The Green Man Read Free Page B

hypnagogic
(onset-of-sleep-accompanying) hallucinations. These antecede jactitation,
taking place when the subject is more fully awake, or even wide awake, but with
the eyes closed. They are not dreams. They might be described as visions of no
obvious meaning seen under poor conditions. Their nearest, or least distant,
parallel is what happens to people who have spent much of the day with their
eyes fixed on a scene that varies only within certain fixed limits, as when
travelling by car, and who find, when they close their eyes for the night, that
a kind of muted version of what they have been looking at is unrolling itself
against the inside of their eyelids; but there are large differences. The
hallucinations lack all sense of depth of frame, and there is never much in the
way of background, often none. A piece of a wall, a corner of a fireplace, a
glimpse of a chair or table is the most that can be made out; one is always
indoors, if anywhere. More important, the hallucinatory images are invariably,
so to speak, fictitious. Nothing known ever presents itself.
    The
images are, on the whole, human. Out of the darkness there will appear a face,
or a face with neck and shoulders, or part of a face, or something that cannot
be precisely described, but resembles a face more closely than anything else,
perhaps seeming to move slowly or changing its expression. Also commonly seen
are other parts of the body, a buttock and thigh, a whole torso, a solitary
foot. In my case, these are often naked, but this may be the product of my own
erotic tendencies, not a necessary feature of the experience. The strange
distortions and appendages that, much of the time, accompany the recognizable
naked forms tend to diminish their erotic quality. I am not myself sexually
moved by a breast divided into segments like a peeled orange, or a pair of
thighs that converge into a single swollen knee.
    From
all this, it might be thought that the hypnagogic hallucination is something to
be feared. To an extent this is so, but (in my case) the various images, though
frequently grotesque or puzzling, have not much power to terrify. And, as
against the times when an unremarkable profile suddenly turns full face and
glares in lunatic rage, or becomes quite inhuman, there are the rarer times
when something beautiful shows itself clearly, in a small flare of soft yellow
light, before fading into nothing, into the state of a vanished fiction. What
is most unwelcome about these visions is the expectation of the jerks and
twitches, the joltings into total wakefulness and the delaying of sleep, which
they always portend.
    I
looked briefly ahead now to this prospect as Jack and I stood talking in the
bar, which had begun to fill up with the first guests out of the dining-room
and people from the nearer places who had driven over for the later half of the
evening. I said to Jack,
    ‘I
suppose you’re going to tell me all that stuff is due to drink’
    ‘There’s
a connection all right.’
    ‘Last
time we talked about this you said there was a connection with epilepsy. You
can’t have it both ways.’
    ‘Why
not, if it is both ways? Anyway, the epilepsy thing is a technicality. I can’t
tell you you’ll never have an epileptic fit, any more than I can tell you
you’ll never break your leg, but I can tell you there’s no sign of it at the
moment. Another thing I can tell you, though, is that there’s a bloody sight
more than a technical connection between your drinking and your jumps and
faces. Stress. It’s all stress.’
    ‘Alcohol
relieves stress.’
    ‘At
first. Look, come off it, Maurice. After twenty years on the bottle you don’t
need me to lecture you about vicious circles and descending spirals and
what-not. I’m not asking you to cut it out completely. That wouldn’t be a good
idea at all. Knock it off a bit. Try keeping away from the hard stuff until the
evening. You’d better start that soon if you feel like seeing sixty. But I
don’t want