The In-betweener

Aqua Mansion likes to play tricks on me.

It has transported to the far-flung future, and back sometime into the middle ages. Last night, I thought it was up to its old tricks again.

I went to bed at around 11.30, shattered, but sleep was avoiding me for some reason. It didn’t avoid me for very long, however, and I’d managed to drift off to sleep without actually realising it… It was only when I woke again at 1.30am that I realised that I had gone to sleep.

Now, sleep and I have some rather strange occurrences together. Mostly good, but sometimes filled with sheer terror.

Oftentimes, a more in-between description between good and bad needs to be used. Random. Surreal. Randomly surreal.

Like the time that I dreamt that I couldn’t sleep. I still can’t get my head around that dream today! Or the time I dreamt I had to help myself to jump across a huge hole that had appeared down by the river – the hole was a black hole (a Universal one that is, not just a hole that was devoid of light) – so there were two mes in that dream. Or the time Wonder Woman was following me thinking I was some kind of super-powered villain. You can’t get any more randomly surreal than that!

I’ll save the dreams filled with sheer terror for another time, including one where I think I managed to start to dream lucidly.

So. Back to last night. 1.30am.

When I retired to bed the Bonfire Night fireworks had quietened down. The odd one was still whizzing skywards and popping a couple of hundred times on its way up, causing the bedroom to be illuminated by almost every colour of the rainbow. I presumed the air outside was still smoky, but I didn’t check. Bonfire Night is one of the few times of the year that smog returns with a vengeance, it’s a known fact, and doesn’t need to be checked upon.

So, I went to bed, struggled to get to sleep and then woke up a couple of hours later to an eerie silence.

The room was warm, a sign that it was cold outside. My heating tends to over-compensate when it’s cold outside, which is probably the reason why I woke up in the first place.

Curiosity got the better of me, and I looked out of the window.

I was expecting to see the normal view of the Grinds, with everywhere covered with a glistening white layer… tree branches twinkling as icy drops of dew reflect the light from the stars and the Moon… the odd puff of steam gently evaporating from the odd place or two, into the early morning air.

I didn’t see any of that.

At 1.30 this morning, as I looked out of my window, there was nothing there.

Pure white.

A blank page.

I thought at first that my Mansion had transported me to some different realm or other, but this felt too real for that. Then I thought that maybe I hadn’t given the Universe time to bring the view from my window back into my reality… and then I remembered that a few hours earlier, bonfires were burning up and down all across this land.

It wasn’t smoke I was seeing however, but thick fog. I had to open the window to make sure. I could smell and taste it. There’s nothing like fresh fog first thing in the morning!

After realising that everything was as it always was with the world, I settled back into bed, and drifted off to sleep again, having one of the good experiences of restful sleep until my screeching alarm caused me to leap out of my skin a few hours later (which felt like mere minutes, it must be said!)

I looked out of the window again this morning, and all was clear.

Clear, dark and damp.

And, this morning, the room was still warm.