To sleep, perchance to dream

I am a deep sleeper.

When I was little, my father woke up with a start in the middle of the night, having heard a huge WHOOMPH! from upstairs, closely followed by a SMASH! downstairs. He dashed around in a panic, convinced that the revolution had begun, or we were under siege, or that gangs of armed men were robbing his house and running off with his family…. however, upon inspecting the house, none of these things appeared to be happening. In fact, all he could find was a five year old rumtumtugger fast asleep in her room- not in bed in her top bunk, but in the middle of the floor, and a lightbulb smashed in the kitchen. Upon waking up a little more he realised that what had actually happened was I’d fallen out of my top bunk, and the force of my fall had dislodged the lightbulb, which had fallen out and smashed. I snored on, oblivious to the panic I’d caused. I am a deep sleeper.

Some mornings, I wake up and forget who I am. I can’t remember my name… or at least, I think I can’t remember my name. Sometimes it feels more like I can’t remember that I have a name, or that there are such things as names.

I often wake up and remind myself what I was doing the night before, as a means of reminding myself what day it is and how I’m feeling. But some mornings I run a quick mental search on ‘yesterday AND evening’ and there is nothing there. ‘Sorry. There are no records which match your search. Please re-phrase and try again.’ Just a blank screen.

I suppose I can’t beat my mother, who once woke up in the night and forgot who my father was.

I dream very vividly as well, which I don’t think helps. My dreams are feature-length, in glorious technicolour, often with plots and sub-plots and voice-overs as well as the more usual strange happenings, flying sequences, and ‘suddenly finding yourself naked in a public place’ episodes. It seems to me that what happens during the night is that my head is like an Index box full of index cards, and they all fly away and are re-shuffled along with all the fantastic images from my dreams. Then in the morning I just have to wait quietly for a moment for all the cards to fly back, and rearrange themselves in order. It’s not frightening, it’s just quiet and blank.

And this is why, if you’ve had a dream, you sometimes can’t remember it, because all that’s left in your head is your normal, workingday, index cards of memories, people and things to do. However, sometimes the filing system in the morning isn’t quite right, and tucked behind something like the name of your colleague, or a phonecall you have to make….. is “a holographic elephant!”
“A what?”
”I dreamt about an elephant last night!”
“Oh….”

One morning, as I was quietly lying in bed staring at the wall and reassembling my mind and sorting out the dream cards and watching them fly off to that great image repository in the sky, I shared my thoughts about the mental process I was going through with Jack. He stared at me carefully,
”You really are very strange, aren’t you? I love you. But you are odd.”
And I couldn’t really disagree.

With love as ever, and apologies for the absence
therumtumtugger
xxx