Tell Me I'm Worthless(18)

In dreams, as in life, I don’t remember the section of this experience that is a journey. It doesn’t really register at all. I’m there, pressed into the writhing mass of workers on the train, and now I am in the factory, free of the crowd, standing in front of countless gates. I do not know where I have to go. Nobody’s told me. I must be told what to do. Look here now. This is what you are going to do. Everybody is going somewhere. There are wires carrying blue light up above me, and, in the distance, a tower. I head towards it, because that seems like the sort of place where I should be working.

Because this is a dream, everything looks like it was shot on a black and white super-8 camera, with sound recorded in post-production and colour lightly painted onto the frames.

I’m now inside the tower, looking at stone steps winding up the inside of it. These are markedly different stone steps to the ones leading down into the underground station. We have moved, aesthetically, from post-industrial dystopia to the Gothic, with maybe a hint of steampunk. I am now at work. My job is to climb the stairs, to circle up the insides of this great gothic phallus. In the dream I acknowledge that I know this is a phallus.

The stairs wind up between distinct levels, with floors but no furniture. On each of these levels there is an open window, no glass, not even a frame. At every window stands a person. They have their backs to me. On one of the levels, I call to the person standing there – a woman, I think – but she doesn’t respond at all.

You’re thinking, how is this a factory? Which I suppose is understandable. A factory is, among other things, an aesthetic concept, one that we can all get immediately, even if we have never been to a real factory ourselves. Factories are about men working, operating machines, hard hats, that old silent film of the workers leaving at the end of their shift, choked lungs and calloused hands. But more than anything I suppose what a ‘factory’ is, is a hub of production. I know this tower is a factory, or part of one. But I don’t know what it produces. It must produce something, or it wouldn’t be a factory, and I know it is a factory, so it has to produce something. After a few more levels, there stops being people at the windows. I am alone now. Or maybe I’m not. Maybe I just hope that I am.

The further up the tower I walk, I become aware of it. Something is following. I can’t hear it, I do not know what it is. But I know it’s there, that it is climbing the tower behind me, matching my pace, always a floor or so behind me. I have to keep going up. What happens when I reach the top? Will I be out of a job? Will they carry my limp, broken body to the Jobcentre? Will they declare me fit to work? I start to climb faster. I’m trying, very hard, not to look over my shoulder. This tower/factory is haunted, like all workplaces, haunted by the people who have done these same mechanical actions, made the same mechanical statements, cried in the disabled toilets in the middle of every shift, haunted by the feet of every person who has climbed this tower before I have, trying, desperately, not to look over their shoulder, but knowing that there is no escape because the tower doesn’t go on forever and it doesn’t lead to anywhere else. One of these floors will be the last. I can’t tell which. When I reach the top I will have nowhere to go but… down? Down the outside? Is this what the jumpers felt on 9/11? Not that I’m trying to, I don’t know, steal valour from the 9/11 jumpers, I am just panicking at this point, trying to force myself awake. How do I even know there is something behind me? I cannot prove that it is there. As I said, I can’t hear it, I’m refusing to look. Can I smell it? I can smell dust, and nothing else. So, I can’t prove that it is there, yet I am convinced. If it reaches me something so horrible will happen that it is preferable that I die.

I turn to my right, to see a window. Outside, the world is a great white expanse. I climb up, clumsily, onto the window ledge. I peer up out and see that above me, the tower stretches up still further, but I can see its point. And below me, I can see the ground. I can see a garden of beautiful flowers. If I jump, my body will fall into that garden and decay. I will be eaten apart by worms and little insects. I will be fertiliser. And at the last moment, as I prepare myself, in the dream, to jump, I look behind me. The dream changes perspective. I see my own face, looking over my shoulder. My eyes thick with tears and my mouth open. My face is reacting to seeing something that I can’t see. My mouth opens even in a silent scream. Then I am gone. I fall. I jump. Last night I dreamt I went to work again. Last night I dreamt of suicide, again. It seemed to me I stood a while at the moment beforehand, and I could not enter, I could not fall, not until suddenly I could. Then, like all dreamers, I was possessed all of a sudden with supernatural powers, and I passed like a spirit through the barrier before me.

Then like all dreamers I was possessed. And passed like a spirit.

Then I was possessed.

And now I’m awake, feeling like shit. A pain throbs in my head. The flat is freezing cold. Last night, I left the window open.





I had a plant once, which became infested with little larvae, which turned into little flies. They covered my flat’s walls, fucking, and laying eggs in my food. I screamed because I didn’t know what to do, and my neighbours complained to the agency. This was in my old flat. When I moved, I promised myself that I would do better this time around, with this flat. I would try to clean it once a week on average, I would open up the windows and the curtains to let air and light into my space, to stop myself from turning into the worst version of myself, sick like something that has lived in a cave all of its life, sick and gasping. And maybe if I kept the place neat, then the ghosts would feel less comfortable haunting me. I don’t know if ghosts thrive in squalor. The most famous haunted places in the world tend to be the big houses and castles, because rich people lived in them and the collective blood on their hands, the collective violence that they caused on everybody else in the world, manifests into ghosts.