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- Story Listed as: True Life For Teens
- Theme: Family & Friends
- Subject: Childhood / Youth
- Published: 02/06/2012
Running To Dream
Born 1963, M, from Leek, United KingdomIt’s funny how my mind seizes hold of certain memories and casually discards others. When people are asked to recall their very first memory, some say they can remember with amazing clarity their time in the womb - Others, the birth itself in all its gory detail. My own vestigial recollections aren’t nearly as impressive. Like reluctant jigsaw pieces, sometimes they’re jammed in anywhere out of frustration; at other times they appear to have put themselves in the right places - A piece of sky casually swapped for a piece of sun.
As I write this I can recall urinating in my neighbour’s grid, aged about five. I couldn’t bear to run next door in my brand new Batman suit and miss a second of play with Robin, A.K.A Steven Hughes. The memory itself isn’t by any means complete. Sure, I can visualise the small iron grating covered with slimy, rotting leaves, and I can feel the jagged masonry through my tiny knuckles as I leaned against his house, but I couldn’t tell you if it was sunny or if my urine was pale gold or completely clear. Tomorrow I may be able to describe a whole raft of other sensory details, or it might simply fade into subliminal obscurity and be supplanted by another keener image.
Visual aids, such as photos, or my mother insisting ‘you must remember sleeping in a tin bath when you were a baby?’ seldom helps. If you try and force a memory to the surface you risk losing it altogether. Like a bath-locked spider I resist the urge to scoop it up in a piece of toilet roll and render it an arachnid cripple. I always place my hand on the base of the bath and wait. Usually, the spider will get bored of climbing and sliding and go exploring. If I stay still for long enough it will explore its way over to my flattened hand and bingo!
As for dreams, well they’re a different entity altogether. Dreams for me are like cherished friends. They also serve a number of purposes, some of which you might find hard to believe. I don’t often give advice because most of the time I feel unqualified to do so, but on this occasion I’ll make an exception.
Forget counting sheep, sleeping tablets and other homespun sedations. First, try and empty your mind of all the extraneous guff such as ‘did I lock the back door?’ or ‘today I sounded just like my Dad’ rubbish. Let old and familiar dreams find you by throwing down discarded stills as bait. Hopefully you’ll attract some big, juicy, fiercely remembered image that develops in your minds darkroom and the right chemicals of recollection will mix and fix it. It’s a random slide show. Some drunken projectionist slots in unconnected pictures, pages ripped from a hundred albums and diaries. For me its Newquay 76, Oliver Twist and Yvonne Earl (I underline her in red). Then you stitch them all together to make this huge quilt and pull it up under your chin. Just as the last stitch ignites you fall asleep. Don’t think you can accomplish it in one session. It takes lots of practice, but if you stick with it you’ll be drifting into welcome oblivion before you can say Rapid Eye Movement.
When I was about 11yrs old I started doing a paper round. Not exactly a ground-breaking revelation for an almost-teenager. These were the days when ‘health and safety’ meant carrying a tightly rolled Sunday Times to beat off any snapping letterbox terrorists or borrowing Dads hiking socks to prevent the knotted canvas garrotte from cutting off the blood supply to both arms. To this day I still roll up a newspaper as though I was shoving it through a letterbox. Mind you I also get a saluting spasm in my right hand when an army officer walks past. The only defence against this is to walk around with both hands buried deep in my pockets.
Anyway, back to the paper round. I’ve always been an early riser, so getting up at five thirty wasn’t an issue. I never had to set an alarm or practice a ‘must wake up at five thirty’ mantra before going to sleep. The problem wasn’t waking up. The real bind was leaving a great dream behind. My failsafe internal alarm clock always seemed to coincide with a crucial point in the dreams narrative. While my subconscious, ‘acting’ self wrestled alligators and subdued faceless demons the other ‘directing’ self clapped his hands together and yelled ‘Cut!’
But all was not lost. I discovered if I made copious notes the second I woke the essential core of the dream would stay with me while I delivered the newspapers. Every now and then I’d take out my cue cards and read them aloud.
“Alpine Scene. Some sort of toboggan race. Victorian dress. Night time. Flares or roman candles marking the route through a dense forest. I’m leading…” and so it would continue. Any early dog walkers or shift workers probably thought I was nuts. But I knew if I didn’t keep the dream alive it would vanish forever.
Towards the end of the round my pace quickened as excitement and anticipation took over. I almost felt sorry for the last few customers who often received partially shredded papers or the wrong magazines. With my empty bag flapping around my waist I sprinted homewards. Mum and Dad were nearly always still asleep, and the hardest thing was to switch from noisy and reckless to silent and considered. I can’t explain how nervous and impatient I was, slipping under the duvet onto sleep-wrinkled sheets that still held my body’s warmth and odour. I felt like a victorious hundred metre runner who’d been ordered to have a lie down, instead of stepping onto the podium to collect his gold medal.
Eventually, my breathing and heart rate slowed, and with one last look at the crib sheet I shut my eyes and willed myself back to sleep. Re-joining the dream was always the best bit. I’d stand at the doors of some immense sound stage eager to throw the switches and re-awaken my subconscious. For the moment, the actor was absent and the director had assumed control. Slowly but surely facets of the frozen dream would thaw and take their places in the last remembered scene. With the dreamscape almost complete, the only missing component was me, the actor. I’m not sure how the separation happened, all I do know is before I knew it I was back in my own story, careening down some mountain side with spindrift stinging my face and someone or some thing in hot pursuit.
Dreams are still a great comfort, but I lost the ability to re-join them in my late teens. For a few glorious years I shuttled to and from the paper shop with the broadest of grins and an obliging subconscious that allowed me to use my own internal remote control. It did become an addiction of sorts, and had I not lost the knack I’m sure I’d have slowly wasted away in bed. I even pictured my bereft but ever-hopeful parents standing at my bedside; waiting to be interviewed for some gritty documentary entitled ‘The death of a dream addict’. Of course I’d be completely unaware of my outward decline and carry on vanquishing the foe from within.
Running To Dream(Simon Daniels)
It’s funny how my mind seizes hold of certain memories and casually discards others. When people are asked to recall their very first memory, some say they can remember with amazing clarity their time in the womb - Others, the birth itself in all its gory detail. My own vestigial recollections aren’t nearly as impressive. Like reluctant jigsaw pieces, sometimes they’re jammed in anywhere out of frustration; at other times they appear to have put themselves in the right places - A piece of sky casually swapped for a piece of sun.
As I write this I can recall urinating in my neighbour’s grid, aged about five. I couldn’t bear to run next door in my brand new Batman suit and miss a second of play with Robin, A.K.A Steven Hughes. The memory itself isn’t by any means complete. Sure, I can visualise the small iron grating covered with slimy, rotting leaves, and I can feel the jagged masonry through my tiny knuckles as I leaned against his house, but I couldn’t tell you if it was sunny or if my urine was pale gold or completely clear. Tomorrow I may be able to describe a whole raft of other sensory details, or it might simply fade into subliminal obscurity and be supplanted by another keener image.
Visual aids, such as photos, or my mother insisting ‘you must remember sleeping in a tin bath when you were a baby?’ seldom helps. If you try and force a memory to the surface you risk losing it altogether. Like a bath-locked spider I resist the urge to scoop it up in a piece of toilet roll and render it an arachnid cripple. I always place my hand on the base of the bath and wait. Usually, the spider will get bored of climbing and sliding and go exploring. If I stay still for long enough it will explore its way over to my flattened hand and bingo!
As for dreams, well they’re a different entity altogether. Dreams for me are like cherished friends. They also serve a number of purposes, some of which you might find hard to believe. I don’t often give advice because most of the time I feel unqualified to do so, but on this occasion I’ll make an exception.
Forget counting sheep, sleeping tablets and other homespun sedations. First, try and empty your mind of all the extraneous guff such as ‘did I lock the back door?’ or ‘today I sounded just like my Dad’ rubbish. Let old and familiar dreams find you by throwing down discarded stills as bait. Hopefully you’ll attract some big, juicy, fiercely remembered image that develops in your minds darkroom and the right chemicals of recollection will mix and fix it. It’s a random slide show. Some drunken projectionist slots in unconnected pictures, pages ripped from a hundred albums and diaries. For me its Newquay 76, Oliver Twist and Yvonne Earl (I underline her in red). Then you stitch them all together to make this huge quilt and pull it up under your chin. Just as the last stitch ignites you fall asleep. Don’t think you can accomplish it in one session. It takes lots of practice, but if you stick with it you’ll be drifting into welcome oblivion before you can say Rapid Eye Movement.
When I was about 11yrs old I started doing a paper round. Not exactly a ground-breaking revelation for an almost-teenager. These were the days when ‘health and safety’ meant carrying a tightly rolled Sunday Times to beat off any snapping letterbox terrorists or borrowing Dads hiking socks to prevent the knotted canvas garrotte from cutting off the blood supply to both arms. To this day I still roll up a newspaper as though I was shoving it through a letterbox. Mind you I also get a saluting spasm in my right hand when an army officer walks past. The only defence against this is to walk around with both hands buried deep in my pockets.
Anyway, back to the paper round. I’ve always been an early riser, so getting up at five thirty wasn’t an issue. I never had to set an alarm or practice a ‘must wake up at five thirty’ mantra before going to sleep. The problem wasn’t waking up. The real bind was leaving a great dream behind. My failsafe internal alarm clock always seemed to coincide with a crucial point in the dreams narrative. While my subconscious, ‘acting’ self wrestled alligators and subdued faceless demons the other ‘directing’ self clapped his hands together and yelled ‘Cut!’
But all was not lost. I discovered if I made copious notes the second I woke the essential core of the dream would stay with me while I delivered the newspapers. Every now and then I’d take out my cue cards and read them aloud.
“Alpine Scene. Some sort of toboggan race. Victorian dress. Night time. Flares or roman candles marking the route through a dense forest. I’m leading…” and so it would continue. Any early dog walkers or shift workers probably thought I was nuts. But I knew if I didn’t keep the dream alive it would vanish forever.
Towards the end of the round my pace quickened as excitement and anticipation took over. I almost felt sorry for the last few customers who often received partially shredded papers or the wrong magazines. With my empty bag flapping around my waist I sprinted homewards. Mum and Dad were nearly always still asleep, and the hardest thing was to switch from noisy and reckless to silent and considered. I can’t explain how nervous and impatient I was, slipping under the duvet onto sleep-wrinkled sheets that still held my body’s warmth and odour. I felt like a victorious hundred metre runner who’d been ordered to have a lie down, instead of stepping onto the podium to collect his gold medal.
Eventually, my breathing and heart rate slowed, and with one last look at the crib sheet I shut my eyes and willed myself back to sleep. Re-joining the dream was always the best bit. I’d stand at the doors of some immense sound stage eager to throw the switches and re-awaken my subconscious. For the moment, the actor was absent and the director had assumed control. Slowly but surely facets of the frozen dream would thaw and take their places in the last remembered scene. With the dreamscape almost complete, the only missing component was me, the actor. I’m not sure how the separation happened, all I do know is before I knew it I was back in my own story, careening down some mountain side with spindrift stinging my face and someone or some thing in hot pursuit.
Dreams are still a great comfort, but I lost the ability to re-join them in my late teens. For a few glorious years I shuttled to and from the paper shop with the broadest of grins and an obliging subconscious that allowed me to use my own internal remote control. It did become an addiction of sorts, and had I not lost the knack I’m sure I’d have slowly wasted away in bed. I even pictured my bereft but ever-hopeful parents standing at my bedside; waiting to be interviewed for some gritty documentary entitled ‘The death of a dream addict’. Of course I’d be completely unaware of my outward decline and carry on vanquishing the foe from within.
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