I'm trying to type in the dark at the moment. The children are playing a game that involves having the lights off, and I'm hunched over the keyboard in the corner. I can touch type pretty fast but it's very disorientating when you can't see the keyboard at all.
I managed to shift half the newspapers out of the front door into the recycling box last Monday, but have had one child off school sick all week and there is still a two-foot high pile of papers in the hall - and a new stash of dailies growing (daily) in Bruce's cave. Sometimes newspapers invade my sleep; I dream I'm wading through newspapers like thick tangled seaweed. It's a sensation that turns up at random in my dreams - I can't always see the newspapers, but I know they are there.
Dreams - do you remember your dreams? I have very distinct memories of some of my dreams. In one, I was driving a car through dense fog; I remember the feeling of cold wetness against my skin. I closed my eyes - that seemed the only sensible thing to do - reached my arm out of the car window and felt my way along by walking my fingertips along the kerb.
Apparently, the logical bit of your brain switches off when you're dreaming. I love it when I remember my dreams. I love the way everything makes perfect sense while you're dreaming and then when you wake up you realise (if you're lucky enough to remember it for more than a moment) that it was actually completely bizarre.
A great aunt of mine was a psychologist, an early follower of Jung. Jung set great store by dreams and was deeply interested in the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious. My great aunt, M. Esther Harding, wrote a number of books, though none specifically about dreams (I think) - my parents have several of them at home - the only one that I can visualise is The I and the not I which I gather is about the conscious and subconscious. I haven't read it.
Her most famous book, it seems, is Way of all Women. I looked for it on Amazon and found a copy that you can look inside. From the first few pages, it actually looks really interesting, so I think I might see if I can read it next time I'm visiting my parents.
(The illustration with this post, by the way, is a doodle I drew when I was supposed to be working on an A level essay for Antony and Cleopatra over two decades ago. If you look carefully, you can find the words 'Antony and Cleopatra' within the doodle. My brilliant mother had kept it all these years, along with my strange guitar case picture with the 'Imagination' poem and the watercolour I did of the view from my bedroom window at 'Penn'.)
