Not waving

I’m meant to be writing a blog for work, but it’s not happening just now.

How do you say "I had a strange dream last night" without a hundred ears tuning out before you’ve even gotten to the significant bit? Nightmares, wet dreams, dreams specifically about the listener – you might entice a few more ears to stick around, but not many. I’ll listen to your dreams, in as much detail as you can provide, because I enjoy the thought processes that go into the telling, and you can sometimes even glimpse a hidden feeling that marbles the convex underbelly of its imagery. Dream imagery is certainly more stunning than any I’ve experienced tangibly.

But I had this strange dream last night (goodbye, gentle readers, until next time); it was terrible, actually. My niece and nephew were little children again, and I could see by my tracking system that they were still on the beach playing, and specifically where they were playing (in the tide, and Christopher is only a toddler), so I went to check on them. I knew before reaching the shore that my nephew wouldn’t be there, and my mind scrambled to assemble the narrative - abduction.

I spent many hours crying and shouting and looking inside horrible containers, all the while knowing that he’d never be found. At some point he stopped being Christopher and started being Hartley, and then I had to wake myself up.

Sometimes my dreams will trail their coattails through my waking life, and their details can inform things that I feel or think about. I once thought I was in love with a real person because of a dream, and I acted on it, and that’s the last time I will ever do something so foolish. If anything, now I worry that the symbolic sediment left to dry on the surface of consciousness may prove fatally prophetic, if ignored. I’ll tell Bruce to keep a more careful eye on Hartley or I’ll wait for the green man before crossing a familiar intersection, and I’ll still wish I’d kept everyone at home, wrapped in cotton wool.

On the flip side, real life issues can find monstrous architectural counterparts in dream threads that get woven into the fabric of one's psyche, so that you don’t always know if you’re awake or asleep or somewhere in between. Though life has a way of dispersing the clouds and making that distinction immediately, and sometimes even painfully, apparent.

Since I left you (I've not found a convenient coffee stop)

Recently, a friend on Facebook posted a video to my wall for a song that I used to listen to obsessively back in 2004. A pixie-like girl - who was obsessed with all things to do with Iceland, and who did data entry with me for a few months between semesters - first introduced me to Avalanches that summer, and I never looked back (to a time before Avalanches, I guess). Anyway, in contrast to the light and exotic scenarios my imagination painted around that island-beach-party noise you hear thumping away in the background, the video does something dreamlike and far more substantial:



I don’t often enjoy music videos (I quite liked Grizzly Bear’s ‘Two Weeks’ until I saw this video, for instance), but sometimes I get lucky.

Speaking of dreams (don’t worry, I’m not going to describe them), I’d like to find out why mine thematically revolve around distance lately. (Fine, I lied, but I promise I won’t bore you with superfluous detail). For instance:

-- I must return to work (in Hertfordshire) on foot from Vancouver, which becomes Regina and then turns into a steep, red-earthed logging road in Oregon.

-- I have to find my way back home (in Hertfordshire) from work (Regina) by city bus. I get off at the Cornwall Centre and then panic once I realise the enormity of my journey.

-- I have to find my way to a McDonalds across town in order to do a coffee run for work, and I have to take Hartley with me. (Town = home = central London in this scenario.)

Okay, so that last one was negligible. And fortunately, even my dream self recognised that there is a McDonalds on every corner, because I chose to invent one just up the road. Also, I stepped on a pizza that was displayed on the steps leading up to the cashier. (I thought I'd add that in because it's at least an interesting dream detail.)

So what have we learned?

1. Unexpected music videos can reveal a familiar song’s hidden depth.
2. My subconscious is anxiously preoccupied with distance and conflicting notions of home.
3. I am a cheapskate who would rather buy my colleagues shitty McDonalds coffee than spend an extra tenner at Costa.
   

Pop quiz next week, fellow dreamers.