Fear

Being such a heavy sleeper, I very rarely have those kinds of subconscious hallucinations you regular people call dreams.

You know the ones, where you’re walking down a familiar road with someone from your past you don’t see anymore. You know you don’t see them anymore because you’ve conjured up a different face for them, but still refer to them that particular past-person. Anyway, you end up discussing, in incredible depth, the complexities of off-shore angling even though you’ve never held a fishing rod in your life. The road you’re walking down begins to mutate and you’re find yourself at the fish counter of the branch of Morrisons you went to when you lived in a different city that time. You pick up a piece of halibut to prove a point you were just making, meanwhile the blank-faced person behind the counter continues to knit a stripey scarf. Over the in-store tannoy comes the all-too-familiar sound of your morning alarm and you come back to reality, almost immediately forgetting what you were hallucinating about. You know, those ones.

So yeah, I don’t have them. Or even if I ever do, the aforementioned forgetfulness kicks in before I’ve had a chance to open my eyes and seek out where the alarm is coming from because I place my phone in different parts of the room each night, away from arm’s reach, thus forcing me to physically get up if I wish to silence it.

In lieu of such a dream, I recently lay awake – but in the dark with eyes closed to try any force myself to sleep – thinking thoughts conjured up by my mostly dormant mind. I was awake (technically) until after 4am, trapped inside the story I didn’t want but got anyway. Being awake through it also emanated that erratic structure of typical sleep-dreams, giving me one long, consistent awake-dream, that I seemingly couldn’t get out of and actually go to sleep until it had actually finished.

The long and short of it was thus: I was being accused of a crime I didn’t commit. I was the only witness and so with all the strength and conviction in the world, I could categorically sit in the witness stand and tell the people I was innocent. But only I knew that to be a rock solid truth. For everyone else, it was conceivable that I “might’ve” been guilty. Those accusing me of wrongdoing were, in fact, utterly convinced that it was me and understandably argued their point with such vigour and determination that they wouldn’t take otherwise for an answer.

So here I was, a victim of perhaps misunderstanding or unfortunate timing, weedy enough and defeatist enough to not effectively defend myself, staring off against a courtroom adversary adamant enough to want me to suffer. With all of this taking place inside an American TV style courtroom with a British curly-white-wiggy judge inside my own pessimistic head, of course the jury in my mind found me guilty. I don’t think the judge in my head officially gave myself a sentence – he probably did but we had already cut to the next scene in this saga by then – but I imagine I was to be imprisoned for somewhere around seventy-million years.

I don’t remember prison that much. I think these kinds of fabricated stories, whether asleep or awake, rely heavily on previous experiences in real life. Thankfully, I haven’t had to deal with the misfortune of being incarcerated so my mind had to conjure up some kind of solitudal cell with white walls and a postcard-sized window with bars across it.

I adopted some kind of “vow of silence” mentality, partly out of the shame of being in prison, partly out of wanting to keep my head down and just letting each day pass into the next. For the first few months, friends and family members wrote letters to me, of which I responded to none. Requests to visit me I simply rejected. I suppose in this situation, two things were happening in my mind simultaneously: a) I had become paranoid that, despite my innocence, my reputation in the eyes of those I’ve cared about has become soiled by this “criminal” label above my head, whether they believe it to apply to me or not; and b) I suppose I just didn’t want anyone I’ve ever cared about to see me in prison clothes, locked inside an institution.

After some time, people seemed to get the hint; the letters and the visitation requests stopped coming and I just got on with being silent and withdrawn inside my new life I had created in my mind.

It had been fifteen years when I received a letter from my former defence lawyer. New evidence or new testimony or new something-or-other has conveniently materialised and my case was to be reopened. There was a chance I could be freed. For the first time in fifteen years, I agreed to have a visitor. My lawyer came and told me things in detail. My brain happily glosses over this, using the convenient narrative device of watching on through a window so we can’t hear what’s being said. It might as well have cut to a blank title slide indicating “INSERT DETAIL HERE”.

Shortly after, I received another letter, jointly signed by several old friends. This is where we come to what I believe to be the point of this whole hallucination. Magically assuming that, despite me cutting off all ties with anyone and everyone I’ve ever known, loved or cared about, these are the people who would be in touch. In fact, I think this is my brain’s shorthand for saying “these are the people I would want to be in touch”. Different people in different parts of the world from different aspects of my life, all suddenly coming together despite probably never knowing each other, and saying to me “hey, we’re still here”.

This isn’t really about me – I know it’s ridiculously far-fetched to imagine that, in this hypothetical situation, all of these people would conveniently band together and leap to my aid after a decade-and-a-half of silence. This is about them – if such a situation was to befall me, who would I miss the most? Who would I secretly be hoping is there for me? It’s evident to me that these are the people I most care about and wouldn’t want to lose in this lifetime.

My mind used to do a similar thing, where I’d imagine XYZ person dying young, me attending their funeral and being deeply sad about it. Maybe such a thought was a product of fear – fear of loss. Thankfully, my brain has stopped killing off my close friends and family members in my mind to prove a point. However, it seems the morbid streak has decided to manifest itself in a new way where I now sit in self-imposed solitary confinement for ages and ponder who I’d mostly miss on the outside. I suppose forcing some imaginary distance between me and my loved ones (or at least cared about ones) is how my brain comprehends just how much I love (or care about) them.

So, the retrial, fifteen years on, back in that same courtroom, opposite that same accuser. Magical stuff happens, I’m finally found innocent and immediately released. My accuser gets, I don’t know, ten hours of community service or something for being a bit of a dick to me. I don’t care, it’s really not about them. The gavel bangs and I’m a free man. Instinctively, my first thought centres around where I might go now. A split-second later, I verbalise the phrase: “I think I’m homeless now.”

Perhaps I end up staying in someone’s spare room for a bit. Perhaps everyone has forgotten or forsaken me and I live in a box on the street. I’m not really sure what happens next, that’s not the story. I’ve been released from the main body of events, having learned who are the people I most fear losing in this life and would owe my eternal gratitude for doing me the favour of sticking around, even when I turn into a silent and distant arsehole.

Somewhere around 10am, I awoke, thankful that my brain had actually managed to shut up and leave me alone for the last six hours, dreamless.

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There’s something about this squealing, screeching guitar sound that, not only just grabbed my attention from the first listen, but also awed me with every subsequent listen as well. Granted, I have only listened to it handful of times. But that’s the ideal relationship one should have music I think. There’s nothing worse than being battered over the head with the same pop song forty-seven times a day for five-and-a-half months before you realise you can’t stand it any more.

Incidentally, this is so new that the band doesn’t even a YouTube channel at the time of writing. This is Giant Party’s introduction to the world and one can only imagine what more they may have off down the line. I look forward to it with cautious optimism, and endless musing over the ambiguity of the band name. I mean is this just one big party with lots of guests, or is a relatively smaller affair exclusively for giants? This is an internal debate I may well end up taking to my grave.

Giant Party – White Ink