It is a documentary about homelessness, maybe. We are outside a cinema or hotel foyer looking out. There is a thick fog and a family climb out of a taxi, rather old-fashioned with big coats and unload a large number of packing cases and boxes. We hear a woman’s voice saying ‘You can’t stay here. There’s no accommodation here.” The man replies “we are a family of travelling performers. These are our props. We do mime.” The woman says, “OK, go round to the right to the stage door”. Here you can see they have an amplifer and boxes of costumes. As they are waiting and getting ready to go on, I see H and an older woman. I say “One day we will all be living together”. The older woman says, “We already are.” And then I cover my face. I am overcome with emotion.
Please can I hibernate?
What with the drama and tension at work in the university that has taken the name of the county of my birth, I lean toward 15th december (our early last day so that the uni can save money on lighting heating and security men and so that according to our vc we can all ‘spend more time with our families’) when I can float off on a haze of sleeping till almost midday, a gentle infusion of alcohol, reading the backlogs of paperbacks on Buddhism and er.. spending more time with my family.
For some reason I have started eating the packets of Japanese food that I bought on a trip to Hong Kong in October. Tonight its my NISSIN RETORT POUCH which my son has just heated up and which is disgusting and which I am about to pour down the sink.
Using negative energy for a positive outcome
I am in a large old house, more like a mansion, early victorian possibly. Its night. The front room is more like a shop. I am in there with an elderly couple. A man comes in and sprinkles some white powder into the coals glowing in the fireplace. He does this to clear the fireplace or the chimney. Then he detonates it somehow, puts a match to it and we all quickly hurry out of the room into the hallway. As we close the door we hear a large explosion inside. We wonder whether that has cleared the chimney out. As we stand in the hall which has a high ornate ceiling (it is gloomy) reaching up to the roof, debris comes down from the chimney pots which seem to be above there. Then lots and lots of other plaster and rubble starts to come down. I think the explosion was too big and we dash out of the front door into the night. I oopen the door and go out first. In the front garden there are some letters in the ground fashioned from wire saying shoe repairs or shoe laces by someone ‘United’.
In another part of the dream I am going around thinking the phrase ‘use negative energy to achieve something positive’.
the dreams you forget
Someone told me recently that its the dreams that you just can’t quite remember that are most revealing about your unconscious. Often nowadays I wake in the middle of the night with a memory of a dream, telling myself I must remember what I’ve just dreamed but by the morning it is gone – just out of reach.
another sad story
My poor university is in trouble again: see the THES. There was a mischievous leak of a letter some of us signed. Mischievous because I can’t see what good this will do anyone – either the university managers or the profs that signed it. There have been some very moving testimonies from frustrated and demoralised professors up on our email.
I paid the ultimate price for unsafe sharing
Last night in a corner of a smokey pub in Cambridge a friend and I nuzzled up our Palm Treos together and mine accepted some apparently handy apps. I glanced up nervously, feeling guilty about this liaison in a public space, expecting to be thrown out. Back home, with the night wearing on and a failed hotsync later my trusty Palm was caught in an agonizing loop of starting up and going nowhere, and my pulse was racing. It was my moment of haste in the pub and now my digital life was potentially in ruins. Where was my Unique Tax Reference and my password for my paypall account? What was my son’s telephone number? When is the next research committee meeting? I went to bed in a mood of muted mourning knowing that I had not yet plumbed the depths of the extent of my loss. The extent of my passion for gimicry, gagetry (looking to them to stave off existential boredom) and my love of furtive free things was mirrored in the voiceless horror of my confusion. The story continues….