In which I get the better of my brain (for once)...

I run a comedy night every Tuesday and (like it or not) the amount of stress and adrenaline involved generally comes back to haunt me when I’m trying to sleep. Generally the same scenarios will play out over and over again in my fevered, fatigued brain like a malnourished, sleep-deprived hostage being strapped to a fairground carousel by demented, whirlwitzer-loving terrorists. Think Adam West's Batman, but on acid...which he probably was.

Last night, however, I didn’t bother going onstage. We had too many acts as it was, and you can only push an audience so far, particularly when there’s only 10 of them and they’re going to the toilets in shifts. Tag team weeing, if you will. As a result, the night was admin. Not unstressful, but I didn’t have to make the mental shift from organiser to entertainer, which makes the same grating noise as the gear change on my poorly maintained bicycle. (My level of general concern over my bicycle makes me convinced that I'm not ready for children, as I'm sure I'd continually spray them with WD40 and then just hope for the best.)

Strange then, that my brain decided to concoct some half-assed dream about a comic (who wasn’t even at the night) cruelly critiquing my routine (which I didn’t do) to pieces. As far as stirring up paranoia, it was a pretty weak effort on the part of my subconscious – half-baked, poorly researched, plot-holed, scare mongering. Apparently the self-sabotaging part of my psyche has restructured its business plan around the Daily Mail. Tonight, presumably, I will wake up in a terror sweat over the fact that vampire immigrants are nesting in trees; carrying off nuns and orphans by the hand-basketful. Or maybe I’ll get my wires crossed and wet the bed over the fact that a dog has adopted a squirrel (or something) and now the squirrel is barking and dragging blind people around.

The upshot was that I was able (after a cursory inspection of reality) to say “Shut up brain” and go back to sleep, comforted by my long-term sense of intangible dread over fly-by-night phantasms. If this was something that we could all master, the world would be a less problematic place.