I turned the heating on for the first time last night. The retained warmth this brought to the flimsy walls of my house was probably limited but nonetheless precluded the need for the double duvet arrangement I had nested on my bed and the wearing of thermal underwear whilst asleep. Instead of being cocooned in the weighty warmth of princess-and-the-pea-style layers, I was sweaty and fretty and the smell of burnt toast pervaded my nostrils – effects that probably conspired to produce the latest foray into imaginative weirdness that my brain had to offer.
I think I gave birth in this dream to a little gremlin figure – a twisted, gnarly-looking assembly of reddish limbs reminiscent of early photos of me as a newborn. Then somehow the little creature, still recognizable as a human lifeform, did some kind of undefined body swap with a shrunken version of a human adult. The fact of what had happened did not dawn on me at first, and I was quietly freaked out by the sudden animation of my offspring as it detailed articulately for me all of the physical miseries of inhabiting this undeveloped body, the inhuman indignity of not being able to control its own bodily functions, or walk about. Trapped in its very own infantile locked-in syndrome, the anguished soul seemed to embody the very essence of the human condition.
As I realised that the sci-fi-inspired body swap had occurred and found the explanation for my weird-out, there was the vague feeling that in the corner of the room, the husk of this adult was writhing, occupied with the ill-formed soul of my baby.
And before you ask, no I am not pregnant.
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