I found myself in tears just the other night. I came over all sad and they started to flow. I could not for the life of me understand why. Nothing sad had happened, yet here I was, losing control of my emotions for the first time in ages. I got through eight family and friends deaths in 2025 without shedding a single tear but now the levee had broken.
I’m not sure where I was, either. I’m not sure if I was alone or in company but I was all but overwhelmed with sadness. Had everything finally caught up with me, was I having some kind of breakdown, like the one I suffered when being bullied by senior managers at the British Red Cross all those years ago? Then, reality returned. I was only dreaming.
It was around 3.00 am and the world around me was completely silent, apart from the gentle breathing of my partner. I was wide awake and there were no tears, there was no sadness; just confusion. What was happening with my subconscious?
My dreams are always crazy dreams. I am desperately packing massive bags and cases but there’s always too much stuff. I am trying to catch a train but I can’t find the station and on the rare occasions I do find the station, I can’t find the platform. And other times, I am naked in all the wrong places, in public or at work and no one appears to notice, until they do. Notice, these are all anxiety dreams, crazy, stupid anxiety dreams.
I was young, maybe 12 or 13 when I started to dread going to sleep because I knew what would be coming once I had. Back then, it was night terrors and panic attacks – it was hard to tell which was which – and following two years of psychotherapy, which did not help my already floundering school career, stopped the worst aspects but didn’t touch the crazy, stupid dreams.
I don’t think they’re ever going to stop. Doctors shrug their shoulders, saying just get over yourself, there’s nothing here for you, not least because you’re not young anymore and the system doesn’t care about your bad dreams and their effects.
They say that once you wake up you have ten seconds to remember what it was you dreamed the night before, yet I get flashbacks to dreams I had years, decades, ago. The only difference the other night was that I was crying. I don’t remember one like that before, but maybe that old adage is correct and I forgot about those dreams straight away?
If only there was a dream seller, like in Lindisfarne’s Meet Me On The Corner, where the narrator, the genius that was Alan Hull, asks: “Hey, Mr Dreamseller, where have you been? Tell me, have you dreams I can see? I came along, just to bring you this song, can you spare one dream for me?”
Just one dream, as chilled as an Ibiza sunset, that I could watch on repeat every night until I drift away into a dark and dreamless sleep.
The world is a sad enough place as it is during the conscious part of the day. Is it too much to ask for the sadness to go away just for a while?
