In providing my loyal reader with an unwanted, self indulgent update on my mental health, it is important to point out that no matter how bad it gets with me, it’s rarely life-threatening, nor harmful to my physical existence. It just goes on and on, weighed down by the permanent guilt of knowing that other people are suffering more than I am. By comparison, I am a lottery winner, the luckiest bastard in the world. But it’s those dreams I’ve seen lately, fast, furious, uncontrollable and exhausting. I wish I could talk to someone about them, more than anything I wish they’d stop.
I used to believe in the old adage that once you woke up, you had ten seconds to remember your dreams from the night before, or they would be gone forever. I am not an expert in dreams but my God some of them have all but convinced me that, actually, I am a bit more mad than I thought I was. And Wednesday night/Thursday morning’s dreams hung around all day Thursday and came back again, albeit in a slightly different form, last night.
I am watching trains in a place I know, but it doesn’t look like anywhere I know. I’m south of Shap Summit on the West Coast mainline. There’s a massive station halfway up the incline that, of course, doesn’t exist. And I’m frantically trying to get there. I’m with one of my best friends who died two years ago and I want to get to to the top of the hill, but every time I reach the summit, there’s another climb. The railway points change and they move whole rivers and hills as they change. Finally, we reach the top and there’s a huge slide, or slider as we call it in Bristol, and my friend goes down it so fast that I fear it will kill him. He then disappears altogether and trains are thundering past in all directions. That is just part of the insanity and it really feels like insanity. That dream, that stark-staring bonkers dream, stayed with me all day yesterday and it’s still here now. How the hell do I get rid of it?
The answer is that I can’t get rid of it. How do I know that? Because these dreams I’ve seen lately have always come along like this. People who have left my life, either through moving on and moving away or, worse, dying, they all come back to life, as they cannot do because it isn’t possible. They’re talking and they’re with me and when I am awake, I am reliant on what’s left of my functioning brain to remind myself that actually these dreams aren’t real. They aren’t, are they?
A well-meaning acquaintance said I should tell my GP. Good shout. Imagine explaining that lot to a medic. “Are you fucking mad? It’s only a dream. Pull yourself together. NEXT!” That GP would be right because, well, we all dream, right? I’m no more mad than the next woman and man.
A dear friend, with personal experience of being as mad as I am, puts it down to my ADHD with added severe clinical depression, plus added anxiety. A brain that never seems to shut down even when, especially when I am in deep sleep. The dreams I’ve seen lately are just an exaggeration of how my brain works for the rest of the day. What is killing me – and I do worry it is literally killing me – is that I can’t stop it. And I never could.
I drove my dear old grandad to distraction with the endless twitching and fidgeting, as well as engaging in wild swings in conversation. He’d call me out on it. “Stop fidgeting, Richard”, he would say, not realising, because I never said, that just by calling me Richard he would set off the fidgeting. I hated Richard, the name, almost as much as I hate Rick, the person, today.
When it all calms down, there’s the guilt. People I know and love suffering with serious illnesses, people in absolute poverty at our food bank and a fucked up world in which needless suffering appears to be the norm. Yet here I am, consumed with my own demons which are always there to some extent or other.
The dreams of the trains and the slider are but two of the many dreams I see every night and, to some extent, day dream during the day. Incredibly, I conclude, I’m still standing, older but unwiser, a basketcase in an illogical world where nothing is what it seems.
So far as I am concerned, out of body experiences don’t really happen. They’re dreams, like mine. Irrational, bonkers, exhausting. My depression is the one constant in my life. It has never left me, it will always be there. Weirdly, inexplicably, I fear what my life would be like without the black dog. Would things be even worse?
I’ve been in a strange, hysterical place the last few days but happily my acting skills are still intact. You might think I’m a bit odd when you meet me but I can assure you that I am very odd. I have to go out now, to breathe some fresh air and get what’s left of my head together. And tonight, those dreams will start again. Round and ’round and ’round it goes,where it stops nobody knows, as the song goes. My feeling is they won’t stop at all.
