It's bad enough when you know it's a dream that'll never let you go for your entire life. Better, of course, is a dream without knowing it's a dream. Worse, however, is waking up to discover life's the real nightmare. The worst, though, is to dream that you are dead and waking up to find that indeed you are. Or, upon further consideration, perhaps the really ultimate nightmare is knowing it's a dream without any dreamer. Or...

I found the body of Jack the Ratter in my dream. He had at last come a cropper - several rats were still gnawing their way out of him.

He had eaten the rats whole in utter greed, his tiny brain ring-fenced by such an outrage of gobbling.

I gathered as many rats as I could and, before they squirmed from my grasp, I, too, could not stop gulping them whole, before they spoilt...

After all, the dream was going to be a long haul and I needed as much sustenance as I could get before breakfast.

I even wolfed down the still twitching remains of Jack the Ratter.

But now I know something yet worse than ultimate nightmare: being part of a dream and then waking up to find that it is simply one in an endless series of Chinese Box dreams, growing bigger as they lead in false wakings from one to another, each with a vengeful bloated rat scaling itself up in readiness for my arrival.

I had a few more rollercoasters of horror to crest - for when time re-tracks, as it often does in such cases of chronic dreaming, I found myself to be a foetus inside a rat that lived in a world controlled by a re-invigorated Jack the Ratter.

Later (or earlier) I am the rotting tumour Jack employs as a brain, wriggling like a junkie worm in his head. I try to crawl down his nose to escape - only to meet another dreamer making its way up.

And the last dream is the worst of all, dreaming it's but the first.

I woke with a start.

My wife is (or was) leaning over me, evidently concerned about my well-being. I had been screaming in my sleep, she said. It then occurred to me upon whom I must have modelled Jack the Ratter.

I closed my eyes and tried desperately to fall asleep again.



(published 'Psychopoetica' 1988)