Dream

I dreamed I was going on holiday with some old friends and a couple of current work colleagues - somewhere in the West: Wales or Cornwall, I think, with cliffs and big surf and unforgiving rocks. We were staying in a big wooden hut complex, with high ceilings, big windows, and lots of shelves and storage racks of scientific equipment and tools.

Anyway, the most important thing was that I kept waking up with wasps in the hollow behind my (right) knee, and I kept thinking I had them in my hair (ha ha) and on the back of my neck. Oh, and the wasps transformed themselves into vampires at night. eventually, after pulling back the itchy woollen blanket on the metal sprung bed and rooting around underneath, I discovered that there was a wasps' nest under the bed, and that this was the source of the blood-sucking contagion. Sadly, I was already infected, but I was able to help the others create a vampire detector device using some bits of bamboo and some stripped copper wire that I pilfered from the shelves of supplies. Everyone else would be OK, but I was doomed to pass over into the darkness.

(Not sure if this is a dream about changing jobs or about my Messiah complex...)

Something Else...

Gabriella

Sometimes I think that the only things I really know are the things I’ve created in my own head; the ideas that have grown out of my own… ‘felt experience’ – things that are rooted in what I’ve sensed for myself. Richard [the lost, lamented partner] used to get annoyed with me and say that I lived too much inside my head. And he was right, in a way, but I came to see that way of being as a strength, not a weakness. The things that I believe in all come from inside me…they’ve grown from inside to out. Everything else – what people tell me, or what I read in books – feels somehow incomplete and unconvincing…as if it’s all surface and no substance. I can’t absorb it properly, and there’s no nutrition in it. It doesn’t do me any good, and it never truly becomes a part of me.

The disadvantage of this is that I’m somehow experiencing the world at one remove: everything that comes in gets over-processed, interrogated to see how it fits with the core truths that I have assembled internally. And anything that doesn’t fit that internal template gets twisted out of shape (out of existence), or is sceptically/suspiciously dismissed. This applies to other people’s emotions and attempts at close communication, too. So when people try and tell me something about myself, or ask me a question about my feelings (or which touches on them, however obliquely), I’m immediately defensive and prickly, intent on deflecting their focus and on moving the conversation on into a more comfortable area. And, of course, I have no way of checking whether my intuitions about what people are feeling is accurate, or checking if what I feel about them is reciprocated: there’s no way of internalising their messages properly, and no chance of me externalising what I feel. It’s like there’s a shell around me, impermeable and glossy with reflected light.

Richard hated that about me: I could see him trying to chip away at the shell, or try and sidle up to me and take me by surprise and fool me (when I’d been drinking or smoking dope, for example, when he thought he could bypass the normal channels) – but he could never get in. Those channels were the only ones that hadn’t silted up. I have to give him credit for persistence, though. God knows why he stayed with me as long as he did…it can’t have been very rewarding for him.

And so here I am.