'Loose Talk'
By Benjamin Benedict

To Sleep, Perchance To Dream

Some people feel that each hour they sleep is an hour of their life that they have lost. Well, I like my sleep. I look forward to putting my head on a pillow and am slow to get up in the morning. For me, it is a case of feeling good when I am up, and it is a minimum of eight hours (and I do mean minimum) that gets me feeling that way.

There are those times when you need to get up at a certain hour and you can only have a three or four hour nap. I can handle that on a one-off basis, and it doesn’t necessarily ruin my day, but I hate, just hate to regularly wake up to an alarm. Within a week or so, it brings a grim edge to my waking day, and when I finally get a break it takes a couple of ten-hour sessions in the sack to restore my humanity.

Either lack of sleep or a lot of it can put you in touch with the dialogue going on in your dream world, in touch with what I guess is your subconscious. Sometimes in my dreams, I walk into rooms with orchestras playing and sometimes I wake up and remember myself singing or listening to someone else sing a song, and for a magic minute or two I can actually remember the words and the tune. It is my subconscious that creates the orchestral suite, or writes the song, something that I am completely incapable of doing in my waking life.  It doesn’t surprise me at all that Freddy Mercury woke up in the middle of the night with ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ running around in his brain.

I had a surgical operation, just over a year ago, and found it difficult to sleep in the six to ten days after. Often I found myself lying there in a semi-conscious state, half aware of where I was but at the same time experiencing what I suppose you could call a mild hallucination. The drugs I was on at the beginning, could have accounted for it, but these visions persisted long after I had been taken off anything other than anti-infection medication. My explanation is that my mind craved sleep so much that it began dreaming in a semi-wakened state.

I don’t doubt that the most creative of us are nearer to our subconscious, which is also quite dangerous if you confuse the two. Various disciplines, such as yoga and meditation can also lead you in that direction, opening up your chakras, as they say. The thing is that you must always come down safely. A long time ago I was practising a yoga technique involving mild hyperventilation. I was sitting, cross-legged in the sun and after a while felt myself rise into the air. I continued to levitate for sometime, gradually rising higher and higher, until a large oval opening appeared above me. There were the silhouettes of some figures leaning over the edge, eagerly stretching out their arms, gesturing me to come within reach. It was only possible to see the outlines of their head and shoulders, but there was something a little too eager in their manner and I floated back down, without making contact. To this day, I feel that something very wrong might have happened if I had come within their reach. On returning to my body, I found myself bathed in sweat and had to lie down for an hour or so. I am sure that the heat of the Sun had much to do with it, but I am also sure that there was some real mental danger there.     

From time to time, I have glimpsed how dreams can link from one night to the next. The last two nights, I have been driving around in an orange Karman Ghia that I had in the seventies, with some of my present friends, not those I had back then. I couldn’t tell you much about the story other than I am driving around a lot, but I do know that one night is not simply a repetition of the night before. It may be that the dreams overlap, or that that they are entirely different stories. I just don’t know.

Even when the dreams are not too pleasant, they provide a sort of release. They contain all the unbridled creativity that is locked inside us, and although they seem to vanish, I suspect that they leave a perfumed scent on our waking day. 

       

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