More than you needed to know

MSP dream

In the vast grounds of the Scottish National Party headquarters, a large modern building in the middle of a forest in Perthshire, a group of MSPs had gathered to unveil a statue of Mike Russell, who lost his seat at the last election. As the covers came off the statue, I saw that it was already green with verdigris, suggesting that it had been prepared long in advance of today. Had Russell planned all this, including losing his seat? Was it all part of some greater scheme of his?

Mike Russell was talking to Winnie Ewing, who retired at the last election. Bruce McFee, a new MSP who resembles Fungus the Bogeyman, crossed over to them and told them that someone hadn't come. "He's a Marxist," he said. "I just don't trust Marxists."

The green of the statue against the orange and black of the autumn trees was beautiful but I found that I felt quite sad. How much of this scene would still be here in a hundred years' time? All the people would be dead, doubtless the grounds and the forest would have been sold for development, the headquarters building would have been demolished to make way for houses and the statue would be covered in dustsheets in a basement somewhere, the person it was meant to commemorate long forgotten.

Notes for Freudian Analysis

Before going to bed, I watched Visconti's The Leopard, which is about the end of the aristocratic era in Italy. Burt Lancaster plays a Sicilian prince who spends the film being sorrowfully aware of the passing of his age and the beginning of a new one that will be dominated by crass bourgeois types. Alain Delon plays his nephew, a shallow harbinger of the new world who fights alongside Garibaldi's red shirts before becoming ever more respectable and finally ending the film as a politician.

Plotwise, there are only a few links to the dream, but the wistful acknowledgement that, in time, all glories fade is straight out of the film. I am, of course, disappointed and somewhat mystified by my subconscious's decision to find in Mike Russell some kind of parallel for Burt Lancaster, but there's not much I can do about that.

Coffin Dream

My brother, Douglas, and I were carrying my gran's coffin (her body was inside) from the top floor of a church, where all the mourners were gathered, to the ground floor, where she was going to lie in state. It was pretty hard to manoeuvre the coffin down the stairs, but, although we kept banging it off the walls, especially when it got wedged in the tight corner at the bottom (because Douglas was being rubbish at coffin carrying, of course), we didn't drop it.

When we entered the main room downstairs, Ken Loach, who my gran had married some time before she died, was waiting just inside the door, having arrived too late to attend the service upstairs. "Are her underpants okay?" he asked in a loud whisper. We said that they were fine, and carried the coffin to the altar.

Notes for Freudian Analysis

The evening before I had this dream, I had seen Ken Loach's Ae Fond Kiss. In the film, a group of removal men move a grand piano with much sweary banter and hilarious consequences. Is there a film in which a piano is moved without hilarious consequences? I suppose there would be little point.

I am a great fan of Ken Loach and spent ages trying to convince Ellen that the film wasn't shallow, over-simplified and poorly judged, like she thought. However, I suspect that she was probably right.

Last year, Douglas and I had to carry our aunt Eleanor's coffin from the church down to the graveyard as part of a bizarre Gaelic ceremony on the island of Lewis. Eleanor is the daughter of the gran in the dream. Actually, we didn't carry the coffin, but led the way by holding a cord at the front while all the men of the village took it in turns to bear the weight. When we had lowered the coffin into the grave, the minister thundered at us that we had all better change our ways or we'd end up like Eleanor. He singled out certain men (women were not allowed down to the grave) for special warnings, mostly to do with their whisky habits. It was an extremely strange day.

When my gran died, my brother and I were too young to go to the funeral. I don't think that I was particularly bothered by that, but Freud says that that's what they all say...

Three Sisters

A fragment of a long and very interesting dream that I have forgotten most of:

In the late 19th century, three upper class sisters, all aspiring actresses, were living together in a flat. They were constantly busy rehearsing scenes, practising singing and rushing off to auditions, so each did whatever part of the household chores they were able to in any spare moments. One sister, while polishing cutlery and setting the table as she cooked dinner for everyone, found that she was having some quite brilliant ideas for dialogue and plots. To make sure she didn't forget them, she quickly wrote them down on the blades of the many knives on the table. It occurred to her that some of the scraps of text were really very good indeed. Perhaps she should consider becoming a writer instead of an actress.

Notes for Freudian Analysis

Yesterday, I started to read The Ratman, which is Freud's description of a patient of his, an Austro-Hungarian army officer who has a morbid fear that someone might arrange for rats to burrow into the anuses of the woman he is in love with and his father. It's an obsessive-compulsive neurosis, apparently -- glad I don't have one. One of the first personal disclosures that the officer makes is that, when he was 14, he was devastated to discover that a new friend of his, a student who was five years older than him and who had "taken a great fancy to him and done wonders for his self esteem", actually thought that he was a fool and had only started hanging out with him because he fancied one of his sisters and wanted to get into the house. The humiliation!

That should explain the setting of the dream and perhaps why it has sisters in it. The subject of the dream is probably to do with the fact that, while reading the book yesterday on the way to work (the first day back after the summer recess), I kept thinking what a wonderful film could be made about this crazy rat guy and his psychoanalyst. I should make that film! I sat on the bus, thinking, all I need is a script, some actors, a crew, a huge budget to get all the period details right and some rats and prosthetic arses for the anus-burrowing scenes -- I'm practically in pre-production already, for God's sake! If only I wasn't on my way to work, I could really get started on this thing!

With all this information before him, I expect Freud might suggest that the sister in the dream is me and that, having just returned to my routine work, I have devised a comforting story in which someone is about to find an outlet for their creativity. But what's with the knives?

Croatia dream

I've been away from my computer for the whole of August, hence no new posts for a while. I spent part of August in Croatia and found that it took 10 days for the fact that I was on holiday to be absorbed by my subconscious. The first holiday-themed dream of the trip went like this:

Ellen and I were in a Croatian town, checking out the restaurants. A waiter who had served us before came out of a restaurant and said, "Hey, will you be here tomorrow night, Sunday? We are having very special meal." Behind him, a couple snuck out of the place without paying. They were spotted by other waiters, who chased them. While all the waiting staff were out of the restaurant, a table of seemingly respectable elderly people also decided to leave without paying. The waiter who had been talking to us ran after them and they all ran down the street, dodging in and out of restaurants and through pavement cafes and sending bystanding tourists flying.

Eventually, obviously embarrassed at having proved unable to catch the defaulting diners, they all decided to pretend that a lone Chinese man, standing reading the menu, had been the person they were chasing. They grabbed him and pinned him to the ground. He gasped and spluttered for breath as all seven or eight of them sat on top of him.

Ellen and I then headed down to the beach, but didn't go swimming because we knew that it was the day before the Nazis were going to invade Britain and we thought we'd better get some supplies in. Being knowledgeable about the history of world war 2, I was aware that the Germans only occupied Edinburgh for a year, so I thought that, if we could just keep out of trouble for that long, everything would be fine.

Notes for Freudian analysis

One of the very funny things about Croatia is that, despite it being absolutely the whitest country that I've ever been in, an awful lot of the graffiti in bus stations and so on says "niggers out". A few days before I had this dream, I saw a Chinese family who I am quite prepared to believe are the only minority ethnic people in the whole country.

We saw an Italian fascist group demonstrating outside the Slovenian embassy in Trieste, which is perhaps where the Nazi invasion part of the dream came from. Surely, I thought, if anyone, apart from a German, should be fully aware of how stupid an idea it is to be a fascist, it would be an Italian. These fascists were demonstrating either against or in favour of someone or something called Tito Boia -- it was hard to tell.

When I had the previous dream on this blog, which was set in Kosovo, the idea of going to any part of former Yugoslavia hadn't crossed my mind. However, if the extent of my powers of prophecy is the ability to foretell where I'm going to go on holiday in a couple of months, I'm not very impressed.