More than you needed to know

Minutes Dream

A colleague was typing up the minutes of a sub-editors meeting. Over her shoulder, I read the sentence that she was in the middle of writing, which was:

"On Diarmid's art, Henrietta [my editor] said that he should"

"Oh no," I said, "What do they want me to draw now?"

My colleague told me to wait while she typed out the rest of the sentence, which went:

"take more time off in order to go to galleries where he will be able to take inspiration from the work of other artists."

Hooray!

Notes for Freudian analysis

I've been working an an etching of the Parliament for a while. The longer I spend on it, the more I feel that it's pretty uninspired and wish I hadn't started it or, at least, had done a little more work on the concept at the beginning. Oh, talentless fraud!

The day I had the dream, I'd watched Edvard Munch, by Peter Watkins, and had been particularly pleased with a long section in which Munch does a copper plate etching of his dead sister. The film also shows Munch going to Paris and having a great time looking at paintings in galleries (which is to say, he looks a little less consumptive than he does in the rest of the film).

Very occasionally, someone at work asks me to draw a picture for a presentation they have to give or a handout that they're preparing. I never mind doing it and it never takes very long, so I'm not quite sure why my reaction to what I assumed the sentence was going to say was quite so negative.

Darth Vader Dream

Darth Vader was leading some sort of attack on the Scottish Parliament. I saw him striding through the chaos and smoke in the ground floor foyer, directing his evil henchmen. Heroically, I ran up the back stairway to my office where I took charge of the situation, telling everyone to climb out the window and head as far north as they could, but not to take the Forth road bridge, as they'd probably be caught there.

Downstairs, Darth Vader had captured Luke Skywalker but, just as he was about to convert him to the dark side, he realised he'd have to wait because the only Sith name he could think of at the moment was Darth Luke, which didn't sound very good.

Outside, in a crowd of people who had escaped, I watched as evil soldiers (not imperial stormtroopers) overran the building, setting fire to it and throwing furniture out of the windows.

Notes for Freudian Analysis

One of the problems with keeping a public record of your dreams is that you end up publishing some quite stupid stuff.

I went to the cinema with Stephen and Alison yesterday. During the adverts, Stephen asked if I'd seen the Orange phone advert in which Darth Vader's film script is rejected. I said I had, then sat and worked out that, given that it's been showing since some time before Revenge of the Sith came out, I must have had to sit through it once or twice a week since May, which seemed far too long. By coincidence, it turned out that I didn't have to watch it again, as Orange has changed its advert at last.

The film that we were there to see was Arsne Lupin, which had a remarkable amount of explosions for a 19th century period piece. Its general silliness probably influenced the flavour of my dream.

Later on that night, Ellen and I walked past the Parliament, and I thought how strange and dead it looked in the dark. This might be the reason why it turned up in flames later on in my dream, but I'm not certain about that.

Summer Recess Work Dream

I was sitting on a bus behind Carolyn Leckie and Margaret Curran, who was the leader of the SSP (rather than a Labour minister, which she is in real life). Leckie had a copy of the Official Report and was reading a speech she'd made, checking to see if it had been reported properly. She found a part that she thought was strange. The Official Report had her saying that concessionary fares should be brought in for every user of public transport. She asked Margaret Curran if that was a reasonable interpretation of what she had said. Curran said that it probably was what she had said (ie, that she had been reported correctly) because official SSP policy was that all forms of transport, public and private, should be free at the point of use.

At this point, I leaned over and said that she must be mistaken about the policy, as that would mean that the use of cars couldn't be discouraged through taxation. Curran accepted my point and said that she would have to check the policy documents but I was annoyed at myself for not simply saying what I thought, which was that a transport policy that let people drive for free would be completely stupid.

Notes for Freudian Analysis

I had this dream near the beginning of the recess, the night after seven of my colleagues and I had managed to spend an astonishingly long hour and a half discussing -- in the interests of quality control and procedure checking or something -- the best way to report a few sentences that Carolyn Leckie had said in the chamber a month before.

Her words were: "Scrap it. Scrap the M74. Divert the money. Spend the money on public transport. Spend the money on trains. Spend the money on infrastructure. Spend the money on buses."

The meaning is perfectly clear, so the Official Report shouldn't have had any call to reword it on that ground. However, there is a parliamentary convention that members do not speak to each other but instead address every statement to the Presiding Officer, which is why they say "the member for Dunfermline West" or "the gentleman" instead of "you". The unbelievably lengthy debate in the office was to do with the life-and-death question of whether, technically, Carolyn Leckie was telling the Presiding Officer, rather than the ministers, to scrap the M74. In the real world, of course, it was absolutely clear who she was talking to but perhaps, when it was all written down and bound for all eternity within the lilac covers of the Official Report, there might be room for confusion. If so, how should the wording be changed? Perhaps "The Executive should scrap the M74 and spend the money on (etc)" or "The M74 should be scrapped and the money spent on (etc)" would be more correct.

In the highly emotional discussion, some people held passionately that there was an implied "you" that needed to be dealt with and others protested that our duty to retain the flavour of a speaker's words was more important and that, anyway, there's no such thing as an implied "you". It should reassure every voter in the land that the staff of the Scottish Parliament are prepared to go to such lengths to bring them the world-class legislature that they voted for in 1997. Personally, I was quite glad to be able to take the rest of the recess off.