Pour Me a Life by A.A. Gill

Author:A.A. Gill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-09-01T17:22:17+00:00

Waking up was never the desirable option. Reentry into the corporeal wasn’t orderly or smooth. It wasn’t going into that good night—that wasn’t the problem, sleep was a gentle glide, a peaceful anesthetic shutting down of function, like your dad going round the house turning the lights off, checking the windows. It was consciousness that I had to rage against. Sleep, though, was not an escape, not Morpheus’s garden of blissful shades. The intrinsic problem of dreams, like holidays, is that you have to take yourself with you. Drunks’ dreams are never a pretty, relaxed place. Mine came in two flavors—high anxiety and low anxiety. I’d be teetering on the top of a building, a cliff, a branch, a ladder, a mast, a gargoyle—anything that had a crumbling ledge or a trembling lip. Awake, I’m not particularly frightened of heights, but supine, unconsciously, I had hysterical vertigo. As children we used to say that you could fly in your dreams, but you could never actually fall, because, so the received ten-year-old’s wisdom had it, the impact would be so traumatic it would kill you in real time. The dream would crash through the Freudian gauze between allegory and reality and, for a brief moment, your conscious and subconscious would become one. Your id and ego released into the tangible for a split second, you would be Schrödinger’s dream—both completely alive and totally dead. I am born-again living proof that you can die nightly in your dreams. I’d teeter, then sway and jerk and scrabble and grasp and cry out and tumble into that hiss of weightless falling and the rush of the ground, the street, the water, the railings and then the enormous noise of the emergency stop. Terminal velocity hitting the immovably stationary dreamy earth, the twisting limbs, the numb promise of oncoming agony still falling. The pain catching up like thunder after lightning.

—

SO, THAT WAS ONE DREAM. The other was that I’d lose the dog. Lily would slip her collar and run off, usually into traffic, or crowds, or a forbidding crepuscular landscape with a keening wind of foreboding. I would call and call and run after her and ask strangers to help, and unlike the fall, I would never find her, never get her back. So those were the two dreams. And I had one or the other every night in vivid, lifelike 3-D. Once I was startled awake by a death-fall and found that I’d landed next to a girl, almost on top of her. She was lying on her side, head propped on hand, watching me; she hadn’t been there when I’d switched off and unplugged last night. She was the daughter of an ex-girlfriend who had come to my basement to . . . well, probably to upset her mother, and had found the door open as it always was, in case I had the dog dream. But the dog hadn’t said anything and so she’d taken her clothes off and got into bed. “I couldn’t wake you, nothing could wake you,” she said, by way of explanation.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.