Across the pond

In the dream I had just woken up and had decided the first task of my day was to update my contact book. I typed in a few telephone numbers I had written down in my diary into my phone. Then I  thought that it would save time  if I typed the new stuff into my computer and synched it to my phone later.  The next instant I was fully awake. No longer dreaming and with the full realisation that if I was going to type in to the computer I would have to get out of bed and go downstairs. By this time I wanted to write about dreaming.  Explaining that seamless moment between sleeping and waking. Explaining how the unconscious mind works. This was an urrgent, perhaps important task, because the scientists cannot produce this kind of truth.

This was far more important than updating my contact book. In one part of my mind I felt like jumping out of bed immediately. I had certainly had enonugh snleep  because the dawn sunshine was visible through a crack in the curtains. But I did not move an inch. Another part of my mind held me down quite as effectively as if I was strapped down in a straight jacket. This conflict provaked a number of thoughts and feelings in a few seconds. Doubts that any anecdotal evidence could have any value compared to the findings of peoplre who had spent much of their working lives studying dreams. I was setting myself an impossible task. And at a time I was too old and not well enough to accomplish it.

Just one more grandiose fantasy the shrinks would say.

Before I could even move, let alone get out of bed, I had to answer these internal critics. So here goes. This is part of the answer that came into my mind in the next second or two.

If I was in a sleep laboratory, the electrodes attached to my head, would maybe  have shown a small change in my brain wave patterns, at that instant, when I moved from dreaming, controlled by my uncscious mind, to total mental alertness. And if I was in a sleep laboratory I would only have been able to write down a small part of my dream content and my waking thoughts.

What scientisrts get in sleep laboratories is truth, but far from the whole truth, about the mind, which is a far  more complex organism than the latest giant computer.

But, although I am now out of bed, sitting at my computer, the doubts stream in again.  What I have written thus far simply confirms, what most scientists and sceptical journalists will think when they read this blog. Revealing myself as just a dreamer, avoiding the real work, which I am fully qualified to do,  political journalism, at this time, which nearly all politicians and journalists believe, is the most uncertain and important UK general election of their lifetime.

Worse than that it has taken me nearly two hours to write this not very interesting account of a rather boring dream. Two hours in which my reasoning mind has supplied many arguments against writing about dreams. Two hours in which I have been wracked by my morning smoker’s cough.

Which I should not go on about, because it further destroys my credibility. As I know from an email sent by my neighbour across the road, the latest research study, accourding to the Daily Express, demonstrates that smokers are less intelligent than non-smokers.

The voice of reason tells me that writing about dreaming is foolish. It also suggests that writing about UK politics at this time, when every news organisation in the country has teams of their best reporters, plus other distinguished commenators, filling pages of print, hours of air time, and millions of blogs.

Reason tells me I should take a rest. Only faith enables me to finish this short blog. Which means that I use religious language. But my faith is not faith in God. It is not ‘trusting your instincts’  or ”following your hunches’. Not even ‘thinking things out for yourself”.

What faith is not, is much easier to say, than what it is. Which is maybe more like what the Bible calls ‘seeing through a glass darkrly’.

Or to switch religions and take a cue from Islam, from the Edward Fitzgerald translation of Omar Khayyam, who was a great poet as well as a great astronomer and mathematician.

“The moving finger writes, and have writ, moves on.’

Trust not in God. Do not become enslaved by your mind. Let your fingers do the work and tell the story.