The Ryno Pen

(In other, breaking news: Ryno gets to sleep!)

It was one of those nights. I got to bed relatively early, say 0130, but:

• the cat needed to spend some time grooming my beard and generally making sure I was a properly-cleaned kitten (I’m sure that’s how she views me!);
• the dog needed to go out, come in again, go back out, come in and growl over an Important Bone, trade the bone for a treat, come onto the bed, check everybody was okay, then go to her cushion;
• the Breughel Boys (our heavily-smoking, and thus Phlegmish, next-door nabes) were watching oriental horror videos till the wee hours, and the occasional kung-fu “Heugh!” or Tentacle Invagination Scream could be clearly heard;
• during our month-long ordeal (a bout of Ye Piggy Flu and its aftermath) Herself has not been using her CPAP machine…  “SNRX! (pause) Gronk! Wibble-wibble-wibble-wibble… SNRX!”

So it may have been nearly 0300 when I started the voyage to the 0730 alarm call. I think I took advantage of the relative quiet, afforded by a passing coal train, to drift off.

Apparently it takes a while before the REM stage of sleep kicks in. (The time is about 90 minutes, according to this delightful ABC assemblage of sleep facts!) This would go some way toward explaining why I rarely dream. Or, at least that’s my view: ask Herself and she will tell you all sorts of strange things about me shouting “Control-Alt-Delete!” or muttering, “That, good sir, is no way to gralloch a megatherium!”: personally I’ve never witnessed any such behaviour on my part.

So, there I was, dreaming for once. Not under the influence of Strong Cheese or other substances, and I’d gone to bed in a particularly chuffed mood, seeing my writings in Another Place had been given a bit of acclaim. Perhaps those self-administered back-pats helped.

In the dream, I was arriving at some writers’ workshop to collect Herself. (In real life, she is more likely to attend something full of hu-mans than I am.) Waiting outside as the people filed out for smokes and so forth, I recognised the main speaker: he was there as a writer, although I only knew about him from his musical work and from others writing about him, and we’d corresponded once or twice.

(This wasn’t any real-life person: I don’t know who the visual image of the guy was based on. He was a thin man, about my height, with a grey jacket and a pullover on… I remember thinking he looked rather stylish, comfortable. Otherwise, there was nothing remarkable about his appearance; certainly none of that tooth-gleaming charisma one sees on celebs.)

Writer Bloke wound up talking to me while I waited for Herself to show up. She would no doubt have a bit of after-discussion to do: it’s  usually like that when she gets interested in something. We rabbited on about Brian Eno for awhile (he’s always common ground when I talk music, for some reason), and the conversation wound on as we walked back into the hall, to an office he was obviously using on a regular basis.

Scotch and a couple of glasses came out. I sat near the open door, keeping an eye for Herself, and we talked more.

“I’ve done nothing serious in music for about ten years,” said WriterGuy. He seemed to take this very hard, and nothing I could say about his success in writing, as a speaker, and general good regard in the arts world, seemed to console him.

He wound up, head forward, sobbing on the desk, with me putting a comforting hand on the shoulder and talking him through it.

Then I woke up…

I have a sneaking suspicion I was talking to myself.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 4th, 2009 at 1:54 pm and is filed under art, dreams, insomnia, inspiration, music, writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.