Dreams

I will look into dreams more, I think: I was thinking about them in the bog today while I watched the cloud-dodging light flicker on the pebbled glass. Dreams are everywhere you look in literature, in film, in TV shows. Clearly I haven't made a study or anything, yet, but what strikes me is that dreams are universal, and that they reveal things to us that we already know (but can't acknowledge openly to our waking selves), or they tell a story that contrasts or echoes the main narrative, or they make the protagonist feel weird. (I'm sure there are more functions served, but those are the only ones that spring to mind at the moment...)

Anyway. What's interesting to me is how all this must be rooted in the electrochemical activity of our brain matter, and how different we become when we are asleep (or very drunk), when the 'editor' of consciousness - and the filterer of the permissible, the acceptable and the sensible - takes a break, and all the stuff that's kept at bay during the day is allowed out to play... And, of course, if this 'conscious' self - this 'I' and 'me' - is (as I believe) merely a construct of the underlying systems, then the stuff you get in dreams is closer, possibly, to the 'true' 'I' that's embedded in all those synapses and neurons. (But ah, you might argue. the sleeping 'I' who sees all of this 'unacceptable' material is just another construct from the same source...so where does that leave you? Good question.

Books, must buy books on this. I feel another monomaniacal frenzy coming on.

Gabriella

When I woke up, the room was almost totally dark, the gauzy curtains breathing gently at the window. Something about the intense fixity of the quiet outside, and the absolute stillness of the building, told me that it was very late – the middle of the night. I still had my clothes on, and my body felt achey and bent from where I’d fallen asleep in an awkward position. My eyes were taking in the fragments of light and shade, and I could feel my ears straining to pick up sound, but I wasn’t yet fully present in the room. It felt as my brain was struggling to catch up with my body, as if they’d been separated from each other and, surprised by wakefulness, were seeking each other out in a confused haze.

After I’d undressed and pulled the thin cotton sheet up to my ears, the rest of nanny’s story started to echo in my mind, although I wasn’t really sure which parts I remembered from the actual telling, or from previous tellings, or from the additions and distortions of my own dreamwork. In the darkness, feeling overtired but not ready for sleep again, the pieces of the story danced around each other but never quite met.

“While she’d been walking by the river, the moon had been hidden behind the hill, and by the ring of trees on the hilltop. She now crossed the bridge, from the meadows over to the cultivated fields, and the moon rose above the hill. There’s soon enough moonlight to cast blue-black shadows on the silver-grey dust between the cornrows, and the hedges are inky with shadow too. The woods are black, smeared across the hillsides above the curve of the lane. Most of the village is still in the moon’s shadow, between the shoulder of the hill and the [Hanging?] Wood.