Playtime of the subconscious

Sometime ago, I gave up trying to control my insomnia.

Like a cat, I sleep when I'm tired, and at night amuse myself doing whatever I fancy when I'm not.

Usually, I'm awake best part of the afternoon and evening, which is convenient work-wise and for socialising.

Last night, after a couple of hours sleep, I was awake until a little after 6:30 am.

I don't fret if sleep doesn't visit me, I just carry on, thumbing my nose at the Sandman, and doing whatever is it hand, plus eating if and when I'm hungry.

It is conducive of the laid-back existence which suits me down to the ground.

Last night for instance, after a 2 am breakfast, I finished painting where I had replastered part of a wall that had become damaged.

It was very satisfying; then I listened to a podcast explaining problems with the two slit light wave experiment. However, I doubt I understood it well enough to be able to tell you about it, in spite of a lifelong fascination with quantum mechanics.

So, that brings me to my second sleep, and to dream # 129

I found myself in the office of a New York lawyer, seemingly as an invisible witness.

There were three people in the room, the lawyer, a smart young man who knew his business and displayed an aura of quiet confidence.

Opposite him, seated uncomfortably together at the table were an English couple.

They were related, dressed rather shabbily in expensive, but well worn country clothes.

They possessed the kind of rhetoric that only a private education and parents with pretensions to aristocracy can endow, and seemed to float through life with an air of entitlement.

In my dream, I was not party to the beginning of this conference, but it soon became apparent that the couple were executors to the literary estate of an author who died before the worldwide success of his last novel.

The person in danger of losing this inheritance, was the authors eight-year-old daughter.

I watched entranced as the young lawyer listened patiently, before laying out his view of the situation, and the steps he would be taking on behalf of his young client.

To see this grasping, scheming couple, squirming on their chairs, gave me great pleasure. Is there such a thing as justifiable schadenfreude? Because that is what I felt as the dream dissolved.

In the 1980s, I read a book called “An Experiment with Time”, by aeronautical engineer and philosopher J. W. Dunne. It's about precognitive dreams.

I found it very interesting, but I had my doubts about its veracity.

But I decided to follow his example anyway, and started a dream journal.

After 18 months, I had a file as thick as my thumb, and one evening I sat down with my diary, and compared its entries with my dreams.

I could find absolutely no evidence of any precognition, which was a disappointment that was however expected.

And so the project was shelved until the beginning of this year, when I was given a rather lovely notebook, the cover of which glistens with the gold of Gustav Klimt's “The Kiss”.

It's latest entry is dream #129

As it is coming to the end of this year, my initial hypothesis is that my subconscious likes to play games with the latest waking input.

It seems to draw together the experiences of the day, and stitches them together, much as one could make a coat from any scraps of material that were the right size.

Or, in my case, to make things out of found objects.

I guess I'd better stop now, as I have a meeting to attend.