The Dream of Espresso and the Gorgon

The far-away things are back in my head again - the long walk up the hill to a hidden community, a dream of permanent twilight and plenty but separated from all that we know during the day. I walk alone though I know I can return at any moment, turning round and threading my way back through the maze of half-completed buildings, the follies of misguided regeneration programmes. They block off the roads as if some VIP was due but we know they just do it to annoy us. It's all conspiracy and lies, something designed to stop us getting back home. Some people have stopped by the side of the road; they have found the most beautiful backdrop and it has inspired them to play music, to turn random harmonics into something extraordinary and seemingly not of this planet. Behind them some star - not The Sun - sets while behind me facing them, another rises but the interplanetary dust turns the harsh light of all that fusion to a dusty orange glow that flattens the day and makes all time seem the same. Those light-minutes filter out all the radiation and leave us happy and safe, free of illness and depression, but stuck high above the plains where all the poison has sunk. This is the order of heaven, the benign dictatorship of paradise, run by a committee of gods, brought forth from the minds of all who share the consciousness of theology. There is no dissent - hell, purgatory, limbo or heaven; they are all the same, a filtered compression of all our images of what we want the world to be. No one stands up to be counted or to complain. There is a continuous gentle murmur, the rumbling of people thinking about things and never revealing the conclusions. The music stops, for no one wants to sing and music like this needs the human voice to be complete, not that anyone here can understand this - they just know that something is missing. There are no accidents, no one dies here but still there is pain, the pain of compromise and acceptance of differences. There is no anger or hate, and everyone exists at some median between the extremes of mood.

Gaucamole Nation

We do things differently over here don't we? It could have been acid or a gun and yet someone can still walk up to a high-ranking Government member and throw foodstuffs at him. I was amused by the way that the protester just stood around waiting to be dragged to the floor by secret-service men and when no one bothered she just walked off. With the threat of being shot for running for a train these days, it does take courage to do something like this but the way it played out gives me hope that we might not be as doomed to an Orwellian future as we think. The trouble is that the fact that there was not security might encourage the nutters of many causes to have a go with something a little more lethal than Birds finest mixed with a bit of food colouring. I hope Mandy is thinking about how lucky he actually was today.

I have another dream to report today. I suspect that the number of dreams I am remembering at the moment is because my sleep from 4am is disturbed by a vociferous blackbird who has chosen the tree in our front garden as the main lookout post for his early-morning territorial patrol. Today's dream was set in a garden but as I may have mentioned, very few dreams I have actually take place inside. Some might have furniture and the general set-up of a room indoors but there are no walls and no ceiling. There is not much detail about this one. Twice I spotted what I took to be the space shuttle streaking overhead or powering up into orbit and each time it dropped something. The first time was a small plaque which had a painting like a Russian Icon on it, of two angels or Madonnas. The second time it was strange object like a large version of the plastic things that disposable contact lenses come in but from reading the text on the side, I worked out that it was actually the cover for chocks used to keep the shuttle in place when it was the ground. From this I deduced that the cover had somehow stuck to the wheel of the shuttle and remained attached until the next mission. After this I was talking to someone who I was vaguely aware was something to do with work all the time strolling through a vegetable garden with a strange half-light in the sky.

Serious Freud Office

We start with a dream. It must have been a very short one as I was certainly awake and aware of the time before it happened. I was on a Japanese island - well I was in the air above and to the south of this Island in a way that made me aware of its location on The Earth in relation to everything else - a full-scale version of Google Earth if you like. The island itself was mostly man-made, a sort of long pier like the two arms of a letter 'L' with a sort of mini-roundabout at the join. However, at one end of the pier, there was some very low-lying land- just sand and rocks battered by the sea. On descending to the island, I found that this real land was actually more extensive than it looked, with a few forests and sun-lit glades but always within reach of the sea. At some point the vertical distance between where I was and the actual beach/rocks/smashing waves was increased to the extent I could see a church built right on the edge of the ocean being smashed by giant surfers' waves. And then of course something made me look at the clock and realise that it was time for work.

... Short break for the drive to work ...

The sun had actually risen when I got here this morning, which is the first time that has happened this year. Our office is a standard glass-covered, open-plan edifice, though this floor has some blocked-in server and equipment rooms which mean that there is a long and featureless wall facing the rising sun. This creates an interesting shadow. When people get in after me, they add to this shadow until the sun moves higher and the shadows merge with the more muted cones of light from the ceiling. I have often though of this as a version of Plato's cave which I am sure makes me eligible for some potential pseuds award. Except of course no one is actually chained to their desk here which means that the intellectual meat of the issue is nothing like Plato's cave. Physically it resembles the set-up but by not existing for any more than the few minutes while the sun is in the right position it just becomes a trigger for the real idea. I have not seen the light or anything. Well just a spark maybe.