More than you needed to know

The Shieling that Time Forgot

This scene came at the very end of a long dream that involved me and people I know being chased from our houses in the Highlands. It's the only part that I can remember clearly.

Crouching in what appeared to be a tall but narrow chicken coop that I kept outside the back door of my house, I examined two tiny dinosaurs -- compsognathi -- that I owned. They were quite beautiful, but the more I looked at them, the more they looked like animatronic models. A disembodied voice from somewhere above me asked if they might eat each other, and I said, "Well, they're about the size of lizards and lizards will eat other lizards if they're hungry enough, so I suppose so." Then, the disembodied voice said, "Didn't you used to have more of them?" True enough, I thought. Where had they gone? I scrabbled through the straw on the floor and found one of them, which scurried into a corner. I was somehow aware that the rest , which must have escaped, had subsequently been eaten.

Notes for Freudian Interpretation

I'm reading John Prebble's "The Highland Clearances", which has a lot of information about the meagre livestock that the Highlanders lived off but contains virtually nothing about dinosaurs.

Attack of the Kids

Two children, one dressed as Darth Vader, one dressed as a stormtrooper, were having a full-on, no-holds-barred fight, tumbling over each other and crashing into furniture. The stormtrooper was winning. I stood by, laughing helplessly. I laughed so much that I woke Ellen up by laughing out loud in my sleep. After that, I couldn't get back to sleep because every time I closed my eyes, I thought of those little fighting kids and started laughing again (I was careful to laugh very quietly, however).

I don't know why that seemed so funny; I merely note that, since I started this blog, the only other dream in which I've laughed like that also involved a costumed child coming to harm (the Theatre of Earthly Delights one, below).

The Eye of the Tapir

I was in an expensive-looking Edinburgh pub, talking to an American Senator called Paul Wellstone. Some friends of mine who were there were talking about dogs and, in an effort to bring the group together, I told them about my ex-girlfriend, Kirsten, who got herself a pet tapir because she was allergic to dogs. My gambit worked, as the mention of tapirs caused Stephen Magee to recollect a fascinating fact about them. Did you know that tapirs have five eyes? Apparently, in addition to their normal pair, they have a vestigial pair just underneath their cheekbones as well as something called a "fire eye", which is in a different position on different tapirs' faces.

I'd heard that they had four eyes, but I wasn't at all sure about this fire eye business. When I said that I wished that I could look it up on the net, someone said that it was possible to phone a service that was run by a man who sat in front of a search engine all day checking facts for people who weren't near their own computers.

To use the service, I had to go to a booth at the back of the pub, where a headphone-wearing dispatch officer would take down the details of the information I wanted to find out about. As I explained to him about the tapir's fire eye, I was overheard by people sitting at nearby tables who started laughing, but I didn't seem to mind.

Notes for Freudian Analysis

Senator Wellstone, one of the few Democrats to vote against invading Iraq in October 2002, died in a plane crash not long after doing so. I came across his name in a satirical cartoon on the internet yesterday. I notice that a lot of my dreams feature me talking to B-list politicians, which probably doesn't say good things about me.

Stephen is a store of interesting animal facts, many of which sound as if they might be made up, but are not. However, he has often revealed his ignorance of capybaras, which, like tapirs, are strange South American mammals.

Although I said tapir, the animal that I had in mind was an armadillo.

Kirsten got a rabbit, not an armadillo.

Theatre of Earthly Delights

I was in the back row of a smallish theatre. The set was a minimalist, black scaffolding arrangement with a few rows of benches in tiers up one side, on which sat a dozen or so actors dressed in costumes that made them look like devils from Hieronymus Bosch's paintings - half-rabbit/half-fish things, armoured beetles with pitchforks and so on. On the stage in front of them, an actor whom I somehow knew was playing an alchemist delivered a long speech castigating the demons for their wickedness. He was dressed as the fat little creature who is roasting a man on a spit in the Last Judgment: blue skin, white hair, giant feet and a great pot belly.

Two men were sitting near me, chatting about what they had been doing that day. I couldn't believe that they could be so rude and stupid and it only took me a little while to work up the courage to ask them to stop, which they did.

On stage, a stream of tiny demons -- child actors in amazing costumes -- were somehow materialising. I stood up to see if I could work out how the effect was being achieved and saw, behind some sort of drape, that there was a trap door through which an adult was pulling the children before tossing them across the stage, where another adult caught them. As I watched, a tiny demon was pulled out of the trapdoor. It looked like an egg with a pointy hat on and wings and a tail and was so small that I supposed the child couldn't be more than two years old. The first adult threw the toddler into the air, but the catcher missed it, and it bounced helplessly across the stage. This struck me as just about the funniest thing I had ever seen and I howled with laughter.

Notes for Freudian Analysis

I spent the first half of this month reading a book on Bosch. It took so long to read because I had to spend ages looking at all the interesting things in the paintings. The first part of the book focused on Bosch's criticism of human folly but, overall, it made the case that the obscure imagery in his work is identifiable as mainstream alchemical symbolism of the time. According to the book, Bosch was as rigorous a scientific theorist as Leonardo, his contemporary, except the branch of science that was current in northern Europe at the time -- alchemy -- turned out to be insane nonsense. I'd guess that my dream is supplying me with an image that summarises those two elements. By having an alchemist castigate some foolishly wicked characters, the dream illustrates the first element that I took from the book (human folly) and then, by showing the alchemist to be similar to the demonic figures and therefore just as guilty of folly, it deals with the second (that Bosch was a sort of scientist, but followed wholly mistaken theories). However, why my dream would want to do that is beyond me.

Towards the end of January, I saw all three Slab Boys plays. John Byrne, who wrote them, is also a painter. Each night, I wished that they'd got him to design the sets as I kept thinking that if they were more painterly and exaggerated, they'd fit better with the stylised dialogue than the straightforwardly representational ones that they had chosen did.

Waiting to get the train back from Glasgow last night, I saw the woman who played Lucille in the Slab Boys.

I would consider it extremely bad form to laugh uproariously at an unfortunate mistake on the stage, but it seemed quite alright for me to do so in the dream. Is there some sort of link between Bosch criticising foolish people while adhering to foolish theories and me telling the two men near me to be quiet just before being equally rude myself? Am I taking this Freudian thing too far?

Hutton Dreams

I didn't post anything last week as Alan slapped a statutory repair notice on the site and took away the keys until he'd sent the fumigators in. I believe it had something to do with spam. Conveniently enough, every dream that I can remember since then was inspired by the same subject so it makes sense to group them together.

Last Wednesday, having watched Lord Hutton's statement during lunch with my colleague, Mark Taplin -- both of us fuming about what nonsense the report was -- I dreamed that Mark and I were trying to go for pizza in a large mall but couldn't find the way in. Instead, we came across a hideously crass concrete monument to those who died in the attack on the World Trade Center. It was a massive sculpture of the two towers falling over like dominoes while crude figures fell out of them. All around the base were large blue busts of George W Bush's stupid face that looked as if they'd come from a first year art class.

The next day, after Greg Dyke resigned, I irresponsibly started a blazing argument in the middle of the office with another colleague who kept saying that anyone who now thought that Tony Blair had lied about Iraq was clearly just a malcontent. That night, I dreamed that everyone in the Parliament got an e-mail telling them to go to a meeting room in Waverley station. When we had all gathered, the union reps told us that all of our management had been sacked and that we had to apply for their jobs.

Last night, almost a week after the report was published, I dreamed that I was walking quickly down a corridor with Alastair Campbell, who appeared to be my boss. He told me that I had to go to a nearby hospital to play drums in a jazz quartet as Duke Ellington couldn't make it. In passing, he said that the hospital was built to such a high standard that, if it took a direct hit, even a cat that had already lost five of its lives would be saved. It occurred to me that that was just another way of saying that it wouldn't withstand a blast that was strong enough to take away five of a cat's lives, but I didn't say anything.

I had a really great time with the jazz band and seemed to take to drumming pretty well. What luck! After the third song that we played -- an up-tempo version of something from the score for Anatomy of a Murder -- I called Duke Ellington to tell him how much we were enjoying playing his music. He'd been listening on the radio, however, and thought that we were making a terrible job of it. My drumming was awful, apparently: too heavy handed.

Nevertheless, we went ahead and played the final song, after which I tried to call Alastair Campbell to let him know we were finished. The operator of the hospital telephone, through whom all external calls had to go, had never heard of Campbell and I had to explain who he was. "What he does in London, I do in Edinburgh", I said, although I knew that that wasn't true.

The only note for Freudian analysis that I will add is that Anatomy of a Murder is a courtroom drama in which a lawyer successfully defends a man who certainly killed someone and that the death involved took place in the woods.