The walls in the Downtown apartments are paper thin and often in the small hours you will hear noises that chill your soul. Most nights, the darkness in Boomtown can feel uncomfortable but I recall one night in 1979 when the still air hung like a heavy blanket over everything and the night felt particularly oppressive.

It had taken me ages to fall asleep and it felt like no sooner had I drifted away that I was dragged from my deep slumber by a blood-chilling scream. In what seemed like a second - but could have been a lifetime - I heard the madness stir inside my brain as I tried desperately to separate the horrors of the dream-scape from the reality that I was emerging into. I sensed terror in the shadows and lay there expecting the scream to reach out of the darkness a second or third time, but there was nothing.

Had the scream been just a nightmare? Vague recollections of a featureless white room danced across the no-man’s land between my subconscious and my wakening. The room was lit only by an icy blue neon strip in the hall outside and was featureless except for swarms of buzzing white flies and the deep red blood that started to seep from the ventilation grills high on the walls. Or had I been in the grips of the recurring nightmare that had me falling and spinning to my death??

As I became slowly more lucid and reality started to get the upper hand, I heard a soft sleepy voice from beside me….reassuring…."it’s ok, were you dreaming"?

I gulped in a mouthful of air – so heavy I could almost chew it - and gathered my thoughts….”no, I’m fine”, I replied, must be something I ate late last night.