muninnhuginn | Is there a 12-step program for this? (Reply)

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Coughs.

Looks round at the seated circle of listeners.

Stares at claws.

Ruffles feathers nervously.

Um, yes. Er, hello? Er... my name is

muninnhuginn and I am a serial dreamer of sf conventions.

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You're a passenger in the car, partner driving, offspring in the seat behind. The road is busy--it's holiday time so what would you expect?--but at least you're not stuck behind a caravan: on this road, single-carriageway, winding between the tree-clad fellside rising steeply to your left and the precipitous drop down to the narrow rocky lakeshore to your right, there's no chance of overtaking safely. Ahead the cars glitter in the sunlight much as the surface of the lake does: hard, bright springtime light. The pale blue sky is only softened a little by the dabbed-on clouds; above the trees you expect the same to be true of the greenish fellsides with their dottings of lambs.

You continue along the road, flanked by fell and fall, until, on the left, a break appears in the tree-clad cliff. A car park, not much bigger than a passing place, occupies what might have been a small quarry. You stop, park as neatly as possible, get out. Beside the lay-by you find a path, zigzagging steeply up the fellside, first bark-soft through the silver birch and then sharp-pebbled up the grass-clad hill.

A the top of the rise, the path levels, the sharp stones of the path become flat-topped boulders as you rock hop across a stream. Between the stones the water first bubbles and spurts like a mountain stream and then becomes calmer, stiller as the stones you tread on become more regular. The edges of the pool you are crossing are cool, white concrete and beyond them you begin to see through the glass walls that surround the pool the crowds of people circulating, flowing together into knots, parting and joining a purposeful stream to some unseen destination.

You step off the last stepping stone onto the strip of lawn, wait while the automatic doors whisper their welcome, and step inside.

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There are too many stairs. It's not laziness that makes you think this. But....

There are two lifts, but only one goes to the floor where you sometimes find your room if you stalk with a sort of sideways shuffle to prevent it turning into a different room on a different floor.

There are several flights of stairs, but if you choose the right ones, the ones that are hidden across the restaurant behind a pair of mirrored doors, the ones the uniformed staff mutely scale with trays of breakfast or extra pillows, you come out at a swing door that comes out onto a corridor that has become not quite distinctive to you, since it looks exactly the same as the floor above and the floor below. You are only convinced you have reached your destination when your card successfully negotiates with the lock and allows you to open the door and see your pyjamas neatly folded on the bed.

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And. And. And....

Every night, it seems, a different whirl of corridors and function rooms, bars and restaurants, a different swirl of clothing and costume, familiar face and foreign, convention goers and not.

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I'd always had vivid dreams, disturbing sometimes, tediously frightening often: how many times can I fall off that particular patch of scree on the descent of Great Gable and wake just as I land at the bottom before I'm done with it? (In reality I didn't even trip when I crept in terror across that bit of path.)

Then I didn't dream for most of a decade. I was told at one point in the slow stagger to the diagnosis of FMS that what I was suffering from was actually a problem with my sleep. Through the swollen joints, the eczema, the fogged brain, and utter bone-weary exhaustion, I could get that. If going to bed so tired I was unconscious pretty much as I lay down, sleeping for twelve hours or more, and waking to feel as if I'd fought all night with a heavy-weight boxer, isn't hinting at a sleep disorder, I'm not sure what is. And I had no dreams.

When they came back I had a lot of catching up to do. But, especially as I tended to dream in arrears, my internal dream time previously lagging by about two years, this didn't seem too strange. In fact, I was rather glad: I'd never really dreamed about my daughter and now here she was growing from a small child to an almost adult in a series of bright pageants.

So, I'm not writing a con report for Mancunicon, because it hasn't filtered through yet. But I expect one day to experience some small part of it--the vision up high of a steam-punk clad woman crossing a glass-sided bridge inside a glass tower against a lowering sky; a man with a portable lectern offering to speak just to me in an otherwise empty lift--in another visit to my ongoing convention-going dreams.