On Dreams

Tue, 30 Jan 2018 09:38:03 GMT

I rarely wake up and remember my dreams. As I've gotten older I've woken up in the middle of fewer and fewer of them. This seems to be a pretty common trend. Perhaps as you get older you get better at sleeping.

When I do remember my dreams they tend to be quite interesting. I mean, they tend to have coherent plots or make interesting suggestions about things. I once designed a really nice community theatre in a dream. All I need now is a spare million pounds and a nice community. I tend not to have dreams that are a confused and random series of images. If I wake up in the middle of a dream it's like having watched an interesting television programme.

They are also interesting in as dreams they have some unusual qualities. I used to be able to have waking dreams. Sadly I seem to have lost the knack and the time for right sort of naps.

I also have episodic dreams, a series of dreams where one dream follows on from a previous dream with what appears to be a coherent plot carrying on from one episode to the next. One, the most common, involves my brothers and I travelling up a river. I've been having that one since I was a teenager. The least common is a Doctor Who series involving Canary Wharf and what I think is going to turn out to be a Dalek invasion. Yes, it is better than Moffat.

Last night I had the next installment in the third main series - The Curious Flat That I Bought. This is the least organised of the main episodic dreams. The other two, well you can't miss an episode, This one has a less linear narrative. The main linking theme is the location, the Curious Flat That I Bought. In the deam I have bought a flat. The flat is quite small and in a state of disrepair but is at the top of the building and might just have the potential to add a bedroom in the attic space. Upon exploration it turns out that the attic space is huge and made up of a series of oddly laid out rooms with unhelpful interconnections. To get to one set of rooms you have to crawl along a corridor in the eaves. Another room has a loft bed-mezzanine arrangement. This has a door, one that is about 8 feet up the wall. This leads to the kitchen. The one room which is plumbed to bathing is basically the hall from which all the other roooms connect. This space in turn has an attic, which leads to a greenhouse. You have to go up to the greenhouse and back down again to get to the best bedrooms. The greenhouse leads to a roof top terrace which I discovered last night backs on to the side of a hill and forms a small garden. I apparently have neighbours. One of them is borrowing my greenhouse.

I've been wandering round (and wondering at) this flat for about twenty years now. the main emotion is a combination of excitement at the potential, frustration that nothing seems to work as it ought and bafflement at the bizarre layout. As Ester Rantzen would say, that's life.

I don't read much in to dreams. I don't think they are secret carriers of hidden meaning but I am curious about the timing of the episodes.

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On Dreams