I actually am coming to like the shocking revelations of my sleeping mind. Its obvious that I absorb a lot of detailed information while I am awake, and the rest I synthesise as I go. Names, places, detailed faces – they’re all there in my sleeping mind. Whole people live their own lives in my head, only being let out at night.
Last night, after going to Comrade Arshinov’s farewell party, Souvarine and I stumbled drunkenly home to bed. I had one of those drunk-nights where the sleep is mostly a partial-waking doze. Though at some points was punctuated by fully-fledged lucid dreaming states.
At one point I dreamt I was a man with a woman’s body. I was making love to another man. I didn’t have a physical penis, but a kind of mental-penis. I think this dream was symbolic of indepdendence – possession of my own forms of action but without neccessarily being bound to follow others rules. In this dream I was free to find my own joy. And joy it was – strange, confronting and rude, rude pleasure.
Around 4 am, Souvarine woke me up by turning on the light and ferretting around in an agitated manner. Someone had stolen his pillow, somehow it had gone missing. “Perhaps you took it sleep-walking”, I suggested. With a “grmph’ he checked the study – there the pillow was on the chair. “Well I don’t know how it got there”, he grumbled, “I don’t sleepwalk, it must have been someone else“. Being the only other person there, I pulled the blanket over my head and went back to my strange dreams.
