Dreams of Murder

I hear the sounds of building site machinery in the distance. Airport noise. Reminds me of mornings and holidays never taken. Journeys and farewells. Blue sky and brightness again. Springtime.

I tried reading before sleep last night, the excellent 'Street of Crocodiles' by Schulz. This worked, and after I had switched off the lamp, I soon fell into a blissful sleep. Not quite oblivion though, not with my dream recall, pleasingly. A visceral nightmare last night, a horror film dreamt of in fever. Probably because I had, finally, started writing 'Meditations on the Noxis-Nibris' last night.

I was in New Zealand sharing a house with a number of other people. Alistair was possibly one of them. The house was dark and shadowy, and was once a mental asylum. There were still patients living there, despite the fact that it was no longer a hospital. Two of the people living there were the old British Comedian duo Cannon and Ball. One night, there had been some kind of darkening of the atmosphere of the labyrinthine edifice. An outbreak of murder. One hulking patient had killed another, left the body down a long set of stairs. Cannon had killed Ball, by eating out his stomach. Cannon had vanished into a room and refused to come out. I was keen to alert the police, but days seemed to pass by without anything being done. The bodies kept being moved about (?). Things were getting out of hand. At the bottom of the stairway, one of the bodies had started to decay. I found a severed hand in the hallway. I was ascending another set of stairs. The house seemed to be infected with a blight of stairways. These stairs were modern, almost science-fiction-like, bright and gleaming. There was also some moving parts to the flight of steps I was ascending, an indescribable collusion of rollercoaster rides and merry-go-rounds. I had to keep moving on these steps, but they swung me further and further out. Afraid I would fall. Afraid, even more, that I would become stuck on these steps forever, and would somehow be implicated in the murders. With relief I managed to extricate myself from the stairs. Cannon emerged from his room. The effect of murdering his comedic partner had caused a kind of physical degeneration. His posture had grown almost ape-like, his physical presence brooding and intimidating. The worst were his eyes, wild and staring, an ancient malevolence. I locked him back in the room again. I finally manage to phone the New Zealand emergency services. A complicated series of options. The man I am speaking to is angry with me for phoning. I try to explain to him that there has been a series of murders and the murderers are still in the building. he goes away to get me the correct phone number, which I write down with a mixture of relief. I get off the phone, and triumphantly tell Alistair I have the correct number.

Which is all I can remember.
The brutality of the dream is remniscent of a dream that Andy had a few weeks ago, where he had killed a man, and had to dispose of the body. The man's head had been split open. Andy managed to stuff the body in a cool-box, the kind used for picnics. He was hauling the box outside, presumably to bury it somewhere, when a man called to him; 'Mate, your onions are hanging out!'. Andy looked down and saw that the 'onions' were in fact the man's brains, hanging down from the icebox. The man asked if he could try the 'onions', saying that they were rare. Andy was horrified of this, and said that he needed all his 'onions'.

And writing about that dream reminds me that Hazel, Andy's younger sister, had a dream the other afternoon about being a murderer.
Strange.
A season of dreams about murder.

Twenty five minutes to midday. Not a cloud in the sky. I feel an urge to swim in the sea, or to lie in the park drinking coffee, but, alas, office life continues.
At least there are the delights of the coffee machine...