Edward St. Aubin

They say that the more entertaining your life is, the duller your dreams. This also works in reverse: the last few months have been a nightly rollercoaster of nuclear apocolypse (a few weeks ago now), heart-breaking betrayals and tsunami-based obliteration (last night). These dreams play themselves out in such insanely vivid detail and technicolor that waking up each morning is like being pulled back into one universe having spent an exhausting few days in an alternative one. That period in the morning where it still feels like you have a choice between continuing in either of these two universes, completely unalike but both equally real, seems to be getting longer and longer each morning. I'm bringing my dreams further and further into my waking day.

And the effect seems to be leaking into other parts of my life, too. I could understand it if, after two consecutive hours of watching The Wire (I always watch them in groups of two!), it took me a few moments to realise that Greggs was not really in danger, or that McNulty was not actually drinking himself out of custody of his children, but it's starting to happen now with significantly dummer TV shows like Arrested Development or Futurama. When the episode's over I look around the room, blinking with surprise that the world is still as it was in that seemingly other existence when I switched the episode on in the first place.

The lastest example of this, however, is actually something a little more artistically plausible. I'm reading a book at the moment that, within as little as half a page, can launch me into a world at least as real as this one but with the added benefit that the monologue providing the commentary (a) is not my own, and (b) completely understands the world he's commenting on (a rather unfair advantage a narrator has over an internal monologue). It's the first book I've read since reading George Orwell where I've been consciously reading for the fabulousness of the prose, rather than to find out what happens. I get to the end of the chapter and look up, feeling surprised to find myself still in my room.

Am I slipping into some kind of half-waking netherworld from which I'll never escape, or am I just reading a really great book at the moment?

Damned if I know...