#nightmare

Giant skull-aliens floating in sky
Darkening it, shooting missiles into our building
Everything crumbles
Please remove these visions from my mind and restore peace

Fell asleep with the TV on at about 8.30 last night
I was plum-tuckered
I had the weirdest dream about a fool I once knew
Turning a circle of fabric into a dress without sewing


[Poem compiled from Tweets tagged #nightmare]

Falling

Floating

Flying through space

A shower of multicoloured particles pierces my body

Cleansing me

Above, a glitter of stars across intense darkness

Below, the sun breaks over the curve of earth

To a waterfall cascading off a cliff

Rainbows glisten through the spray

As the torrent cascades around me

Intensely cold but refreshing

I settle on a tropical sea

And am absorbed

Chris Lakeman Fraser

Sister

My sister and I rode through fields on horses. My horse grew wild and raced on and on until I grew so scared that I jumped off. It continued to gallop away with my sister following. As the horse leapt on to a wheelbarrow my sister dropped to the ground and began to roll and stretch her leg, from the knee, slowly reaching into the air. My horse responded, mirroring my sister’s movement qualities, lying down, becoming still.

J. Lay

Horses

Horses dancing and prancing in a field at night, eating white chocolate truffles.Streaks of lightning hit the field and run along the barbed-wire fence.

Scorcher

Jerked out of my dream of burning books, I leapt out of bed, the sheets seemed on fire.

I rushed into the shower and enjoyed the cascading coolness. Gradually the images of curling blackened pages ran with the water. I dressed in fresh clothes and went into my writing room to begin the working day.

As I reached up for the leather-bound dictionary and opened it. I breathed in a strong smell and saw that all the edges of the pages were scorched.

It’s been very warm for this time of the year and on a good day my prose style has been scorching. I mean, really. Sentences flashing from my fingers like sparks. Similes to die for. I opened the window and breathed in air fresh as daisies, fresh as new-baked bread, fresh as teenagers in the back rows of cinemas.

But still very hot. I’m trying to think cool things these days to help me stay calm. I don’t understand these random outbreaks of burning. Even in our dreams we aren’t safe, it seems – has global warming arrived fully and totally at last? No one told us that we had to put up with self-combustion, but only last week a cow on the Paggett estate suddenly had one of its rear legs on fire.

I could crack on about self-cooking beef, but really, it wasn’t pleasant. Nor the fish we rodded out of the river recently, pre-poached in brine. Hard boiled eggs from hard boiled chickens. Oh, I could bang on, but really.

I dream of escaping to one of the poles but the ice-cap is melting and the polar bears have all been given dark ocular wear by the Royal Society to prevent them going blind and banging into each other. Oh, ice! I long to hear cubes clinking in my lunchtime Martini again but have to make do with tepid aperitifs these days.

Only the writing is any good but soon there may be no one to read my best work ever.
Close my eyes now and go to the library of my dreams, cathedral of ice and ideas, waterfall of words, to drench me in stillnesses.


Cindy Oswin and Chris Meade, two in the morning, Hornsey Library All-Nighter

Freedom

I dreamt that I was swimming with stupendous dolphins.

Saying Goodbye

I wasn’t in the country when my mother died. I was heartbroken at not being there and unable to say goodbye. My heart ached for many months. One night I dreamt that my mother appeared. She was above me, horizontal as I lay in bed. I felt as though I was slightly above the bed with one arm raised. Mama had an arm stretching towards me. I was aware that we were unable to make physical contact, though I could see her. There was a kind of glass ceiling between us. What I did feel was a rush of heat/love that filled by whole being. She had come to say goodbye and the following morning the pain had gone.

Rosie