I’ve realised recently how dull my dreams have become, I usually dream lucidly however recently I’ve started waking up the moment I start to change the parameters of the narrative or simply my location, it’s most probably stress, something I felt I’d had a grip on over the past year or two. I could blame it on nicotine, or caffeine, my erratic sleep patterns, or maybe I’m just letting it happen in a state of sullen and benign curiosity, testing a pet theory I have that many are purely based on the process of reticular activating mechanism or RAM.

Whatever it is it isn’t working, I’m waking up on average every two to three hours, four if I’m lucky. Yes it’s true, my RAM is full, I need an upgrade. When I can’t sleep I continue my waking life in a semi-concious state, perhaps I am still only half awake now, but there are tell-tale signs that I am not dreaming. My hands are cold, the sound quality is less peripheral, and there are no famous people in the room.

Last night (or rather the earliest hours of this morning), I found myself at the end of a rather salubrious pier, a horizontal edifice of high Victorian grandeur that seems to have been refitted according to the futuristic dreams of 1970′s American billionaire who’s watched too many sci-fi films of the time. There was a bowling alley, the sides were lined with shops (I always ignore the retail industry in my sleep), and at the far end a private members club, a yacht club I believe.

For some reason they let me through the door, perhaps I own a yacht in a parallel life. Inside the club the architecture had been left untouched, in fact it was looking rather grubby, though the glass dome detail was rather impressive, the baby grand had seen better days and the plants needed watering. I headed for the bar (of course), the rather attractive blonde serving drinks was busy doing the accounts and encouraged me to come back later. I flirted without any serious attention for a while before turning back. As I reached the door I met Robert Wagner and Stephanie Powers of Hart to Hart fame, celebrities of my childhood no doubt, they were looking a little tired but seemed to treat me like an old friend.

We chatted for a while before they showed me a room, inside that plain and simply decorated cubby-hole with a sea view was a desk, a chair, and a typewriter, I sat down and stared at the blank page. Before long Stephanie brought me a scotch on the rocks (which I’d never choose to drink in normal circumstances). She smiled, patted and briefly rubbed my shoulders, gently urging me to begin writing. I did and within an instant I read the page and realised then and there I was blogging. I woke up. Here’s an approximation of that dream-induced article:-

Time Travel Through The Cathode Ray.

Everyone has had their fair share of déjà vu, I literally induce this bizarre and rather misunderstood mental incursion (or should that be aberration?). For most of the past decade, whenever I’m alone, which is much of the time, no matter what task I am engaged in, drawing, painting, writing, I will have the television on, mumbling at a distance in the background – and whenever the TV is on, I prefer an old film or two or five. The volume set at ‘subconsciously register’, the narrative inconsequential, apart from Westerns which I do find tiresome, is it all the gunfire, the whooping racial-stereotype Indians, or the terrible orchestral fervour these movies rely on? I cannot tell.

Because I hardly glimpse at the screen I can "watch" the worst and best films of the last century time and time again, indeed watching is not the operative word here, a more suitable verb would be "soak" (like a celluloid sponge), as the vacuum tube hums (no FST here) mumbles on incessantly, skipping from character to character and scene to scene, much akin to a dream.

Is this a case of an addiction to nostalgia, the comfort of the past unchanging? Perhaps, to the slightest of a degree, but more so, far more so, as with my father, the few times I do look up and attempt to engage with the storyline I find myself hunting down incongruencies, be it the plot, the film photography, the mishaps of extras in the background, a sudden lapse in continuity of any sort, almost as if the question of time’s solidity and steadfastness is not a comfort at all but rather an annoyance.

One director who will probably be nodding vociferously from the grave to the last paragraph is Jaques Tati, who is fortunately (for me) the creator of one of my all time favourite films, Playtime, a feast of nonsensical happenstance and circumstance entwined, which by several accounts simultaneously predicted the warren-like existence of many corporate office workers to this day. Looped actions and narrative, lost tourists, pointless behaviourisms and a plethora of wide-angle and overhead scenes of a disorganised ant-like society going through the motions for the sake of it, without true purpose, man, society, life stumbles on regardless.

Time has always fascinated me, or rather the failure of science to completely grasp its nuances and complexities, I had never been a fan of Einstein’s hankering for a continuous linear model of the fourth dimension, Chaos and quantum physics have made some tentative steps to traverse the chasm of ignorance regarding our temporal existence, but as with death, until you are completely outside of the framework of our existence, it is hard to prove any theory, one way or another. For me, the beauty of time is its mysterious and illogical nature, what was mad one day is sanity the next, what was imaginary can become reality, and what was impossible can eventually reach a golden threshold of possibility and eventually fact.

Time plays with my mind, and I let it, in fact I positively encourage it to frolic through the ages and aeons of parallel states and wormholes of non-causality, for time is one thing amongst a legion of distractions that does not. For me mortality holds no sway, to exist, to not exist, without consciousness, or the definite knowledge that I would possess such things as identity and recognitive powers of the self, without these the idea is meaningless. Dying is something to be feared, as is all suffering, time’s ugliest trick is the effects of decay, to remain static and disintegrate, losing oneself to the ether, particle by particle, that is something I do not look forward to. Yet I needn’t, the process has already begun, and there is a trade-off, as the beauty of youth and vitality withers away, ebbing and flowing towards a final tide, I know that I have at least my memories of what has been and in some parallel universe what could have been and will be.

This post is tagged cathode ray, death, dreams, famous people, film photography, insomnia, narrative, parallel life, parallel universe, RAM, Reality, sci-fi, science, sleep, sleep patterns, time, time travel, TV, victorian grandeur, waking life, yacht club