Under the carpet...

I've been through a positive spell and now find myself surprised that all the clouds did not go away. Of course, I make my own weather and, with so many storms over the years why should I expect sunshine all the time? It is so hard to define why I act the way I do. I have clues, but even tiny things can set me in turmoil - a call promised that didn't happen (a two way street by the way), things that at one time I would just deal with become things that wake me sweating in the night, and then the ultimate betrayal of family which of course is probably down to me; at least that’s what I’ve been told. I no longer know, and I wish I could say that I didn't care - but I can't be a broom to sweep it all under the carpet any more.

There’s just too much dust, most of it my skin and bone.

Dust.

And then there are dreams. Why is it that you can keep people you have no time for out of your life but not out of your nightmares? Bedtime, it’s when the shadows come.

Dust and shadows.

I go to bed tired these days. I don’t know why, I don’t do much. Perhaps that’s it; maybe doing almost nothing is tiring. Of course I spend a lot of my time not thinking or thinking about things other than the things my mind tells me to think about. I use distraction techniques when this happens. I play memory games on my tablet, write the blog, check my mails, Facebook, drink, look for anything that will stop me focussing on the knock, knock, knocking in my head and the swoosh of the brooms.

It sounds crazy doesn’t it? Well, maybe I am crazy.

So I go to bed tired and use more distraction techniques to stop the knocking and swooshing so that I can fall asleep - a-z of islands, twenty nursery rhymes, a-z of pop groups, twenty fairy stories, a-z of Italian food, twenty cocktails, I make up jokes, count backwards in threes from a thousand, rhyme a word to the power of ten. Eventually I fall asleep and then the knocking stops, the whooshing fades, the door opens, and I slip into dream about rabbits, and sheep, or other things.

Dust and shadows and distraction.

I dream a lot and usually they aren’t good dreams. I suppose you could call them nightmares. There are no zombies or vampires in my dreams, but there might as well be, they distract me further. I wake a lot too, three or four times a night, and when I awake I use distraction techniques to get me back to sleep. Often I slip into the same dream as I was dreaming before I awoke, sometimes it’s a repeat and other times it’s a totally new version. Dusty, crumbling houses are a major theme in my dreams as is being lost in a strange city, finding myself naked in the street or in a hotel, steep roads with no side barriers, losing keys, cars, money, passports, meeting people I don’t want to meet any longer, talking to people I don’t want to talk to ever again, reliving feelings I no longer want to feel, loving people I will never love again.

Why is it that the people I have no time for any longer still turn up in my nightmares? How do they do that? What gives the right to pop into my life uninvited whenever they want?

They say new brooms sweep clean. Is that a knock at the door?