I've been having a lot of nightmares lately.
On one of my first nights back at university, I dreamt that someone was breaking into our house, and when I looked out of my bedroom window I saw a man running around our cul-de-sac carrying a pizza box. I thought he must be delivering a pizza, but then he looked up and saw me, and through the box at my window. I screamed and my parents ran in. My dad called the police and my mother insisted on hiding all the Christmas presents in the attic so that no prospective burglar would find them. When the police arrived, they parked in our front porch and insisted on talking about the weather, and Christmas, and Sunday lunch before they'd talk about the creepy man running around in circles outside.
And earlier this week I had a dream which is pretty hazy now, but somehow included a highly dangerous, laser-filled garden, Alicia Silverstone, Alicia Silverstone's birthday, an evil stepmother, a swimming pool, a plunge pool that descended into the ground, a shower cubicle, and a rendition of Eternal Flame performed by The Bangles.
It also featured a bloke called Adrian, whose main purpose in the dream appeared to be pausing significantly mid-sentence.
He also bore a striking resemblance to a bloke I used to have nightmares about when I was a kid...
When I was about six I had recurring nightmares about running through a field of yellow, knee-high wheat (the field looked exactly like a field in one of our parents' friends' gardens only in real life it was just long, dying grass), away from the cut and trampled path that ran in a triangular shape from one corner of the field to the centre on the opposite side, and then back to the other corner on the opposite side. I was being chased by someone, this bloke, who I couldn't see but I could hear behind me, and when he finally caught up with me he took me somewhere with lots of tents and said something I never heard. In retrospect, it wasn't very scary. His name was Ollie and he wore his hair in blonde curtains. In my dream the other night, this very 90s vision of the male was updated and so the mysterious Ollie became the mysterious Adrian, and he'd had a haircut.
I'm starting to wonder about what I eat before I go to bed.
But then, I've always had really weird dreams.
When I was sixteen I had nightmares about several London museums. Only now I can't remember them very well and sometimes I wonder if I made them up afterwards. In any case, we never talk about the London museums.
I also once had a dream that my GCSE Chemistry teacher was systematically poisoning our year group with science goggles filled with bright red liquid cancer. Although, to be fair to him, he did offer one boy the choice of a leprosy sandwich, with or without tomatoes.
I think in that dream we were eventually rescued by one boy dressing up as Peter Pan and providing us all with Chemistry-resistant drugs, which looked suspiciously like Mint Imperials.
I bet Freud would really like this.
We were studying Freud last week... I think it was generally agreed that he's sometimes a useful starting point, but that it's essentially all... well, I can't put that nicely. So, er, maybe it's best that we never talk about Freud.
Anyway, moving on from that...
I finished reading If This Is A Man today. I actually quite like it, which feels a bit sick to say considering what it's about. But it's quite... I like that it's understated, how Levi doesn't feel the need to spell out on every page just how awful it all was. I like how he just gets on with his story, with telling us what he experienced, and because he only tells us what he experienced himself he focuses more on the living than of the dead, which makes it somehow simultaneously both more and less bearable as a subject.
When I was a kid, I remember being thrilled when I discovered the word 'simultaneously' in a Jacqueline Wilson book. I also remember being thrilled to discover 'in unison'. I guess I must've been pretty easily pleased as a child.
Anyway. I'm sure there was a point to this. Or maybe I'm just killing time again.
I'm kind of dreading tomorrow. It starts with the seminar on If This Is A Man... I'm dreading it because I'm not really sure how you start talking about something like that. I mean, generally our seminar discussions start with our tutor asking us all how we liked the book and someone saying that they really enjoyed it and then someone else groaning and saying it was awful. And that probably won't happen with Levi.
I sort of want to read some of his other stuff now. I want to read The Truce and The Periodic Table because I felt like his voice was kind of reliable and honest and I thought he put things incredibly well. Like, there's this bit where he writes:
It is lucky that it is not windy today. Strange, how in some way one always has the impression of being fortunate, how some chance happening, perhaps infinitesimal, stops us crossing the threshold of despair and allows us to live. It is raining, but it is not windy. Or else, it is raining and it is also windy: but you know that this evening it is your turn for the supplement of soup, so that even today you find the strength to reach the evening. Or it is raining, windy and you have the usual hunger, and then you think that if you really had to, if you really felt nothing in your heart but suffering and tedium - as sometimes happens, when you really seem to lie on the bottom - well, even in that case, at any moment you want you could always go and touch the electric wire-fence, or throw yourself under the shunting trains, and then it would stop raining. (Primo Levi, If This Is A Man, trans. Stuart Woolf)
And I liked that bit, because as horrible as it is, I felt like it was quite a clever and accurate observation, and he put it very simply... It also reminded me of a poem 'Luck in Sarajevo' by Izet Sarajlic, which goes:
In Sarajevo
in the spring of 1992,
everything is possible:
you go stand in a bread line
and end up in an emergency room
with your leg amputated.
Afterwards, you still maintain
that you were very lucky.
Which is the same idea - that however awful it is, it could always have been worse, and you do still consider yourself lucky that it is not windy, and that you have only lost your leg.
Sigh.
This isn't really helping with what to talk about in the seminar, I'm not making any sense, and I've got work to be getting on with and a fresh pot of tea that needs drinking.
Have a wonderful evening. You look lovely tonight.
