Rhetorical Question

Derivatives

After some heavy drinking, I fall easily into a sleep so deep that I remain unconscious of my dreams. To know you are dreaming when (on the face of it) you are not dreaming is inextricable from knowing that any period of sleep is a Variant Senility Disease (VSD) affecting us all, even when we are new-born babies or 'foetuses and beyond'.

A single period of otherwise broken sleep – broken, for example, by prior over-indulgence – often allows you to glimpse the true nature of one’s condition from the vantage point of an observer who is independent of you, but an observer suffering from your VSD. So, after a day obsessively reading about the global banking crisis, I spend hours drowning my sorrows followed by an imperceptible slippage into further hours (in hindsight) watching abstractions that focus in and out of existence like the sporadically poor reception of a digital TV signal. The monstrous margins between each abstraction appear to be constructed from complex financial instruments of leverage and derivative in the form of spiky vegetation disguised as a hybrid of man-made barbed-wire and natural undergrowth.

My memory of all this – a memory equally as complex in nature as the derivatives themselves – also contains dream images that keep joining and unjoining as they continue even into the very ‘forgetting processes’ that often follow full waking ... beyond the reach of any further breaking and mending that can be mistaken as waking ... accompanied not by the normal thumping headache eating you from within but by the prickly crown-of-thorns eating you from without.