‘The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense’ – Carl Jung

I’m still really drawn to finding ways to getting away from myself in my creativity, to see what new doors open, including collaborating with artificial intelligence for my Ob story, and also attempting automatic writing, where I (try to) write as I fall asleep. It’s really hard to tap into that moment between being awake enough to be fully in control, and being actually asleep when obviously you can’t really do anything. The more I do it, the longer I can be in that state.

The biggest challenge is reading my writing the following morning. I also think that although there’s the odd phrase or image that’s quite juicy, my mind generally resorts to lots of cliches. Which is disappointing.

Here are a few sentences that I managed to collect in my visits to the borderlands of sleep.

There’s something living inside your child. It’s a sort of scratching feeling.

When the curtains go up I expect you’ll be the last person alive, it seems to be all the rage, and I did wonder if there might be some kind of wrongdoing going on.

In the cavity of his mouth I sensed a bad smell that wrapped itself around my throat and surely made me stand up and think about what I had done.

Dear God, it would be very kind if you had a good listen to a song I’ve been writing about the struggles of being a spaceman. Will I even go to Heaven? I ask.

He cocked his eye like a gun but when he was scratching down the back for pennies all he found was a disappointing memory.

Slowly air blows across the limits of my hearing. Could there be a voice on the wind? Who can hear the voices of the darkness, and a sinking feeling that not everything is going to be OK? Where am I? 

Adders are in the maze, I can feel them moving through me, I can feel the eyes on me, like a blinking light, a redness, the sore losers are the only way ahead. 

Soft and sharp, filling it up with air. Easily the most difficult thing is to try and put yourself in their shoes, but the problem with that is that we just can’t seem to get together for any length of time. The only possible way is to treat it like some kind of disease, that needs to be really thought through. 

We are in the place now beyond the strange strings, where the cries of the night are like music to my ears, long after the others have gone and left us in the clearing with nothing but our minds to keep us company. The pain is pretty intense now she says.