May 25, 2011

• So long since I had a dream worth remembering. My diaries used to be full of them, fodder for my writing, a conduit for my sanity. The last dream I remember remembering was about flies beneath my skin that I squeezed like zits until their black little heads and wiry legs dotted my face like brail. Last night’s dream was less creepy crawly, more bloody sinister. A siren, a megaphone, a voice shouting through the night; something about a murderer on the loose. “Do not leave your homes. Lock the doors. Lock the windows. Lock up your daughters and DO NOT PANIC.” So like a good little girl in a horror slot, I left my house, disappeared into the night where my labyrinthine dream house I stands. It draws me in every time and I crawl through its miniature corridors and down its vertiginous slopes and up its creaking staircases, twisting my body through too-small doorways and pressing myself into deep corners. I was running. Away from the bloody man. The man with blood on his hands. On his executive-smart suit. He appeared and disappeared like my reflection. I blame TV! I’m addicted to the medical and crime programmes, the blood and the bones, the guts and the gore. Bizarre ER with its sometimes horrendous, sometimes stupid, always bizarre A+E cases; Spiral – the French crime drama just shown on the BBC with its battered prostitutes and murderous pimps; Surgery School – fly on the wall docu about trainee surgeons… Documentaries about ‘Extraordinary Lives’ (you may have seen them in the freakshows in the early 20^thcentury), documentaries about disfigurement, documentaries about children’s craniofacial surgery… It’s all there. It’s what I pay my TV license for!

  • 8:33 am
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