Dream and Memory Flood

I'm in one of those funny phases at the moment, when all of the channels are open, and all of the pipes are connected, and memories and vivid dream images are able to flood through into my consciousness and my subconscious.

Last night, for example, I had two extremely vivid dreams. The first one involved me standing on a football terrace with my little brother, in a time that was a mixture of the 1980s and a future time, and a stadium that was a mixture of various London grounds and more northerly constructions but, at the same time, was absolutely Griffin Park, the home of the mighty Brentford. We seemed to spend most of our time moving around in the early evening light (my favourite time for standing in a football stadium, preferably at a pre-season game in August, with the smell of roll ups and beer in the air), trying to find a place to stand where we could get a clear view of the pitch. Secondly, I was dancing with Nigella at a school end-of-term disco, the last, slow dance. She was beautiful and warm. It was very exciting. The main component of this dream was the warmth that was passing between her and me, and that warmth carried over into my waking state, when I was semi-conscious, and seeing that imagery in my mind, with that warm feeling echoing powerfully through me, and feeling that poignant feeling you get when you want that imagined/dreamed thing to persist, to be real.

Thinking about the poignant beauty of that dream later in the day, I found myself smiling at the warmth and desirability of that dream state.

I also found some other bits and pieces of memory creeping in unbidden: the subtle, splendid mouldings of a plastic model kit that I bought in - what? - 1977? - the Airfix B-26 Marauder (a WW2 US light bomber): I remembered how I'd been excited by the excellent moulding of the wheel bay interiors, and the subtlety of the control surface mouldings - I just knew that these would all look superb once they had been painted, complementing the aesthetically pleasing curves of the aircraft structure itself. I could unwind a whole other set of associations from this, so tactile and real are the memories that are living in my fingertips and in my nostrils - but I won't bore you with them (not yet...). I guess what I'm getting at here is that the things that really hit you, and the things that make an impression and spring easily to consciousness are not necessarily the things that you would choose if you had any conscious choice about it; the grand narratives that you create for yourself are undercut by the minutiae and randomness of your actual experience, creating a gap (and tension) between the imagined self and the reality of the living physical organism with a definite timeline and set of contingencies.

What you are, and what you want to be. The essence of being alive, and human, and fallible.