I wrote this a couple of months ago when I was unemployed.

At 1210 local time, Great North Eastern Railway InterCity 225 train bound for Leeds had left London King’s Cross. Traveling at 115 miles an hour it derailed south of Hatfield station at around 1223. Four people were killed and a further seventy injured. It took them weeks to realize that the derailment was caused by approximately 300 microscopic cracks that occurred in the rail that happened to corporately fail on the afternoon of October 17, 2000. I’ve just described the Hatfield rail crash.

My dreams have been like this for the last couple of weeks. Not about train crashes or anything like that, but my dreams have been derailing from their set course and spilling themselves onto the memories of my previous day. I’ll live out a normal day, go to bed, dream about something that closely mirrors my day, and I’ll wake up confused about what really happened to me in the last 24 hours. Did I really say that or did I just say that in a dream? Do I really feel this way or is it just how I felt during REM sleep? What happened? What’s real? Does it matter? Should it matter? Will I think this was a dream? Is this being awake?

I’ve been asking myself these things every morning for the last couple of weeks and there haven’t been any answers yet. My main hypothesis is that my brain is striving for more excitement that it will edit and extend my boring and simple life. If my normal life is a DVD, my subconscious is playing for me the extended, director’s cut of my life and editing together in my memories. Am I really that boring that my brain has to sabotage my memories and experiences? My answer right now: probably/maybe.

A secondary hypothesis is that there have been many, many stress fractures forming in my mental track over the last couple of months. Stresses formed by high-speed thoughts of my personal future, self-worth, and contemplation of my role in this play where the world’s a stage and at best the most of us are background extras (non-SAG members). The stresses of the Hatfield crash were also caused by high-speed travel and that led to an inevitable derailment. Maybe my high-speed thoughts have caused similar microscopic fractures and have resulted in a paralleled subconscious derailment: where my dreams of one day have sloppily derailed onto the same day’s memories. 

Unlike the Hatfield crash, there have been no (reported) physical injuries or death, but I’m starting to feel as if my memories are becoming compromised; that my experiences are becoming the casualties of some cracks in the rails. I hope that these casualties are of the merely, correctable and temporary nature; and not something much, much worse.

What have we got besides our current experience and memories which connect and make sense of that experience? I’m starting to lose confidence in both. Even as I write this, I’m wondering if I’ll later dream about it. The dream version will be filled with many more characters and my writing will seem incredibly brilliant. If this happens, I’ll awake the next morning frantically trying to remember the reality of my writing and undo the potential damages to my memory that my dreams may (or may not have) caused.

Hopefully this can become like the Hatfield event. You’ve probably never heard of this before, and it only happened 7 years and 2 months ago. 7 years and 2 months from now I wish to look back on this paper and say, “I’m glad I got over that phase.” But I might say, “I may have had a dream about this once, except it was more exciting now that I think about it.”