Dreamless
(published 'Stuff' 1993)

It’s darker towards the middle of the room. There’s no fear greater than that of a greater fear. Surprisingly, fear of death is not the greatest fear. John is never surprised. John’s thoughts spark off each other, take fire from fire. John dreads the eventual outcome of John’s thoughts: insanity, complete and utter. John awakes on the parlour window-couch having, the previous night, fallen asleep, John thinks, in John’s usual bed upstairs. The couch is under the inset bay: a wooden surface with narrow mattress. For most of the daylight hours, John has been snoozing between supposed dreams. Now, with the onset of dusk, John infers that the outskirts of the room, including even the windowless walls, are shimmering with light, leaving the central rug between the fireplace and the bay in shadow. Or is the shadow a sooty mist rising towards the ceiling? With growing horror, John realises that the supposed dreams were not dreams at all, but merely what John fears most: the onset of insanity, complete and utter. Then comes an even bigger doubt. The one flaw in John’s line of argument. John’s mind floods with mental flame, as John grows less confident regarding the nature and/or demarcation of dream and insanity. There is, of course, a rogue force called reality which feeds equally from both dream and insanity, but then calls itself sanity for convenience (or just for the laugh). John feels confused, without realising that such confusion is affecting more than just John’s thoughts. All senses sense each other wrongly. John smells awful. John tastes John’s own dead body. John sees nothing but John’s own eyeballs slowly revolving in their sockets, as the scratching at the bay’s window tries to get in. John touches the top of John’s head and feels a gluey substance instead, and this action itself seems to cause John’s other senses to be even worse affected. The darkness in the middle of the room disappears from sight. John wakes up in John’s usual bed upstairs, having slipped peacefully through a dreamlessness more akin to death than anything else: a beauty sleep to end all such beauty sleep. But, surprisingly, outside, there’s still a darkness, complete and
utter.