Tag: dreams

Spooky dreams

On By Laura MorganIn Books, TV and radio

You know those times when one coincidence follows another, and you suddenly get the groundless notion that the threads of your life are more closely and weirdly bound together than you thought? And then it turns into a really vivid dream, and you get reality and your dreamworld confused?

No?

It started with Primo Levi (who, by the way, is the one writer who makes me want to stop writing, because he writes so beautifully that I think I might as well give up trying). I picked up Other People’s Trades, a collection of his essays, as we were leaving for Naples last month, because you’re not allowed to read your Kindle during take-off and landing, and I thought I might as well read something Italian. When we got home I broke off and started reading the Kindle again, so I’ve been progressing through the Levi in fits and starts, and on Sunday I started to read an essay called The Language of Chemistry, which reminded me that Levi was a scientist as well as a writer – specifically, a chemist (and if you haven’t read it, you must immediately go and read The Periodic Table, which I think includes his most beautiful writing of all).

Later that day, after dinner, we watched some Breaking Bad (the beloved has seen it all before, but I am new to it and loving it), in which, as you’ll know if you’ve seen it, the main character is Walter White, another chemist. The episode we watched, the last in season two, ends – I am trying to do this without spoilers, but if you really mind, look away now – with Walter looking into the sky, followed by an aerial shot of the New Mexico desert, while something spins rapidly through the air above it. We’ve been watching for a few weeks and it was sheer coincidence that we reached that episode minutes before turning the TV over to see Felix Baumgartner spin rapidly through the air above the New Mexico desert during his freefall descent to earth from 128,100 feet, which might be the most exciting thing I have ever seen happen in real time. I almost didn’t want to watch, but in the end the thrill of seeing someone do something so brave and brilliant won out over the fear of seeing someone fall to his death, which was always a possibility.

And then, when I went to bed that night, I picked up the Primo Levi again and carried on reading, and when I went to sleep my dreams were full of tortured chemists falling to their deaths in a brightly-coloured desert, and then I woke up with a start and remembered that Primo Levi did fall to his death, in circumstances which remain unclear. And I shivered, and read myself back to sleep with Stephen King, who at least is supposed to be spooky.

Last night’s dreams were even more vivid, but I don’t think I can bring myself to tell you about them. Maybe one day, after everyone implicated is dead, but not till then.

You dreamed about the same creep I did!*

On By Laura MorganIn Films, Navel gazing1 Comment

Me and my brother and sister have a game. It’s called “In… what… waaaay” in honour of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, although it doesn’t really deserve a name of its own, because it’s just “guess the movie I’m quoting”. But we’ve seen all of the same movies, so it’s more fun to play than it would be with random strangers.

Anyway, there are some films, Ferris among them, which almost aren’t worth using any more because we all know them so well, which means that if you can come up with a line from one of those films which the other two don’t immediately recognise, you are definitely the winner of that round.

In a separate development, I am really enjoying my new job. Really enjoying it. Put those two facts together and maybe it’s not that strange that last night I dreamed that my actual job was coming up with movie quotes for people to guess. As the alarm went off at seven o’clock this morning, I was gleefully reciting the line “that’s the bedroom…but nothing ever happened in there”* and waiting to see who’d guess it first. I can’t remember who was doing the guessing, but – as when we play it for real – it was all very jolly and uncompetitive.

I’m pleased that my brain chose to associate my new job with playing “In… what… waaaay”. I think it bodes well.

Some of my dreams are interesting and many are definitively not. The most interesting dream I’ve ever had, which I can still conjure up perfectly vividly even though I dreamed it in 1992, is a story for another day. The second-most interesting dream was a nightmare which still sends shivers down my spine, although it’s one of those nightmares which don’t sound scary at all when you describe them. I’ve never been able to interpret either of them in a way that made sense, so perhaps I will write about them here one day and see if someone else can do better.

In general, though, I’m not a very cryptic dreamer: most of what I dream about is a perfectly transparent reference to whatever I’ve mostly been thinking about that day. Here are three examples:

1. When I’d been at the Guardian about eighteen months, I was asked to take on a much more technical job than I’d ever done before. It was still project management, but it involved knowing about servers and back-end systems and other things I didn’t really understand. These were projects on which the website would literally stand or fall. In the days before I started, I dreamed that we were all riding in a giant bus, which was being driven jointly by our Chief Technical Officer and our Systems Administrator.  At a crucial moment,  they asked me to come forward and drive the bus. As I took over the steering wheel, I swerved it violently to one side and crashed the bus into the verge.

2. A couple of years later, I was helping  to run a survey of people’s favourite films by collecting lots of data and sending it to a friend, who was mashing it up and turning it into something interesting. Midway through, I dreamed that the friend in question was a private detective (in the dream he was also Sherlock Holmes, and I was Watson) and he’d called me into his office to help with an assignment. “I need you to gather some information”, he said. “I need you to go out and find every example you can of the anthromorphisation of letterboxes in nineteenth-century English literature.”

(I guess my subconscious added a flourish of its own there.)

3. Shortly after the beloved and I became engaged, I dreamed that we were in a large room full of people we knew, eating a meal. Our table was at one end of the room and we were facing out towards everybody else. Our chairs were eight or nine feet tall, and we’d had to climb ladders to reach them. As the meal ended I looked down and realised that the ladders had been removed, and we had to stay in the chairs, with everybody looking at us.

No need for Freud’s help in interpreting any of those, I don’t think.

(On the other hand, the period in my life when I had the liveliest and most colourful dreams was while I was reading On The Interpretation Of Dreams before I went to sleep every night, which is an activity I strongly recommend if you can’t afford hallucinogens.)

*They’re both easy, but please go ahead and guess the source of each quote in the comments. It will make me very happy.