Fever Dream

Have you ever had a fever dream? I have.

Dreams are interesting and explicable to no one but the dreamer. Fever dreams are not even understandable by feverish dreamers. They are the essence of mystery. Because they do not contain words or even recognisable images they escape description. They are slippery things in buttery hands. They are fever dreams.

If you’ve had a fever dream and do not recognise this description then it’s about me alone. That’s okay too.

My fever dream happened when I was not asleep and not awake. I was aware of having a point of view but not one that I recognised. I was aware of seeing things but not of what I was seeing. I was not even seeing but was using a sense that did not correspond to any that the body owned. I was moving, but not using the correlate of any limb or locomotion method employed or enjoyed by this fleshy sock.

In short, I was alien to myself.

When every breath tickles unbearably; when the rush of air into the body has no option but to go through that single point of irritation; when the source of life, without which I would expire, can travel only through discomfort, the mind becomes hyperfocused on this point.

Breath-cough, breath-cough, breath-cough over and over and over. No respite. Not a chance of the focus slipping elsewhere. Not life but only life. Not sleep not waking. Omnipresent cough evocation.

If this were a mediation on mortality it would have been my most successful effort yet;, but it wasn’t (even though it was). I was locked in by my larynx rather than bound by my will. A dream over which one has no control in which one is lost is not anyone’s idea of fun.

And that was day (night) one. On the second day (night) I was searching my mind for words as if I were some human (inhuman) version of a word processor and on the third day (night) the zombie voices began and all the doors in the house were firmly shuttered.

Listen, none of this makes sense to me so I’m pretty sure it’s gobbledegook to you. That said, if you are a fever dream interpreter please send me your CV. Make sure you put plenty of pictures on, use Comic Sans throughout and print it onto your favourite fluorescent paper.