Fever Dream

When our son was born, we had a bit of a shock. We'd already been through the sleepless newborn days with our daughter a few years earlier, so we were pretty sure we could handle it. It turns out, nothing could have prepared us for the arrival of our son, an adorable but undeniably clingy little human. He would not sleep unless the following conditions were met:

• Clear, uninterrupted access to the sound of a heartbeat
• The warmth of our bodies
• The smell of either me or Chris
• Being held upright at a specific angle

We tried everything. We put a hot water bottle under his blankets before we laid him down. I tucked a muslin cloth into my bra all day and then wrapped it lovingly around his bedsheets to give him a familiar smell. I swaddled him. I unswaddled him. We bought a little soft sheep that played lullabies and heartbeat sounds. We took him to a cranial osteopath. We had him checked for reflux. We tried safe co-sleeping. We offered him a bottle instead of breast milk. We tried giving him a dummy, which he would violently reject in the manner of someone being poisoned. Nothing - and by this I mean the avalanche of suggestions we had coming from every single person in our lives, whether they had children or not - worked for us. Our son knew what he needed to sleep. If he did not have those things, he would not just whimper or cry. He would scream.

We set up shift patterns: Chris would hold the baby so I could sleep, and three hours later, he'd wake me up so we could swap, and we'd follow this pattern until the sun rose and we lurched almost drunkenly into a new day. And we did this routine for months.

The person in charge of the baby could not fall asleep, because sleeping while you're sitting up holding a baby is dangerous. So we had to do something to stay awake. And therefore, I enjoyed the most delirious hours of gaming I've ever experienced.

I've said it before, but certain games suit the kind of mad, bleary-eyed desperation that can only come from a lack of sleep. I'm not sure LittleBigPlanet 3 is one of those games, but that is what I mostly chose to play in the dead of night, tucked up in a rocking chair with a blanket and our new son sleeping contentedly on my chest.

LittleBigPlanet 3 is already slightly dreamlike. I've been playing around with it this week, knowing I was about to write this newsletter, and it still feels a little bit otherworldly. I don't know how much of that has to do with my associations, and how much of it has to do with the world of the game: ironically, I've not had much sleep this week, so I seem to just be unable to play this game with a fully functioning brain.

Anyway. This is the first LittleBigPlanet game I played. I remember being really chuffed to hear Fry and Laurie in close proximity to each other again. I quite like the story line; it's wholesome but with a kind of underhanded, slightly menacing undertone. It feels a little bit disjointed, maybe. Strangely lonely. But I love the levels.

Because they're stunning. Genuinely inventive, packed with detail in every layer, and sometimes quite silly. How many games let you fling yourself back and forth between launch pads while hurtling down a river of jam? Not many.

But I want to talk about one particular section of the game. Manglewood is a '50s-Hollywood-inspired world. I remember it as a dizzying, neon-lit world of pinball and diners and, I don't know, betrayal. And there's this one level called 'Deep-Space Drive-In'. In the background plays a particularly dreamy cover of the song I Only Have Eyes for You. When Sackboy is running around inside, the song plays crisply, but when he pops out to have a little swim through space, it becomes muffled, like you've just dipped underwater. Sort of like when you're about to drift off to sleep and you can feel your surroundings slipping away from you. I remember playing this level, sitting in the rocking chair, staring at Sackboy floating gormlessly in space until I started to lose focus, no longer sure what was real and what wasn't.

That song, to me, is now so powerfully evocative that I can barely stand to listen to it. It rockets me back to a moment in my life when I felt completely vulnerable. Tired beyond my wildest imagination, my entire body screaming for sleep, so grateful for the small person in my arms, but also longing to be where my husband was. We were like ships passing in the night at the time, both of us barely functioning. After a little while I started to miss him.

Even outside of the context of the game, the song I Only Have Eyes for You is already a bit strange. It sits somewhere between lovely and haunting. There's a kind of sorrow to it. It reminds me of old-school American diners, regret, and a deeply passionate love affair between a young couple doomed to be wrenched away from each other. You know? It reminds me of an old couple dancing slowly in a quiet kitchen. It reminds me of that feeling when you love someone with so much intensity that it hurts.

I don't know, there's just something about this song. I've been trying to make a playlist of songs with a similar vibe. I called it Fever Dream. There are only seven songs on there, and two of them are weird instrumental songs using ocean noises. Nothing quite hits the same as I Only Have Eyes for You. (Martina Topley-Bird's Lullaby comes close though. Also, I maintain that Soul Food is the sexiest song ever written. Also? I just Googled it and it turned out she has a really good cover of - you guessed it - I Only Have Eyes for You. So I made some sort of connection in my mind, somehow, when I made this playlist. Also, did I mention I'm really tired today?)

I listen to this song and I feel an aching nostalgia, both for that moment in time that our family became complete, and also for a time in which I never actually lived.

My father-in-law went through a phase of buying Stephen King novels for us whenever he was in a charity shop. It's sweet, the way he wanted to buy stuff he thought we'd like. But do you know how many books that man has written? It's an insane amount of books. Eventually, we ran out of room on the bookshelf and started stashing them upstairs. When we moved, we found two massive boxes under the bed. Full of King novels, lids bursting open. We don't have enough real estate for this kind of thing.

We need to sort it out, obviously. Only the best will survive the cull. There are a few we'll keep without question, and one of those is 11.22.63.

11.22.63 is like the book form of I Only Have Eyes for You. It's like King grabbed the record of this single, shoved it into a blender, drank it, teleported to some kind of dream state, and then came back and wrote the novel in a feverish haze. Like in that one episode of The Simpsons where Homer eats the insanity peppers, you know. Or maybe he just listened to the song a lot while he wrote the book, which would be quite a lot easier. I would like to remind you once more that I am very tired.

In the book, a beleaguered English teacher named Jake discovers a portal allowing him to travel back to September 9, 1958. Jake, for reasons too long and spoilery to explain here, has to prevent the assassination of J.F Kennedy. There are rules, obviously, and the more Jake bends the space-time continuum, the more confusing and surreal things become.

The idea came to King way back in 1971 and was eventually released in 2011. It's still King-ish. You get these moments of really intense horror and intrigue, particularly surrounding the mysterious 'Yellow Card Man', who waits for Jake every time he travels back. But it's also deeply - to use a word I (unfairly) hate - relational. People who don't read King can get the impression that he's all about monsters, but his books are so powerful because he has this way of digging uncomfortably deep into the darkest areas of the human psyche and dragging them out for everyone to see. That's the horror of King. (Just don't read Cell.) He's always been interested in human nature. 11.22.63 is a startlingly detailed depiction of early 1960s America in a way that manages to be yearningly nostalgic, while also unflinchingly honest. It's also chiefly concerned about the human in question. Jake goes back in time years before the actual assassination occurs: we can almost forget about it, becoming slowly settled into Jake's new-old life in the past.

It's one of the few King books I've ever read more than once (along with Lisey's Story and The Shining). I'm really tempted, now, to pick it up for a third time. Everybody hates Lisey's Story because it's so strange and nebulous and smooshy. (Maybe I should re-read and write about that sometime.) 11.22.63 is similar in the way it feels less like conventional horror, and more like a strange adventure. It's an epic book. It's the kind of book you could kill someone with, or at the very least, give them a severe concussion. And it also recalls that sleepless daze, partly because I stayed up later than I should have to finish it, but partly because Jake's messing around starts to melt the fabric of reality. Everything, especially near the end, becomes strange and fragile. It's hard to tell what's real, and what isn't. I know the fallout of time travel feels like a cliche at this point, but this is done really well.

I'll tell you a secret. When my son was a baby and my daughter was three, I was really nervous about going out with them on my own. At least to start with. I remember the first time it happened: it was frosty outside, and I spent ages wrapping them up, hats and scarf and gloves for my daughter, a giant fuzzy bodysuit for my son. I manoeuvered the pram outside and I got to the end of our road and I felt this incredible sense of triumph. Yes! I pushed a human being out of me a week ago and here I am, walking down the road with two little people, all wrapped up warm. I took a picture of it, actually. My son is barely visible, you can just about see him lying in his million layers in the pram. My daughter has a big cheesy grin, and her hat is pulled down too low over her eyes. I was so proud of myself that I printed that picture and put it in a frame. It represented growth, somehow. I represented the thing that I am good at, which is the practical side of mothering. I'm nailing it! I thought. I remember everything about that walk because it was so important to me.

A few days later, I sent Chris a text while he was at work.

'I just went out for a walk with the kids and I don't remember it.'

'What?'

'I mean I was just suddenly at the end of the road. I don't remember getting there.'

A lack of sleep can do weird things to a person. Looking back, it was almost dangerous. I may as well have teleported to the end of the road with my small, vulnerable children. I had absolutely no recollection of getting them there. It's like my brain went to sleep and my body kept moving. A day or so later, I had my son in my arms, and I crouched down to pick something up, and I got so dizzy I fell over, bumping my back into the wall and startling him awake. I sat there on the floor, back aching, sobbing, and kissing my wailing son, mumbling into his little bald head: I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry.

Parenting stretches you in every way. Physically, mentally, emotionally. Many times I've laid awake worrying about them for one reason or another. And I know how this sounds. I'm one of those mums always talking about the bad stuff, and never the good. One of those 'just you wait until you have your own' parents. I do try not to be that way, actually. Partly because I know, now, that all babies are different. But also because I don't want to put people off. The love I feel for them, that's the thing that makes it worth it. And the love they give to me. I remember people telling me, you'll miss this one day. And honestly, at my worst moments, I remember thinking: please shut up and go away. Because who wants to hear that when they're so tired their body literally won't function anymore? But it's true, I suppose. Annoyingly.

One day I'll be old, and maybe I'll be watching a film, or I'll be in a shop, and I'll hear the sad, lamenting rhythm of I Only Have Eyes for You, and I'll be taken right back, almost like time travel, and I'll remember the smell and the sight and the feel of those late-night moments with a controller in my hand, and I'll miss those long, sleep-deprived days (and nights). I can just see it in my future, somehow. And it won't just be a sad moment, or a happy one. It will be both.