Across the pond

The dolphins are silvery and glistening in the sun and engaged in a circular dance with each other. They fill me with awe and excitement, not like those rather dull grey specimens I saw in Gwnt Bay on Thursday. The dolphins are somehow connected with The Times. How do I know this for certain? It is the logic of dreams. And this is only one remembered fragment of a series of dreams last night.

In another fragment I am in a tall building in New York, about halfway up. Some workmen have removed some of the glass and are perched precariously outside doing some kind of repair work. I feel a bit shivery because of the cold air coming in. But the room is full of the chatter of the party a big commercial firm in the building is giving.

I know that all the Laurence Stern fellows have been invited to this party but the only one I recognise in the crowd is David Leigh of The Guardian. I ask him where he is living and he tells me Park Avenue West. I explain to him how New York has radicalised me. The discovery of the extremes of wealth in the United States, nowhere better illustrated than in New York, where the plush apartments on Park Avenue are a few blocks away from run-down rent-controlled tenements, where the baths are so small, that I can only sit down in them. And some don’t even have a shower.

Rationally this seems like a load of nonsense. But these are only a few remembered fragments. My growing belief is that dreams are the theatre of the mind. Every night when we dream we are writing plays, poems, novels, symphonies. Some of us are painting pictures.

And perhaps the dreaming mind recognises an affinity with other living creatures that is different in kind from the understanding of the reasoning mind. The scientists tell us that we are descended from the creatures of the watery world and that the dolphins are amongst the most intelligent of them.

But it is only in dreams that we get to dance with dolphins.