself falling out all over the place, till eventually all that remained of him is one meagre slice of tomato and the limp fabric of his face, which having slipped off his skull now resembled some cheap rubber Halloween mask. When eventually the second ambulance turned up, thanks to good old NHS cutbacks, it turned out to be a kebab van filling in out-of-hours, with a stretcher in the back crammed in next to the old dead man’s leg...

All credit to the British healthcare system though, once at the hospital, they did stitch my brother back up again from his paltry tomato-based remains, and a day or two later he was back to true Daniel form, gorging on cheese sandwiches, despite my concerned warnings that he would split his stitches that way… So a happy ending all round one might think, except that a day or two later we (my brother, his fiancé and I) were escorted by ambulance car over to the hospital where my Dad was now being treated for his chainsaw-related neck injuries. Unfortunately, for some reason, instead of keeping their eyes on the road, the two irate ambulance drivers kept turning round to hurl abuse and flip the bird to the three of us sitting in the back, despite our desperate pleas for them to both calm down and turn their attention back to the road... Inevitably, full head-on collision with another vehicle soon ensued, with lucky me getting to watch the whole thing in graphic slow motion from some disembodied viewpoint in front of our car… Eyes bulged, faces hit windscreen, throats were cut by shattering glass, bodies were propelled violently forwards, my brother’s stitches all burst from the impact, and all sorts of other gruesome consequences all slowly and surely played out before my very eyes… and then I mercifully woke up, unsurprisingly perhaps in a state of sheer and absolute terror.

Moral of the story – Max, next time be more careful with the damn chainsaw!!!

Dream 'Come Dine with Me'

Another true classic last night... :-)))

To my great joy, I dreamt I was on episode one of interfaith / sexuality ‘Come Dine with Me’ with the same Muslim women as on this (but fatter) as the first host, along with a male gay couple, a young black guy, the obligatory gobby Northern Lass, and myself presumably meant to represent the militant atheist (aka voice of reason) of the group. Host cooked up a fantastic curry (though with weird cheese cracker vol-au-vent things on the side and no bloody alcohol) and all things considered things went comparatively well for the first show, with me politely refraining from expressing my Sarkozy-leaning views on the burkha, and the gay couple reining in their campness and tippy-toeing around the awkward subject of sexuality so as not to cause “offense” to the religious among the group. Unfortunately the black guy stormed off mid-show when in a socio-demographical debate on the subject of inner-city knife crime (admittedly rather polemic dinner party discussion material, especially for a first meeting) I used the what I know to be the politically correct term “black” in reference to the ratio of black-to-white teenagers stabbed in the last few years.

Am not quite sure if the above shows me in a politically correct or incorrect, but just in case I failed to sufficiently “embrace diversity”, I’d just like to balance it out with a quote by the late great Douglas Adams on the subject:

Religion has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever. That's an idea we're so familiar with, whether we subscribe to it or not, that it's kind of odd to think what it actually means, because really what it means is 'Here is an idea or a notion that you're not allowed to say anything bad about; you're just not. Why not? Because you're not! If somebody votes for a party that you don't agree with, you're free to argue about it as much as you like; everybody will have an argument but nobody feels aggrieved by it. If somebody thinks taxes should go up or down you are free to have an argument about it, but on the other hand if somebody says 'I mustn't move a light switch on a Saturday', you say, “Fine, I respect that”.

Oh what a complicated world we all live in these days, but in these controversial, overly sensitive times where one can't even bloody sneeze for being termed racist, one's thing for sure - can’t wait to dream episode 2!!!

Some Recent Classics... :-))

A random selection of recent memorable dreams:

• Being kidnapped by a millionaire Arab sheik who was collecting beautiful wives from all over the world and having to live in luxury in a corner of his palace, dress up in gorgeous Bollywood style attire, and have fun socialising with all his other kidnapped wives at communal meals each day. No wonder I was a bit gutted when the guy later decided all these women in his house were just too much hassle, and had a competition for the most beautiful one he’d then go on to keep (Jennifer Aniston won).
• Meeting Dizzee Rascal for dinner via expats.cz and getting invited to stand at the front of his gig later that evening, pulling, and then the next day running into my colleague Misa (a fellow fan) who was all like OMFG Sarah how did you manage to hook up with Dizzee, and I was like, yeah, check me, scored with the Rascal... :-)) (Neither of us speak like airhead, celeb-obsessed teenagers in real life, btw.)
• Unexpectedly going out for dinner and cocktails with the Sex in the City girls, but feeling horribly embarrassed as hadn't known to get all dressed up accordingly...
• Johnny Vaughan asking me to join the Breakfast Show to replace Lisa Snowdon. Apart from the early starts, that surely must be one of the best jobs in the world…
• Finding myself a pre-fame 50 Cent's baby mama and going on the run with him to Brno...
• Having to write an English Lit (which I never studied) university exam on supposed Czech classic 'The Good Soldier Svejk' (which I never read), but getting disqualified for writing my conclusion on toilet paper and had to beg the course tutor to turn a blind eye...
• Having to read a book reminiscent of both 'Catcher in the Rye' and Max Frisch's 'Andorra', and write an essay on it for my boss. Unfortunately the book only exists in my head and was something to do with alienation and discrimination experienced by foreigners within the Czech Republic.
• Finding that the database I manage at work was a white kite, which needed testing by flying from the top of a high hill, and one day experienced functionality so uncharacteristically high that the force nearly pulled me from my feet... In real life you’d have trouble getting the damn thing to stay in the air…
• Discovering “Princess Diaries” style that I had actually been fathered by the King of the Fairies and was going to get to rule over the alternate universe of the fairy folk and get wings. Quite miffed when woke up that wasn’t the case.
• The Sorting Hat putting me in Slytherin, and somehow not being in the least bit surprised.
• Serving as Barack Obama’s designated mistress for the EMEA region (well, Michelle can’t travel everywhere with him, can she… ;-)) ). Haven’t been able to look at him in the same light since...

Oh if only real life was so interesting...

Recurrent Dreams....

While my overactive subconscious is in the habit of frequently throwing out some truly epic gems of originality (more of these to come in future entries :-)) ), at the same time it often also regurgitates the old, mainly anxiety based, classics with depressing regularity… Of these, the most common recurrent dreams are:

• Tsunamis – possibly related to narrowly missing the 2006 one when I was backpacking across South-East Asia in my early twenties. All I know is each time I have this dream, it is always with a sense of dreary resignation that after all my previous dreams about this happening, this time a tsunami is finally coming in reality and there is no sense in running from it, as it will soon engulf us all anyway…
• Past Nemeses – involving either one girl at school who was always a snidey bitch to me, who I always pleasingly seek out and punch in the face (hah!!), or former evil / sociopathic colleague who seeks to destroy me with her characteristic piercing death stare…
• School – lately I’ve been dreaming of high school reunions, at which I surprise everyone by the fact that I am now a sophisticated, confident, urbane woman (ahem) with enviable life in one of Europe’s most beautiful capitals, as opposed to the swotty, self-righteous, calorie-counting, woefully attired geek I was back then, and all the popular girls of the Class of 2000 now want to be my friend…
• My Old House – a place I was ultimately glad to leave given all the regrettable family crap that went on within those walls, but which nevertheless keeps creeping back unbidden into my dreams… Don’t need a psychoanalyst to tell me I have “issues” from the past here I should probably deal with, but hey, good old British emotional repression has served me pretty well up till now, and either way definitely works out cheaper than years of introspective self-indulgence in therapy at any rate!
• Little Brother – at the moment am dreaming frequently of having to somehow protect my cherubic little brother as a child from some unknown danger. Given that he is a 6ft 3in, karate brown-belt, fully-fledged anaesthetist with house / fiancé these days, am not sure where this one is coming from...
• Mum – these are the absolute worst. Either I dream her cancer of ten odd years ago has returned, or she is ill in some other form and I can’t do anything to help or prevent it… Too awful a prospect to even want to think / write about.
• Exams – usually in the form of suddenly remembering that I forgot to go back and do my final year at university after my Year Abroad, and realising with horror that I no longer remember anything about Kafka or Dostoevsky, forgot all my Russian, and can’t remember where I put all my university study notes…
• Irrevocable Mistakes – i.e. lapsing back into smoking, accidentally cheating on my other half, being late, getting bollocked at work, missing flights, or putting something accidently on Facebook or sending in an email that really shouldn’t have done etc – either way always a dream I am insanely relieved to wake up from…
• Aeroplanes Crashing – not one I’ve had in a while, but in the run-up to my move to Prague I used to dream I saw an aeroplane crashing from our UK office on the third floor. As the date of my move moved ever closer, so too would the plane crash ever nearer to our building, until the week before I actually flew out, the crash site was so near that the explosion blew out the windows and we all had to be evacuated…
• Moving – recently I keep dreaming that I’ve found a fantastic new flat in Prague that I get all excited about and move into, only to slowly realise that my old one was much better / cheaper / closer to work and I’ve forgotten to find someone to take over the lease and I’m now paying rent for two flats simultaneously…
• Hamsters – this one is a fairly new addition to the recurrent crop, and invariably involves lots of adorably cute little baby hamsters running all about the place and me desperately trying to scoop them up and put them in a cage before they get squished underfoot, but they all keep on climbing out again. According to the Dream Dictionary site, hamsters are a sign of undeveloped emotions, which I of course take great offense to – my emotions are perfectly well developed, stupid judgemental website!
• The Devil – for a confirmed atheist, I do seem to have an uncanny fear of the devil (or at least some overwhelming force of inexplicable evil), and sometimes have those nightmares where you think you are awake in your bed and some malevolent force is preventing you from moving / breathing etc.
• Fat – dreaming I have reverted to my previous teenage incarnation of chubby Sarah, and have to lose it all over again…
• Teeth – not the normal teeth dropping out, but having my extremely expensive / excruciatingly painful to install bridge work come loose, leaving me as a peg-toothed, gappy-gob on one side of my mouth…
• Vomitting – apart from spiders, my other extreme real-life phobia or worse (don’t read if your squeamish) – coughing up shit…

Which pretty much exhausts the list of recurrent dreams – looking back clearly all reflections of my deeply angst-ridden, vengeance-seeking, history-beholden psyche… Hmmm, perhaps that therapy might just be called for after all!! ;-))))))))

Starting from the Beginning...

In my life I have, apparently, already had a good 10,429 nights of sleep. If one presumes that I dreamed at least several times in pretty much most of them, but forgot them either on waking or over the intervening years, that definitely adds up to one hell a lot of wasted material already for this blog...

That said, there are a few dreams that have stuck with me from early childhood onwards, the very earliest from when I was about three being:

• Dreaming that I was in a Monster Munch advert (presumably based on this classic 1986 example)
• Dreaming that a massive tarantula was crawling up my leg and pulling one of its legs off, only to find a body full of purple Turkish delight like gunk and that the spider still kept slowly and surely hobbling seven-leggedly along my leg and up towards my face (this one, unsurprisingly, resulted in a deeply engrained, life-long arachnophobia).
• Dreaming that a scary monster cast a shadow across our hallway, presumably to pluck me and mine out of our beds and gruesomely consume us by dead of night.

Clearly anxiety dreams in the form of monsters and nasty creepie-crawlers characterised my infantile subconscious from the start then... :-))

Apart from one dream in which I gleefully pushed my little brother of the balcony when I was about seven, I don’t remember many dreams from my later childhood, though I do recall several recurrent dreams from my geeky, gawky, all-round traumatic teenage years, the key examples being:

• Pregnancy dreams, in which I either found myself inexplicably up the duff or already with a newborn babe in arms, leaving me both mystified as to how I’d somehow come into the family way despite my as then undoubted unsullied state. Then as now, I utterly hate babies in real life.
• Dreams in which I ate chocolate, biscuits, or pretty much anything on my then taboo list (which at the time pretty much constituted everything that wasn’t water or some kind of vegetable of which you used up the calories value in the chewing), and being desperately relieved when I woke up that I hadn’t in fact caved.
• Occasional flying dreams (sadly not had one of those in a loooooooooong time).
• One particularly vivid dream in which I saw the devil in goat-like horn-headed form ascending up Joel Hill towards my Year 10 classroom, and sensing a diabolic malevolence so intense that the paint actually started peeling from the walls (more than it was already peeling, that is – don’t think my bog-standard comp had updated its interior decor since about 1955...).
• Shagging Jerry Springer (eughhh – God knows where the old subconscious dredged that one up from).

Not many recollected dreams to show my from my first 10,000 or so nights on the earth, but still more than most I’d guess... More to come from recent years in my next entry anyhow!

Meet Me and my Subconscious...

Hello. My name is Sarah and I have a warped subconscious.

Looking back I think I have always been a vivid dreamer, and can even remember dreams going back to my very early childhood; however, in the last year or two, for reasons unfathomable, my nocturnal life has gone into very real overdrive...

For this reason I've decided to now document my dreams in the hope of drawing at least some logical sense of what until now has been a series of disjointed, bizarre, frightening, recurrent, and occasionally epic / lucid subconscious encounters. Hopefully some more psycho-analytical types out there will be able to apply some sort of meaningful interpretation as to the weird and wonderful night-time contents of my head...

Maybe it's down to an otherwise over-active imagination, maybe (as I suspect) a combination of undealt with issues from the past and a series of daunting situations facing me in the present, or on the other hand maybe it's just a matter of too much cheese and wine before bedtime... :-)))) And now THAT is something I am just never giving up - dire nocturnal consequences or not!!! :-))))