Days and Nights.

The disturbed nights are back – waking up chilled and feeling icy air on my face, even though the bedroom is heated and I’m well covered. I’m tempted to wonder whether it’s a symptom of a known condition, and then I wonder whether I’m being honoured with a visitation from some form of otherworldly presence. I even looked around the bedroom the last time it happened, but I couldn’t see anything.

(I always find it odd, you know, that some people hide beneath the bedclothes when they’re frightened. I was a nervous kid, but I never hid beneath the bedclothes. I always had to keep my eyes wide open, looking for inexplicable shadows or apparent movements in the darkness.)

And then there’s the return of the uncomfortable dreams. The one I remember from this week was of being in my home town and wanting to go somewhere. I knew where I wanted to go, but I didn’t know how to get there. And I couldn’t work out whether I’d simply forgotten the way, or whether the road layout had been changed. It brought on the beginnings of a sense of panic.

So then I woke up with the sun already climbing and didn’t want to get out of bed because I dread having to negotiate another day of daylight in present circumstances. I find darkness easier to deal with.

Where has the humour gone? Where the silly ditties? Where is my friend the llama these days, and where the musings on moths and mazy pathways? Where, indeed, are those more comfortable dreams in which I’m sitting in the Lady B’s kitchen while she consciously ignores me (which she would never do, of course; she’s far too polite for that.) But at least the childhood dreams of being menaced by a mad woman haven’t returned. Not yet, anyway.

Actually, the humour hasn’t gone altogether either. These days I save it for YouTube after midnight. Nobody ever gets the joke, of course, probably because the humour is as singular as everything else about me since I took up the reclusive habit. Gone are the days when I could make a comment to a bunch of people and they would laugh hysterically. That really did happen, you know. It did. One man scared the living daylights out of me once by nearly choking. He was in a wheelchair I remember, and it struck me as odd and salutary that humour can be so humorous that it becomes anything but funny. I suppose it’s all about living and learning.