Lovecraft Dali dream landscape with figures...

12.30 am - Asleep for only minutes and I have to get up to doodle a dream I’d just had.

Well, actually only half a dream. I never should have had that conversation about H.P. Lovecraft and Salavador Dali with the woman in a wheelchair at the shop.

Maybe I shouldn't have eaten that cheese either.

Odd isn’t it when you strike up a conversation with a stranger not because you want to but because you have to - well, she didn’t give me much choice really.

Sometimes I forget that I’m closer in age to old people than young people, sometimes I forget that I’m not very far away from being old myself, and sometimes I just forget.

Another sign that I'm on the road to... now where is it?

Anyway as the conversation progressed I began to realise that I had very much in common with the woman in a wheelchair despite the ten years or so she had on me. We read the same types of books, enjoyed the same type of films, both had an interest in surrealism – I was going to say ‘penchant for’ but that would have been too Dali.

Who would have thought that two strangers would be standing in the shop discussing the merits of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos, agreeing that Ray Bradbury’s ‘Something Wicked This Way Comes’ is probably the best story ever written, pondering if Salavador Dali’s work was more influenced by the early fantasy writers or Breugel, and agreeing what a great film the 1936 version of H.G Wells’ ‘The Shape of Things to Come’ is.

So back to 12.30 am, the early hours, awaking from a dream where strange huge creatures with multiple waxed moustaches moved thunderously across a flat, twilight landscape littered with tall conical towers shaped like traffic bollards and dripping with melting clocks. Cold and barren and always two o'clock despite it being evening, shadows lengthening as dieing stars burn out their tired existences in the leaden sky above.

I can feel him coming out from the Necrominicon, the Outer Gods and at their head Yad-Thaddag.

Stop!

Fast out awake and up, down to the kitchen reaching for paper and the brushes and pens that are always to hand even at this time of the day.

The rule is the first paper to hand. This time the back of the tax man’s letter informing me that he will be sending me a letter, about a letter he will be sending me, about the tax return he requires me to fill in before I can get back the money that he has overcharged me.

I should really use a sketch book but the rule is first paper to hand, and anyway a sketch book would tighten my doodles into a knot of trying.

Flimsy, grey, recycled paper, weave too open, liable to buckle the minute liquid hits the surface. Red wine and black ink, brushed in a hurry, splashed with tippex, ten minutes to capture a dream that would be gone by morning.

Ten minutes to capture my Lovecraft Dali dream (dish- dash). Ten minutes to record my Lovecraft Dali landscape (scribble - scratch). Ten minutes to record then back to bed.

May the Great Old Ones grant that the night-gaunts leave me be.