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| the life and times of David Serjeant |
| When I was a teenager, I used to have recurring nightmares about being buried alive. My English teacher, who was a bit of a sadist, once recommended I read an Edgar Allen Poe short story about a premature internment.
I never did, and evetually these dreams wore off. I occasionally dream about my body mutating or re-morphing in some way - tubes growing from my shoulders, my face shrivelling, that sort of thing, but by far and away the most common recurring dream that I have involves me being somewhere high up and either falling off or dropping something valuable (like a daughter) over the edge. So far I have fallen from the following places (that I can remember): > Blackpool Tower > Aukland Space Needle > Beachy Head > Eiffel Tower > Grand Canyon > B52 Bomb bay doors > Texryte House (Southgate Road, London, N1) > Various non-existent places > Berlin Fernsehturm > Helicopter over Vietnam > Helicopter over Derbyshire > World Trade Center > Cliff in Swiss Alps (on skis) > Ski Lifts / Cable Cars > Ships / Car Ferries > Platform 1, Chesterfield Train Station > Unidentified London Underground platforms. In real life, I nearly jumped off a very large cliff on a mountain in North Wales when the part of the mountain I was on was covered in low cloud. I was undertaking my field mapping project at the time as part of my degree and after jumping down a few short four or five foot drops on my route across some outcrops, I automatically thought the next ledge would present a similar leap. I changed my mind at the very last moment when I realised that I really couldn't see where I was jumping to. I sat down to write in my field notebook for a while instead. When the weather cleared and I peered over the edge at a long sheer drop, I felt my heart leap into my throat. Then there was another time in a disused copper mine beneath Alderley Edge scanning the ground for samples for the Museum I was working in, where I discovered at the last moment that I had been walking backwards to the brink of a mineshaft. |
| places i have fallen from in my dreams >> |