January the 5th, 2012

Since then I have rarely enjoyed a peaceful night when the world doesn’t end. Sometimes it isn’t the sky that breaks apart, but the ground. I find myself stood outside the Surrey Quays Centre (in these dreams I’m never indoors, I have no idea why) and suddenly the ground is pushed apart from below. My range of experience does not include actual earthquakes (most of my life has been spent living in Britain, they are far from a regular occurrence) but it doesn’t feel to me like an earthquake. I imagine that phenomenon is like the ground shaking, everything getting whiplash as two tectonic plates come together. This feeling is something else – like there’s something powerful below, reaching up and pushing apart the soil to destroy all that’s above it.

Imagine if you had ants on a shelf that was just too high for you to see. The way you’d deal with it is to stretch out an imprecise hand – a paw almost – and try to clear them away as efficiently as your sightless state would let you. That’s the sensation I feel in my dream. Something is coming out of the ground that knows we’re here but only has an imprecise idea of where we actually are. It is reaching up to get rid of us in the most dreadfully haphazard way. What is down there? What could possibly wield so much force?

I see the same people again and again in these dreams. In the one at Surrey Quays I see the woman with the baby dressed in blue. One of my dreams takes place on Oxford Street, where I see a man hobbling on crutches with what seems to be a broken ankle. In the dream I have in the countryside (a so far unidentifiable place of greenery, not Dorset at any rate) I see a slightly overweight family of four in a Vauxhall Corsa. It’s always the same faces, always in the same location. Who are they? Do they suffer these dreams as well?