You know where you wake up in the morning and decide you’ll curl up and lie there for a while just to let things get up to speed a bit, and after a while you decide you’re probably as functional as you’re going to get without putting shoes to floor, and so you grudgingly get out of bed and wash yourself and go downstairs and eat your breakfast and leave the house and get a bus, and then realise that you haven’t actually moved at all and you’re still lying in bed and half asleep? Advice: starting from right now, take whatever steps you need to take to avoid having that experience while you’re already sleep-deprived and working with a five-minute snooze timer, because otherwise you will find yourself stuck in the fucking Groundhog Day of dreams.
What’s worse is that I got to the stage of knowing I was dreaming, and standing in my bedroom in the dream wondering what might be the best way to break the cycle. And then getting Lynchianly paranoid about whether or not I actually might have already done so, and is my vision hazy because I’m asleep or because I’ve just woken up or, oh, maybe that’s just my very self evaporating before my eyes. I don’t mind telling you that this is some heavy shit to be wrestling with on a Friday morning, especially when the “normal,” properly dreamlike dreams that acted as a prelude to these fiendish recurso-shenanigans involved
- creating and then being stalked by a psychotic character called “The Painted Man” and
- walking into my bathroom and immediately having a panic attack because everything was mirrored and there were three times as many doors as there should have been, none of which led back out to the hall.
So. The only sensible conclusion I can draw is that the subtle mind-trauma wrought many years ago by the magnificent House of Leaves is finally catching up with me. Now that the absolute dissolution of my psyche is proceeding at a decent clip, I can move on to phase II: fall in love with a stripper and have the shit kicked out of me by a man from Gdansk. Stay tuned, Bat-fans, for more exciting updates from the mouth of madness!
Hooray! A post! An epic and brilliant post
Whilst perusing the bargain basement of Hodges Figgis my eye was drawn to a lovely looking copy of Only Revolutions, which turned out to be by your friend Danielewski. I took it home with me, but am already quite intimidated by it and, quite literally, don’t know where to start.
Fantastic description of those awful Groundhog Day dreams. Although now I’m not sure I want to take any measures to prevent them for fear of an existential crisis within the next one. Come to think of it, they’re still better than the ‘teeth falling out’ ones I often have.
Embrace the crisis! The only way out is through. It is only after the complete denial of the self that something something something.
Andrew, I thought I’d replied to this already… I enjoyed Only Revolutions for my own silly reasons, but it’s probably a fridge too far for most people. HoL is the one to start with.