He phoned me up at eight the next morning - eight hours into the new year and I’ve been asleep for three of them. A new record? A new record.
“I had a dream about being afraid of heights again.”
“Good for you.” Where are my glasses.
“I was scaling the interior of a building, trying to find my friends but they were all up at the top and I didn’t like the looks of the ladders. The whole building kept changing too, it was like the Escher painting from hell.”
“I’m sorry for your loss.” Why was sunlight created. Fuck you, God.
“I couldn’t see them, I was too afraid. And then suddenly part of the building was my childhood bedroom, except different, you know how things are in dreams. It was weird and disorienting so I went to the kitchen because that was on the ground floor.”
I really didn’t give a damn about his nightmares but if I hung up the phone he’d just call again, or worse, crawl up from the basement and confront me directly.
“I’m sorry your New Year’s is off to such a crappy start. At least you weren’t woken up right in the middle of REM sleep by a weird religious guy who lives in your basement and doesn’t get sarcasm.” He hung up at this and with any luck would sulk for a while, but fortune would not be so kind. Five minutes passed and then house music started playing from the living room and I wanted to die. Revenge had too much bass.
