- The Observer,
- Sunday February 4 2001
They tuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to but they do. They might think that they are scared for their children, but who are they kidding? They are scared of them, that they will lose their boys and girls to an intimate, changeling night. So they tuck them up and tuck them in, hoping that their little ones aren't corrupted by the bad dreams, the bad thoughts. Yet there's nothing innocent about slumber. My earliest memories of dreams were always strange and dark, full of monsters and fearful knowledge. Things that the grown-ups would never tell you of. The night is an unruly time when the imagination runs riot against the authority of the day.
I often work at night. It's a fertile time for a writer. And you're less likely to get disturbed. Saturday night's the best. I look down on the busy streets where I live, watching the revellers below, and kid myself I am having a better time than them. I am making my own entertainment, I say to myself, if they only knew what a good time I'm having. Writing is, in a sense, an anti-life activity, and you've got to keep yourself going somehow and not dwell too much on the thought that you are scribbling your years away. And sometimes, in the wee small hours, you can be hacking away and hit pay dirt. You can tap into that child's imagination that you had all those years ago. Though at other times you can feel so inspired (maybe having had one too many of those funny cigarettes) and you can produce reams of stuff that in the cold light of day reveal themselves as insomniac nonsense. Whatever, I always keep pen and paper on a clipboard by my bed. You never know when you might come up with something. Sleeping on an idea, you can wake up to catch the odd sentence or snatch of dialogue.
I avoid writing down dreams, though. We don't really remember them, not consciously. We can't. We no longer have the infant logic to unravel them. Their very strangeness eludes our understanding. We rationalise, we edit, we try to reassemble. We work our way through the maze, but we're left with a ball of yarn rather than a map of the labyrinth. And they play tricks with us as we come to the surface. This is the very puzzle of the night, the interface between sleep and waking.
By the time we are teenagers, the night means mischief. Telling lies to our parents, getting hold of cheap cider or whatever can furnish a derangement of the senses. Teenage Neverland. Breaking into premises, wreaking havoc with senseless acts of vandalism and then sneaking back to our beds. I remember one night when I had been stopped by the police, up to no good (but not up to that much bad either), and they had taken my name and address and sent me home. I crept into bed sheepishly, my head still throbbing with Strongbow, and my dad came into my room. As I feigned sleep, I expected a telling off but instead he found it all quite amusing and told me he'd been just like me at that age. The worst horror of all - he understood. You can imagine what surly resentment that engendered.
Leaving home, we can not only stay out late, we can stay out all night. In my day, the big thing was speed. A jaw-clenching drug to trick the night of sleep. We had to experience it all, play it all out in clubs and all-nighters, torturing ourselves with sleep deprivation. The bright lights of the city burning into the darkness, extra sharp. A delirious sense of power of having not dreamt, of being constantly alert, alive. Of course, it had its horrible pitfalls. Comedown. Amphetamine psychosis where your dreams catch up with you. I remember after a particularly long binge finding myself in a cinema matinée surrounded by hallucinations just out of view, turning around in my seat every so often to try and catch the shadow of something just behind my shoulder. There was an awful sense of mortality that stalked a youthful desire to have fun, to live into the night. By being awake at night and sleeping by day, we imagined we were turning time around. And if time is upside down, maybe it will go backwards as well and we'll stay forever young.
And that sense of mortality is, of course, bound up with sex. After puberty, this is what the night comes to mean. Sex, sex, sex. Suddenly this tyrant takes over the imagination and the unfettered sensuality of the darkness is subjugated by an insistent lust. One struggles to understand that thing that has found you out in the dead of night. You struggle with yourself and, in clumsy encounters, with others. Awkwardly dancing between desire and embarrassment. I grew up feeling very uncomfortable about my sexuality, but thankfully the night confided with its own confusions and gave me the confidence to act, to make mistakes, and not to care too much about the blushing dawn.
And then, when you do find somebody, you sleep with them. This has always seemed to me more intimate than sex. To share that close unconscious time with another. For a while, it's marvellous to be curled up in post-coital bliss with someone you feel sure you're in love with. But as the night wears on and they snore or encroach upon your space, it's easy to begin to resent them. I have to confess that in this respect, I'm not very good in bed. The fact that the longest relationship I ever had was with an insomniac might have something to do with it.
We are never more certain of things than when we are sleeping. It's no wonder that dreams are associated with divination. And when they appear close to real events, we can be haunted by what might have been, we go back to places and feel that we've never left them. I remember one dream - no, hang on, I have a vague recollection of something I dreamt. I was at a party and I noticed what at first I thought was a red-headed child. As he turned around, I saw that it was Jamie, a Glaswegian dwarf that I knew. If you think that this is putting him bluntly, this is exactly how he described himself. 'I wouldn't say that my body is my temple,' he'd say, 'it's more like a Presbyterian youth centre.' We were chatting, but then suddenly something came to mind. Jamie had in fact died two weeks before, something that my conscious mind was sluggishly aware of but had only informed my sleeping self halfway through our conversation. So in the dream, I had to make sense of this. All sorts of unwelcome thoughts posed themselves, metaphysical speculations that I'd normally have no truck with. I wanted to ask him about this but was scared thinking that if I did mention his death he would suddenly disappear. How rude, I thought, to point out to somebody that they were dead at a party. Finally, unable to bear it any longer, I blurted out: 'Jamie, didn't you die?' 'Ay,' he replied with a wink, 'I might have just done that.'
I woke up with a start. I was covered in a thin film of cold sweat. I lay there in the dark for about an hour, my head reeling. I don't believe in ghosts, but I felt haunted. Jamie had come back from the dead but not, I reasoned, in any tangible way. I was left with the memory of somebody who, in some strange sort of homeopathy, had left a trace of themselves as they were washed away by eternity.
The Big Sleep. That's the real Neverland that we're homesick for at night. We fear the endless nothing that will come, and yet we forget that there was an equal amount of nothing before. Night, night.
• He Kills Coppers by Jake Arnott (£10.99, Sceptre) is published on 17 May.
