Waking

I realized today that as I wake I am often coming back out of the past. That is a vague statement. What I believe I mean is that it seems that my dreams are very often of the past, I am in a dream narrative that is set, to the extent that can be set anywhere, is 10 or 20 years or more in the past. As I hurtle out of that into the alarm-clock-moment of the morning of now, sometimes for an instant or two I am almost awake in the past. Or believing it is the past.

And maybe that is the architecture or structure of dreaming: a narrative leading from all the pasts towards the present. As if your life was like the construction of a railway, and, to some degree, each night the locomotive of dreams runs back to the beginning of the line and careens like mad over all the years and track in between trying to reach the present before daylight comes.

Sh is not answering the phone in her little room at 14 Leytonstone Road. It could mean that she is sick and in the hospital. It could mean she is in New York getting married (exactly contrary to what she told me two weekends ago when she said she was going to study quietly in the UK and wait for her immigration papers -- of course, such a lie, if it was a lie, would be perfectly reasonably from her point of view, as it would keep me out of New York and let her get married in peace.) It could mean she is staying with the cousin Simon and family in Yorkshire. It could mean many things.