Thirty-Sixth Day

Last night, I had a dream.

I don't usually remember my dreams; at home, I wake to the sound of an alarm most mornings, and any momentary dream fragments remaining in my consciousness are pushed out by beep after beep after beep.

But now that I spend days drifting between waking and sleep, there is ample opportunity to let the end of my dreams flower in that walled garden of half-sleep, that Sunday-morning half-tossing, half-stretching that goes on without any concept of time or pressure.

Yet, from these kind of dreams, I would rather wake up.

I'm on a treadmill in a laboratory, being analysed by some kind of white-coated scientists - one man and one woman. Traditional nerdy types with clipboards and faces like a slapped arse. I'm linked up to heart-rate monitors and such like. The treadmill slowly gets faster, and suddenly they start asking me where M is.

Each time I reply that I don't know, the treadmill gets noticeably faster. I can't see the speed dial on the treadmill, but I know from experience that if it has been constantly increasing in speed for this long, it must be well over what the human body can tolerate. But I'm still managing to run - only just. It's a dream, so the treadmill can both go on increasing indefinitely in speed and making me panic and yet still remain within the realms of what I can physically handle. It goes on and on, round and round.

*

It's funny, this dream, because I haven't been interrogated for a while now.

And it's not like this can be a subconscious analogy for torture, because - clealry, quite clearly - I haven't been subjected to any.