Across the pond

Although it’s Saturday, 8 AM, the sun is already blazing over Lyme Bay promising another bright sunny day. Little Dulcie is already awake running around the house with a smile on her face looking forward to another to the beach. I should be in a good mood.

In fact, I am working myself up from irritation to something that feels more like rage and fury.

It’s all because I woke up with three vivid dream fragments still in my memory. I am ‘sure’ that they are part of a long and important story, although they don’t seem to be connected. And a sceptic would immediately point out that they could be extracts from three entirely different stories.

My rising anger is partly to do with being a journalist. In our trade we are used to telling truthful stories, even thouh we know that we have found out only a few of the important facts, and some of those ‘facts’ may be wrong because we cannot be sure whether people who have talked us were not lying.  But these three dream fragments are no way enonugh to make a coherent story.

Worse than that they keep slipping away. It is as if I, and perhaps all human beings, are programmed to forget their dreams. Or as if God had sent one of the arch-angels to whhisper in my ear during the night, but he does not want me to know that the ideas in my head come from Him. He is playing games with. He knows I am just a puppet, pulled this way and that by his strings, but he wants me to go on believing in the illusiion of free will.

Since I have now writtenn down the three fragments in my notebook, I am now calm enough to write this. And I also know from the recent BBC Horizon programme I blogged about that when people are woken immediately after dreaming they frequently report long and interesting complete stories.

So it may be worth examining the fragments.

Fragment 1. My wife has told me that a Mr Roll has telephoned from City University. I don’t know such a man but in the dream I see an immediate visual image of an election poster for Barry Roll, who apparently is a Liberal Democrat MP. And in the dream Mr Roll calls again and says that he is a consultant for City and that they have asked him to find someone to run a new course. No selection panel. And on the phone he implies that he has already made up his mind and the interview he is offering me will be a formality.

Fragment 2. I am struggling to get round a big chasm on a cliff. It is not exactly like the landslip a hundred yards from my house in Dorset. But it is the same chasm that I have dreamt of before, though  the chasm is now bigger and I have to climb a high fence as well. I manage that, but then I am faced with a long walk to get in to the university and along many corridors. And in bare feet which I am acutely embarrassed about.

Fragment 3. I am standing with my youngest daughter on the doorstep of a house something like that owned by my eldest daughter off the Holloway Road. There are three tall rough types, one of whom is lifting the latch to the gate. Their stance is threatening. The leader asks me where I went to school in a tone which makes me feel that if I give the wrong answer me and my daughter will get beaten up.

Still feeling frustrated. I think these fragments were part of a long story my unconscious mind wrote, perhaps better than any story i have written when awake. But I have no way of filling in the gaps.

What I do notice, however, is the very powerful feelings in involved. Rosy wish fulfillment in the first fragment. Pain, struggle, fear and embarrassment in the second two. Which reminds me of the research done by one of the scientists on the Horizon programme.

Which I may check out to provide material for another blog on the thinking we do in the night.