Weird dreams

I very seldom have full-on nightmares of the world-coming-to-an-end, monster-eating-my-leg variety.  But in the last few days I’ve had two absolutely miserable dreams; dreams that left me practically shaking with relief when I woke and realised they weren’t true.

The first was late last week; I dreamed I had to move house again, and I had just three days to do it in.  I had arranged to get all my belongings into storage and was frantically packing; but of course with only three days leeway I was so busy packing that I’d had no time to look for somewhere else to move to.  So I was about to decamp into a local hotel, at the truly painful cost of £120 per night, room only (meaning I would have spent more than my usual month’s rent in just five days).  No-one I spoke to saw anything wrong or odd about my situation, so that as well as being frantic with worry I was also constantly being struck by the fact that I must be a deeply pathetic person to get myself so worked up about minor matters like this.

The second bad dream was last night.  I was going on holiday and had arrived at the airport; there were 2 hours to go to my flight and I was standing at the queue to check-in when I suddenly realised I had left all my baggage at home.  So there I was in Gatwick, desperately trying to think whether there was any way, using the rather stupid selection of shops one finds in an airport, that I could buy myself a whole holiday wardrobe, plus toiletries, books, binoculars, sketchbook, camera, contact lenses and a replacement pair of specs, plus a bag to put them in, before the check-in closed, and still have a bit of spending money left for things like food while I was away.  To add to my state of nerves, my mother then turned up, having decided very sweetly to come and see me off; and she could not understand why I was so upset, or why I felt I had any kind of a problem.  So, again, I had the additional stress of thinking “What is wrong with me, that I am upset by this, when here’s Mum telling me it’s a really trivial matter?”

Talk about deep-seated insecurities!  When I have dreams like this I end up thinking I’d rather not remember them at all.  Not like the one a few months ago when I dreamed I was recently and happily married and busy renovating a house by a lake with my husband.  Now that was lovely!

I don’t know why I’m having such miserable, insecure dreams.  I didn’t think I was particularly miserable or insecure at the moment, indeed rather the opposite.  But the human mind is a mysterious thing, god wot.  Maybe being contented, busy and in good spirits is making my subconscious mind panic. 

I am contented.  Yes, I could have more in my life (a publishing deal, my own home, a garden, a gift-wrapped Jeremy Renner [preferably in my bed], etc etc) but my family are all in good health, I’m happy in my job, I’m comfortable where I live, I have friends, I can afford a holiday each year - plus  a few concerts, theatre tickets etc - my bladder is behaving itself again; and I have my writing, which has driven me mad and worn me out this summer but has also been a well-spring of joy and fulfillment like little else I’ve known.  So I am contented and I have a lot to be grateful for.  Blessed be!

A bad dream can mess up your day...

I had a very odd dream last night, one that has left me vaguely shaken-up and ill-at-ease all day. I dreamed I had to go to a meeting with all of the team from the first floor office I work in, plus one other person who works at Kew, with whom I used to share a flat and who was at the time a very good friend - up until about two years ago when we had a huge bust-up, as a result of which he has cut me dead ever since. In the dream, I was dreading having to spend a couple of hours in his company but was trusting that we’d be civil to one another and hoping we’d be able to sit far enough apart not to have a problem. Incidentally, if we were to have to go to a meeting together, this is exactly how I would feel.

However, when I arrived at the meeting room it was to find everyone else had turned up early, including my former flat-mate, and I was the last to get there. I tried to slip in quietly but he crept round behind me and suddenly grabbed me from the back, catching me round the waist with his left hand and very firmly by the elbow with his right, and to my disbelief having thus trapped me he then leaned over my shoulder from behind and kissed me on the cheek as one might a good friend. He said – to me, but loudly enough that everyone else would hear too – “It’s okay, I’ve explained to them about everything.” I thought, what the heck has he been saying? One of my closest colleagues then said to me cheerfully “So, Imogen, are you going to apologise?” - and I woke up shaking with shock and anger.

Dreams are the brain trying to sort things out, shake them up and look at them from a different angle, right? They don’t mean directly what they show, right? I certainly hope not, in this particular case. I made very full amends, nearly two years ago, for the relatively minor fault that ended this friendship. The idea that I could be considered still to owe anyone an apology for anything about this made me so angry that I woke up outright. But in that case, always assuming I am not merely being horrendously self-deluding about the whole topic (which is always possible), what the heck was this dream telling me?

Imagine that someone you once loved and trusted appears to have told a group of people you work closely with and see every day a version of past events that makes you out to be a Bad Guy. You have always seen yourself as essentially more sinned-against than sinner with regard to this particular issue, and you believe you did everything you could to make amends. You have always felt your conscience was clear. Being confronted by a group of familiar people all convinced of the opposite is both painful and angering, and leaves you feeling helpless and manipulated.

If someone told me this dream as one they had had, and filled me in on the background, I’d suggest they tried to move laterally from the central image. I think I need to remember that – the central image is, to coin a phrase, doing my head in. Perhaps something has left me feeling vulnerable, feeling that I am about to be wrong-footed, and, too, feeling guilty when I know I’ve done nothing to merit it. I know what it’s like to feel guilty when I have merited it (= ghastly), so I know the difference. And the fact I was grabbed from behind could be significant. It’s hard to think of a more unpleasant way for someone to catch hold of you. The unanticipated kiss was upsetting, too; a friendly buss on the cheek, something one would normally welcome, something I once would have been happy to receive from this person, transformed into something that made me feel bad about myself and completely unsure of what was going on.

Yes, yes, this blogger-therapy thing is working! Of course, the dream is so obvious once I think about it; it’s all about vulnerability and feeling vulnerable. The only problem is, why?

Bizarre things, brains. Can’t live with them, can’t live without.

On which idiotic platitudinous note I’ll go home and pack for WOMAD.

Still sticky

...and not getting any better. Another boiling hot day, with a sky like enamel. Traffic roars past over the Green.

It's odd to look at Miss R's pictures of her garden in Oz and see camellias and Daphne bholua in flower, and oranges fruiting; to think of having cool air with an edge of real chill surrounding one in the morning as one steps out of the back door to check on the last of the runner beans; to think of early winter, from the perspective of what Dennis Lee called "the swelter of July".

Ookpik, Ookpik, dance with us
'Till our lives grow luminous.
Feed the headlong green, in case
We do not give it living space.
In the swelter of July
Ookpik soften earth and sky.
Ookpik, Ookpik, by your grace
Help us live in our own space.

- Dennis Lee, from "Nicholas Knock and Other People", 1974.

I adored "Nicholas Knock and other people" and must have memorised getting on for half the poems in the book. I was ten, and feeding my mind was like feeding an insatiable whale - slurp, in goes another ten tons of cultural krill, whoosh, out goes the empty briny, what's next? By the time I was fourteen I had even set the title poem to music, although as I can't actually write music it remains stuck in my head, imprisoned.

I have decided to take this idea of "do something creative every day" to heart - it has worked for me before, I hope it will work again, and even if it doesn't it will still be fun. Last night I did some writing, challenging myself in the process as I was trying to describe a hard frost, on one of the hottest nights of the year so far. Tonight I am having supper with my brother, so by the time I've seen him onto the tube and got home and watered the garden I'll have to find something fairly short and sweet, like putting up some different postcards; or there's always sewing, after all. There's always sewing.

I had a weird dream; in the dream world I had aided and abetted the murder of a former housemate, and had helped to hide both the body and the vehicle in which it had been moved. His remains had never been found, and I had never been able to forget this terrible, terrible thing I had done. I don't mean that I find that surprising - I have no doubt that I would be tortured by my conscience every living minute, in such circumstances as these. But it was a dream, thank all the gods, so it was the product of my brain processing something and putting it into a new form in order to assess and assimilate it.

So I have been trying this morning to connect this with anything - anything at all - in my waking "real world" life, that might explain why I should dream of such things. I've drawn a blank, and I just end up saying "It must be the heat, the heat is getting to my brain." The heat is getting to my brain, and my limbs, and my feet (swelling) and my temper(also swelling) and my heart (aching). It's all the heat, all the heat's fault.

On the which note, let's end with a little weird humour; I just googled "Dennis Lee" and found that as well as the Canadian poet I memorised as a child there is also a chap of the same name who is trying to sell free energy machines; he sounds like the engineering equivalent of Bernard Madoff... It's a mad mad mad world out there.