Beckoning Boyhood

I have some recurring dreams and in one I’m in a huge vacant multi-floored hotel full of everything except people. I’m going from floor to floor looking for something but I’m not sure what it is. In another I’m a long corridor of a sky-scraper building which is on fire, running to some lift doors which are just about to close. As they’re slowing swishing together they're retreating into the distance and I never reach them. I wake up with my heart hurting from hammering hard however the relief on finding it was only dream is exhilarating.

I have a comforting dream where I’m floating towards a beckoning abyss - white light down a swirling tunnel. I never reach it though. I'm floating along slowly in a bubble in an environ where there're no sharp edges, no sounds, no shadows, no worries. Something like the palm of a hand is in the small of my back pushing me along nicely to the white eye at the centre of a slowly-turning kaleidoscope. I'm not sure what this means but I've come to think the white centre is a metaphor for childhood and I'm trying to get back to it. For me childhood didn't last long enough and I wish the world froze when I was about 12. As a man I've found human nature doesn't have the milky goodness I'd expected of it and I'd like to return to boyhood where things seemed more genteel. Since I was about 22 I've felt like I've stepped by accident into a world I'm not comfortable in where people usually live up to my expectation that they'll eventually be a bit of a disappointment. Going back to boyhood sounds brill.

This abstract painting represents the above and was done in about 30 minutes (I'm sure it shows) with a couple of knives. In the dreams will I ever reach that iridescent white at its centre? Hope so. I hope to have that dream tonight but I'll probably end of dreaming that I'm sticking out of a giant Swiss Roll cake and just when Tina Turner is going to bite my head off I'll pop up from a grid in the road and be playing a huge drum in a brass band that's marching across a desert.