What dreams may come

Such complicated dreams last night that I was barely awake enough to say goodbye to addedentry before he had to run out into the chilly rain to catch the 0815. I buried my face in his jumper and tried not to be asleep, but everything just felt too dark and weary. I dreamed ( a load of crazy stuff )

So anyway, I blame watching The Blair Witch Project just before going to bed, though it was really quite disappointingly rubbish and not actually very scary, even as the psychological horror story that it was obviously trying so gut-wrenchingly and camera-wobblingly hard to be. Eddie Izzard has had this rant better and funnier, but it does annoy me that the people in horror films never seem to have watched a horror film in their life ("Hey, why doesn't one of us go and explore the big spooky house full of dead bodies, while the other one goes to see what's making the unearthly blood-curdling screams out there in the dark and treacherous woods?" NO! Are you MENTAL? Don't do it!), particularly when they're supposed to be just ordinary people (if particularly irritating and stupid examples of such) and we're not supposed to be suspending disbelief, we're supposed to be believing in it because it's "real" (at least in the sense of "reality TV" -- "reality" is just another genre, but it's very hard to do convincingly). The total lack of awareness of context didn't sit well with all the obvious signposts to Scary Stuff About To Happen, and I ended up just watching the video timer and thinking "well, there's only 17 minutes of the film left to run, one of these idiots has got to die soon." I'd recommend Stephen King's The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon to anybody who wants a better example of the "lost in the woods and driven slowly insane by what is actually just your own paranoid imagination OR IS IT ARGH ARGH ARGH" horror story.

Meanwhile, I'm reading A Severed Head by Iris Murdoch. I've not yet found a Murdoch novel I haven't enjoyed, though they're all claustrophobic like the feeling you get when you've been inside all day with the lights on, and all you've seen outside is shades of dusk that are finally gathering into darkness. This morning I thought that reading would dispel the shreds of dreams that were still clinging to me, but instead it just made me feel heavy and confused and darkening behind the eyes. Then I had a cycle ride into work that I hoped would be bracing and instead just felt like waterlogged wool, except when I saw somebody who reminded me of somebody else and the memories made me feel all hollow and scratchy, like I'm still having the same argument with somebody in my head long after we've all died. If ghosts exist I'm sure I'll end up haunting somebody, just because I don't know how to stop, even when I've nothing left to say and