THE DREAMER

One dream too many, perhaps, one hope too big....

The dreamer lay still as the dead might lie, and dreamed.

He loved his dreams. He toured the Universe with them and in them. He made love to angels, he caroused with nymphs, he cuddled sirens.

He'd been in Nirvana for as long as he could remember. The girls danced by him, teasing him with their tasselled breasts singing in sweet soprano voices about morning and sunshine and love and the deep places of the heart.

He loved deep places of the heart.

The boys, sometimes whiskered, sometimes shaved, sat in a circle round the edge of things and gazed at the dancers. They were always the same, always watching, never dancing because the girls were dancing for him and that was the way things were. Never for the handsome boys. Just for him.

Flip-flap... the cotton skirts flashed and waved like bright flags in a celebration, clasped in the hands of children. He loved those flag-skirts, the patterns they wove in the delicate air of Nirvana and the flashing white of knickers, the fragrance that spilled from them, sweet flowers, sweeter spices.

And the cocktail at his elbow, coconut and flowers steeped in liquor distilled from everything good and wholesome and sparkling...

The dream was good. It was his favourite dream.

Have I dreamed this place before or have I just dreamed that I've been here before? he asked himself during a moment's semi-consciousness. It was the biggest conundrum of his life because he thought it every time he dreamed " or dreamed that he thought it.

He didn't know, but it didn't matter. He was here now, could gaze in rapture, could rise from the cocoon of his soul and take a dancing girl in his arms and jig around the world with her, go to exotic places, sandy beaches, blue tropical seas, palm trees, places his flesh had never been... And she, being his entirely, loved it. Of course she did: and the truth, a shadow from elsewhere, another time, another place, another existence, was that flesh and blood girls never had.

Dreamland is best....

When I go home, when I have to wake up, things will be like they always were and the sun will hide behind grey clouds while the skies dissolve the moon... And she'll be there, not in my arms and giggling but with a face like thunder, being herself when all she really needs to be is a dreamland nymph...

Life might have treated me better...

Of course it might have! But I was always a dreamer, always spent the best years of my life lost in the paradise I make in my head whilst I sleep.

He felt the gloom descending. He saw the shadows fall. Skirts were stilled, bright colours dimmed.. Desperately... paradise is the only place to be. The girls....

He stirred. The dreamer actually stirred, and the dream melted away like dreams do, leaving no trace of itself anywhere. He struggled in his consciousness, but the shadows deepened.

He groaned.

Anyone who had been kicked so brutally out of Heaven would find himself groaning. A man does groan when he's in pain, and now the dreams were gone and done and dusted the dreamer, being neither awake nor asleep, was half awake - and in pain.

The pain grew, like pains do. It spread through him like thunder, it battered him like guns, it tore through his flesh until the groan became a scream.

Time suddenly lost its will to tick. Nirvana crashed into Hell.

He forced his eyes to open.

Dazzled by the sudden light he gazed through a crack in the world he was in.

Girls were dancing, boys were staring at them, skirts were wafting like flags torn by a summer breeze. But something inside him said he wasn't there, and a voice in his ears, a real voice in his real ears, her voice, cracked with too many cigarettes and weary with too many years, moaned it would be nice if you might think of getting up soon, my darling man...?

And he knew he wasn't anywhere near his dancing skirted white-knickered girls.

Not now. Not ever. It was impossible.

The world he was in was shot into darkness and he heard, through ears that were failing like senses do when synapses die, the sound of his coffin lid being screwed down...