{"id":101,"date":"2005-06-10T13:05:24","date_gmt":"2005-06-10T13:05:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blah\/?p=101"},"modified":"2018-07-20T14:02:22","modified_gmt":"2018-07-20T21:02:22","slug":"the_law_train","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/2005\/06\/the_law_train\/","title":{"rendered":"The Law Train"},"content":{"rendered":"

I don’t have good dreams. Never have. Nor do I have ‘bad’ dreams, except on extremely rare occasions. No, what I have are weird, surreal, fucked-up dreams. I also have the usual recurring dreams sometimes about running away from Something Bad, but here’s the thing: I figured out long ago that, though running forwards away from some terror is practically impossible, because as you might entirely expect I forget how to run, all I have to do is turn around and run backwards<\/em>. I can always remember how to do that. Maybe something to do with facing<\/em> the terror?<\/p>\n

This morning, after I’d gone to sleep for the third time after a night of sleeping not particularly well:<\/p>\n

I’m on a train. Lots of people, seemingly young and American, but that makes sense; it’s where I live. The train itself doesn’t seem out of the ordinary, but it’s very busy. We’re all together, it seems. There’s this one slightly creepy young man, I think he has a camera or a camera-phone, and he’s acting like he knows me, talking about stuff we’ve done together, or are going to do together. I don’t think I know him, so I brush him off, to everyone’s amusement \u2014 they think he’s creepy too, apparently \u2014 and then he seems to continue hassling some of the girls. But soon he disappears. We look out of the window, and one of the guys \u2014 reminds me of Johnny Depp? Or actually is<\/em> Johnny Depp? \u2014 looks out of the window and admires a place selling trailers (except they’re much more like British-style caravans). Says he’d love one of those. I can see that, apart from the trailer place, we’re travelling through a desert wilderness.<\/p>\n

Walking around, a girl beckons me slightly conspiratorially. She seems to be a friend, but I don’t remember her. She tells me that she left some documents for me. She names them, but the names don’t mean any sense to me. I feel both relief and foreboding. She says that she left them with my stuff. I’m not entirely sure what she means, so I go looking. I start to realise that we are<\/em> all together. We’re on the train heading for some sort of training to become \u2014 lawyers, I think. I get the impression I’d had second thoughts and tried to back out, but that the girl had believed she’d done me a favour by keeping me in the system. I’m partly glad she did \u2014 it’s something to be doing \u2014 but also realise that this isn’t going to be right for me. Way too many people. The train is very very social, and I feel, as usual, like an outsider.<\/p>\n

I wander around looking for my stuff. At this point the train becomes unfeasibly wide. The carriages are like hotel rooms. It’s getting dark. At the end of the train I find what looks like a dormitory. Some young men are already there, settling into bed. On each of the other beds is a pile of documents, each named as belonging to one of the students. I look through them all, but don’t find mine. Heading back to the main part of the train, I realise that the girls’ dormitories are way at the other end of the train, to keep us apart. I see some of them in pyjamas, doing girl things and getting ready for bed. Then I find a second boys’ dormitory. It’s dark, smaller than the other one, and feels very cold. The walls are lined with shelves full of something I can’t make out at first, but which turn out to be packages of wood. I assume it’s to fuel the train. Through the window I see the desert; it’s cold and dark now, but the train keeps steaming along.<\/p>\n

I find the bed with my stuff on it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I don’t have good dreams. Never have. Nor do I have ‘bad’ dreams, except on extremely rare occasions. No, what I have are weird, surreal, fucked-up dreams. I also have the usual recurring dreams sometimes about running away from Something Bad, but here’s the thing: I figured out long ago that, though running forwards away … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-101","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=101"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1033,"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101\/revisions\/1033"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}