Oh, what can I not do, in my dreams.
In my dreams I travel on trains and climb mountains, I play concerts and swim rivers, I carry important documents on vital missions, I attend meetings which become song-and-dance routines. My body lies boxed in darkness, but beneath my closed eyelids there is colour, sound and movement, in glorious contrast to the day; mad movies projected nightly in the private theatre of my skull.
My dreams are crowded with people, as though to compensate for the solitariness of my waking hours. People I know, famous people, people from obscure parts of my past whom I thought I had forgotten, people I don’t know at all, spontaneously generated in some crevice of my brain, people who are disturbing incarnations of my deepest hopes and fears. People come together in strange, mixed-up groups—my aunt and John Humphrys, a girl I was at school with, a former colleague; bizarre in retrospect, but at the time having the compelling logic of dreams.
To wake is always horrible, plunging suddenly down a long dark chute to thump gracelessly on to the mattress. “Stop, stop,” I cry to the escaping dream, “I want you still.” But the dream speeds away to the horizon, and I am left clutching only a few remembered fragments, strands plucked from the vanishing tail.
Animals in zoos and prisoners sleep many hours a day. Like them I have become a devotee, a voluptuary of sleep, a connoisseur of its intense, uncharted pleasures. Sleep slips the chains of this life, snaps the intimate fetters of my skin, sets me free to travel the wild landscapes of the ungoverned mind. Each night I enter by the same door, yet find behind it something new. I plunge my hands into the lucky dip of dreams; sometimes I find sweets, and sometimes scorpions, but always, for a few hours, deliverance.