Dark, rainy days.

The cold has come. It's found its way into the house and though the radiator is on high, it's seeped into my bones. I feel slightly ill, a little feverish and quite a bit lethargic. It's still September but the rain is relentlessly pounding on the window. How I love you England.  I wish I had a real wood-burning fire. I'd sit so close my eyes would start stinging and my face would glow as the flames of the fire cast dancing shadows around the room. On days like this I think of writers like Orhan Pamuk. His novels undoubtedly have an underlying melancholy theme. Something like  'The black book'. The feeling I got when reading that is exactly how i'm feeling now. Drowsy and achy and little sad too. But my favourites of his books has got be 'My name is red', I loved it so much I wished I could be a part of it, somehow mold myself into the pages. That book cast shadows in my dreams too. That's what happens to me sometimes. I'll read something that ingrains itself so deeply within me that I'll start dreaming about the book. Usually I'm just an observer and scenes that I imagined will play themselves in my dreams. Other times, I'm not sure how to describe it, but it's like i'm an inanimate object in the book, something that is a part of the novel, like a pen for instance, but something that has no clearly defined character or role. Not like all the 'inanimate' objects in My name is red. I put that inanimate in speech marks because some of them, in Pamuk's books, are quite real and animated. For example a tree in a painting will have a narrative, something that is crucial to the story. You'll have to read it to know what I mean.

Oh, I just thought of what else it is that reminds me of days like this; Neil Gaiman's 'Sandman' series. Dark, almost gothic, graphic novels that create vivid images, ones that reach the furthest recesses of a readers mind. That series, the Sandman one, really go to me. I was only in year seven or eight, and the dark themes those graphic novels explored made me a little afraid... just a little. But still I loved them. It was like exploring a land that you've never even imagined could exist. The dream maker or rather dream himself is the main character in these novels, he seeps his way into peoples lives, through their dreams. sometimes it's hard to distinguish whether a character is dreaming, the events are so intertwines with real life (i.e. the comics real life). Dreams other name is Morpheus. I love that name. I don't remember the events exactly, but I know there was a lot of ancient Greek/ Asyrian/ other mythology mixed up in it. I really have to get a hold of those novels to re-read them again. it's been too long, much too long.   Gaiman's Stardust, is another of my favorites. I read it around the same time as the Sandman series and remember being surprised by how one man could create so strikingly different ( yet the same) stories. I think I read too much fantasy. Sometimes, for instance when I read Stardust, I wish that real life could be like these novels. That magic and myths etc were all real. I wish stars could converse with men and tell tales of world as it were thousands of years ago.

The Stardust film wasn't as bad as I thought it would be, in actual fact I quite liked it. But nothing compares to the imagination. The way you see things in your minds eye is something that can never be translated to a screen, it's near impossible. I mean, people like Gaiman and Hayao Miyazake are probably the type of individuals who get close enough to do something like that. They really do translate their imagination to paper or screen, but I bet what they see in their mind is much more incredible than their real life works.

Morpheus aka Dream 

http://www.arschkrebs.de/sandman/sandman.jpg

(not my image, it's from the above url)