Friday, August 10, 2012

Sleep Deprived Lament

     My trolley was full to overflowing. The wheels were stubborn and cast about         in every direction besides the one I was racing for. Behind me the girl - whose       name I had yet to learn - was hurrying along too, though not to the extent I               would have liked. Every now and then she would pause and peruse                       something on the shelves before either shoveling it into her basket or taking           off once more.

      I was nearing the checkouts when I again missed the sound of her trolley              clacking behind. I turned and saw her inspecting the labels of various drug              packets.

"Leave it," I roar, startling her into action.

She catches up with me and we run together past the checkouts and out into

the empty parking lot where the fumes of the idling four-by-four cast an eerie 
fog into the cold night air.

"Hurry," I shout again, as we begin to toss our wares into the vehicle.

There I was at 6am, enjoying an action packed dream in which, if I do say so myself, I was playing an absolute boss in the midst of a zombie invasion, when I awaken under the sheer weight of the need to write it down. Game over.

My mobile phone is constantly choked up with drafts that make little or no sense to me because I've typed them out while still half asleep and half demented. I have constant headaches over choosing whether to delete snippets of description or dialogue or an unfledged idea because they are simply barmy, or consign them to the steadily growing mess of papers I fear I'll never get around to.

Nothing, no time nor place, is sacred, though the most likely time for an idea to hit is the wrong time. Just this week I was sitting on a plane, preparing to take off when a fragment of prose just popped into my head. Pen and papers are safe in the overhead bin and I can't take off my seatbelt to get them. My phone is in my pocket but I'm not allowed to turn it on. So follows an agonising half hour of repeating the fragment over and over in my head until a time came when I could jot it down. I'm not even allowed the luxury of dropping off to sleep to the rocking of the turbulence.

This post sounds a lot like an elaborate moan, but in truth, I love it. I love the feeling when that perfect piece of prose just flitters into my brain and I know exactly where to put it. I adore waking up before the end of the dream, because it means I can spend many a blissful hour imagining how it could have ended. In short, this is the dream.

(All together now.... awwwwwwwww!)

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