Tuesday, 4 August 2009

places i have fallen from in my dreams

When I was a teenager, I used to have recurring nightmares about being buried alive. My English teacher, who was a bit of a sadist, once recommended I read an Edgar Allen Poe short story about a premature internment.

I never did, and evetually these dreams wore off. I occasionally dream about my body mutating or re-morphing in some way - tubes growing from my shoulders, my face shrivelling, that sort of thing, but by far and away the most common recurring dream that I have involves me being somewhere high up and either falling off or dropping something valuable (like a daughter) over the edge.

So far I have fallen from the following places (that I can remember):

  • Blackpool Tower
  • Aukland Space Needle
  • Beachy Head
  • Eiffel Tower
  • Grand Canyon
  • B52 Bomb bay doors
  • Texryte House (Southgate Road, London, N1)
  • Various non-existent places
  • Berlin Fernsehturm
  • Helicopter over Vietnam
  • Helicopter over Derbyshire
  • World Trade Center
  • Cliff in Swiss Alps (on skis)
  • Ski Lifts / Cable Cars
  • Ships / Car Ferries
  • Platform 1, Chesterfield Train Station
  • Unidentified London Underground platforms.

In real life, I nearly jumped off a very large cliff on a mountain in North Wales when the part of the mountain I was on was covered in low cloud. I was undertaking my field mapping project at the time as part of my degree and after jumping down a few short four or five foot drops on my route across some outcrops, I automatically thought the next ledge would present a similar leap.

I changed my mind at the very last moment when I realised that I really couldn't see where I was jumping to. I sat down to write in my field notebook for a while instead. When the weather cleared and I peered over the edge at a long sheer drop, I felt my heart leap into my throat.
Then there was another time in a disused copper mine beneath Alderley Edge scanning the ground for samples for the Museum I was working in, where I discovered at the last moment that I had been walking backwards to the brink of a mineshaft.

1 comment:

T.Migratorius said...

You are a very entertaining writer Dave Serjeant. Oh, how your mind works both consciously and in that mysterious dreamland! So glad your falling has only been in dreams.