Dreamscape: under the pillars of the flyover

Last night I dreamed I was trying to make my way to the first of a number of addresses in London, but it turned out not to be at all close to the tube station - we'd been running for at least five minutes, over carriageways, up hills, past train tracks, and in all that time we hadn't seen a soul - the city was, as it really is, complex, greenless and literally built up, blotting out the horizon and reaching up into the sky, but it was also, as it never is outside of apocalyptic movies, completely deserted. The structures required to accomodate traffic were present, but no-one else was passing through.

Then I saw someone jogging towards us along a walkway that circumnavigated the great concrete pillars of the flyover overhead. Not just one, but a long line of people, perhaps 30 or so, separated by perfectly regular intervals. When I saw the first one, I thought, this is trouble, we're going to be mugged; when I saw the rest I thought we would probably be okay, as they were smiling and appeared to recognise me.

They ran down the walkway to join us at ground level, and it transpired that they were a group of friends from a school near where I grew up; they'd published a magazine together before graduating and abruptly falling out. We talked quickly about what had happened to us all since we last met and I introduced them to my daughter, a sulky dark-haired girl who didn't look too sure about any of this. Then I woke up with my heart pounding.

So I guess starting this blog freaked me out a little - it's the immediacy of it, and the fact that it's out there, bread cast upon the waters. It's great, though. It's a much more promising note from my sleeping self than the one I got after a lone agent responded to a synopsis with an invitation to submit my three chapters, then sent them back with a form letter by return of post. I dreamed then that the gates of a megalopolis had slammed shut. It was all going on in there, but there was no way I was going to be admitted.

But like Holly Golightly says, there's nothing quite so sad as being the person with your nose pressed up against the window, wanting to be on the other side.

I've come to the conclusion I'm a crap novelist, anyway. I really can't be bothered making stuff up when there's so much real stuff out there that's so much better than anything I could invent. I guess that's a failure of imagination, but imagination does have its limits. From time to time I read or watch something and think No, there's no way, you're not telling me the truth, there's no way that ever happened that way, and then the story's spoilt and I can't be doing with it. Inauthenticity is a killer.