A Disintegration Loop

Shortly before going to Edinburgh with a large group of friends, this is obviously picking up on the underlying concerns of something going wrong (which never happened)...written around 4am; this seems to be a fairly common time for waking for me, presumably influenced by sleep cycles. This one impressed me because I managed to spell nonchalantly correctly despite being almost asleep. I also subsequently visited a bookshop with much anarchist literature. 'On holiday with friends. We appear to be staying in a rocky crevice, in pairs, on a volcano...possibly Vesuvius. My partner is a man called Dan who is tall and thin, with long wiry hair. He is almost entirely grey and resembles no-one I know. During the night, which is not unusually warm, I go out walking along a narrow road. I see shadows of people climbing to the peak of the volcano. I can also see lava spewing out. I rush back to the holiday accommodation to tell the others of the impending danger. My hair briefly catches fire ...

This happened during a night of largely restless sleep. The mornings growing lighter, the birds louder, people go to work earlier, all encroaching on my ability to stay in the realm of subconscious meanderings. Still, I recall waking from this confused as to where I was, and then angry at needing to be at work 'I have lost my job, working in a non specified warehouse. Outside are terraced gardens, the feel of an afternoon spent in rural Italy. A bald man is explaining to me why things have to change, and that when he says 'fired' he means 'being transferred to a distant war'. The warehouse is some sort of command ship. A fat man talks about how the enemy is a self replicating virus that mimics human form. As he explains, the whole place goes in to some kind of lock down, with lights flashing and soldiers running. He suggests I get a gun. All that is left are some out-of-date dusted over technologies, which actually prove to work better than the regular equipment. I ...

This one is semi recent, and reminded me of several places I had been to, alongside the three places I have lived in. Again, the subconscious city is ever present, looming, resourceful in its way via rearranging, regenerating; it is never static. I think this is why I find it so unsettling. This was written at 2.30am, which appears to be a peak time for waking and notation 'I am walking around a hollowed out area, with high brick buildings encircling a sort of square with a tree and a police box, which sits in the centre like the TARDIS. A man, tall and angular, with a candle stands outside it. He is waiting to walk me somewhere. I ask him to wait a while longer, as I have noticed a familiar building. It is my old home, from York I think. I look through the window in to what seems to be the front room. All the rooms, cupboards and fixtures are the same, though contained within one room, like the other rooms are collapsed down in to it. I go inside, as the door is not locked. Inside...

A surprisingly recent entry is in order, and this came fresh from the cortex last night/this morning. 'In an old tall building on the outskirts of the City . Outside, numerous fires rage, rubble is strewn across collapsed streets. I am with a group of friends, and part of some kind of elite squad trying to hold the building from marauding hordes of unknown evil. With me are real life compadres, but also several people from stage and screen whom I should recognise but do not (waking based research indicates these people to be actors Peter Mullan and Michala Banas). I have a weapon, but am told not to use it under any circumstances. This seems strange considering our role as a military unit. We are told to a) contain the threat, voice comes via an unseen radio, and b) make our way to the base of the building and meet up with a security force, which seems to be led by my real life work mate Nick, who has one purple eye. Action shifts relentlessly, I am often confused as to where peopl...

This one had the city as a backdrop, though the longer it went on the more obvious it was to me that I was a long way from home. It reminds me of Cities of the Red Night by William S Burroughs, and also the popular lunchtime soap opera Neighbours. I posted it once before on a now defunct journal elsewhere. 'Old building, on a prairie or any other large expanse of flat open land. The sun here is always setting, the sky a permanent red, fading into yellow where it reaches the floor. The building has no doors or windows, outside is windswept; there always seems to be a chance of rain despite what the sky suggests. I am living next door to an accountancy firm out here in nowhere. A man from the television delivers swivel chairs through a gap in the wall where my door should be. He tells me it needs fixing, I tell him I don’t need any help. He looks around the outside of the house for weeds growing up the brickwork. The accountancy firm is responsible for the chairs in my home, there ar...

This one, I think, has something to do with a computer game, and seeing someone I know/knew in the street, after assuming he was still living in Utah (which he had done). In addition, and totally non related, yesterday evening some men engaged in a bottle fight outside my house. I was in that weird transitional phase of sleep, where the night's reality blended with odd hallucinations. I woke in the morning asking Zoe why we hadn't reacted to the combination of fighting men and church bells ringing to alert people of the coming apocalypse. She informed me the latter didn't happen. The men weren't fighting each other for 'survival' as I had imagined. 'On a train, a GNER one before they went all National Express ( quite why I was bothered by this at 4am when I wrote it I will never remember ), with a man swathed in a headscarf. For the whole of this dream my eyes fail to properly work, and I rub and blink repeatedly hoping they will become fixed. The train goes...

Having worked in a supermarket for longer than I would have wanted, very few of my nocturnal wanderings take place in this space, which is definitely a good thing. These are the three I have written down in the past few years since starting work (and am now only part time thankfully). All of these seem to involve twilight, or an odd relationship with light, which I think is largely down to me working stupid hours. Supermarket, shelves all higher than I expect. Some sort of scam is going on. To me 'Everything here is perfect'. How are they fiddling this? ( I enjoy my lack of detail on what the scam is ). A man, possibly the floor manager from TFI Friday whose name was/is Will, flies about on a hover fan type machine, inspecting things. My mum works there for an unexplained reason, and I tell her this 'Will' character is watching me. She tells me to look busy even though there is really nothing to do. Outside it seems like twilight or a late summers afternoon. Chris is th...