Dreams and fears

Last night I was, as usual, reading myself to sleep. The book is about a woman whose 16-year-old son kills a dozen people at school one day, á la Columbine. The feeling in the book is one that started to make me feel very bleak. Although maybe bleak isn’t the right word. Scared, in fact. Humans are such horrifying creatures. The feeling of dirt, filth and horror, blackness, wicked glee and pure evil was palpable. I started to think there was someone in my room. Not just in my room, but sitting at the end of my bed. By my feet. You know that tight feeling when the duvet is tucked in? That weight on your toes. That’s what I felt and I managed to convince myself that there was someone sitting beside my feet. Not just someone, though, this was an incarnation of evil. Proper drooling, sharp-fanged, glowing-eyed evil. Wearing a frock-coat of all things. In order to get rid of him I had to do some seriously Julie Andrews thinking. I had to picture all sorts of nice soft sweet things. Mother Theresa and fluffy bunnies and good people. I could feel the weight slowly lift and eventually it disappeared altogether. When I realised that a physical weight had actually lifted off my bed I nearly did the same. It scared me badly enough for me to have to hum while I turned on the light, stared wildly around the room and went to fetch a Douglas Adams book to read myself into a better frame of mind. Apart from brief flickering images of these evil beings crawling into my bed with me (A small, grinning, clawed child) or looming over me (a grim, grey, yellow-toothed, hollow-eyed youth) I managed to lose myself in the Heart of Gold quite comfortably. The only feeling that remained was an unease that perhaps these creatures are real. Only a paper-thin dimension away from us. And they leak their poison into our world, causing all the Columbines and Twin Towers. Who knows? It could be true.

I’ve had this awareness of ‘evil’ for a while now. It’s as though humans show a veneer of civilisation that can so easily be ripped or slipped off to show this writhing mass of wickedness underneath. All of us. It’s a flavour I was left with after a particularly affecting dream I had about a girl sitting next to me in a car. She was a mass of self hatred. She hated herself so much that she continually vomited. She would ask me to buy her junk food which she would eat in an orgy of self gratification and immediately regurgitate, often forcibly, onto the windscreen, herself, the upholstery and me. Then she would look at me with a whimper of satisfaction that she had disgusted herself so badly. My aim was to get the police to take her in, but I had to do it without her noticing that I was setting her up as she was prone to wantonly killing people whenever she stepped out of the car. For some reason I was exempt from this spree. Each time I managed to explain to the Police what she was like and set up a trap, they would underestimate her killing ability and several people would die. Messily.

Her feeling of I can’t help being the way I am, I was born wicked. But please pity me because I am pathetic and can’t help myself. I genuinely don’t know how to stop myself or where to draw the line on things I will do. There are no limits. Everything is acceptable because nothing is acceptable. It’s all despicable and base. Urgh. That dread feeling stayed with me for days.

Sometimes it feels as though the sticking plaster we use to cover these feelings is peeling off. Just a little. And peeking out is a little corner of horror and oblivion.