After a few drinks at dinner one evening, and with an old knee injury playing up, I’m careless, and mistake powerful sleeping pills for ibuprofen.
Twenty-minutes later, in bed, flat on my back, sidelight on, window open, I’m listening to electronic music through over-ear headphones. I stare hard at the long cream curtains, attached by rings, to their antique wooden rail. The shadows, thrown by the sweeping rise-and-fall of the material, create a complex patchwork of tones and tints.
Then I see it. A face in the folds.
At first, it’s hard to distinguish. But its profile gathers clarity and detail the longer I study it. There’s a bulging, neanderthal forehead, a nose, maybe a mouth. Male, I think.
Is it someone I know? Is it a ghost? Is it friendly? Or here to hurt me? Could it be the source of that voice I’ve been hearing recently?
But as I stare, the lightest of breezes from the window shifts the curtain’s rolling dunes, and the face’s outline fades, then disappears altogether.
Warm swells of fatigue submerge me, my senses shutting down. I’m fuzzy headed, succumbing to the drowsy surf. Leaden limbs sink deep into soft cotton, my mouth opening slightly as my cheeks and jaw sag. My breathing keeps time with the dense, hypnotic groove of the music.
Have I ever felt this relaxed before?
Relaxing is not something I’m good at. Maybe those brief moments, waiting for the general anaesthetic to put you out before an operation? Two or three seconds that connect the conscious with the unconscious. Billions of chilled, microscopic cotton-wool-balls, exploding in your throat, ears and cheeks, and behind your eyes until, your head completely full, you’re gone.
Heavy-lidded, I shut my eyes.
When I open them again, there’s a huge teal-blue blob hovering above me, wobbling and mutating. Although threatening to form a recognisable shape – perhaps a voluminous cartoon octopus – it remains unfathomable.
The pulsing globule, gently glowing, begins to descend, shades of cyan rippling across its shiny skin. I can feel its warmth growing, like the sun gradually revealing itself from behind a pedestrian cloud.
Finally, contact made, it moulds itself around each rise and fall of my prone body, squeezing its wet, warm, jelly into every nook and cranny. A gelatinous forcefield, that cossets and renews, until I fall sleep.
Widespread Disruption 