A Melancholic Choleric

The Manics album is just too good - there is more emotion and meaning in all those meaningless words than any angsty issues band - I hope you know who I mean here. Singing about not wanting to be "like other people are" is rather like claiming that you are mad or eccentric; your own mental status is not for you to determine is it? Anyway, it seems like poems set to music rather than proper defined songs which in this case is exactly right.

In the spirit of such strangeness I dreamt of myself last night, with my hair rapidly turning bright white and wiry and with a straggly beard, not exactly growing old but beginning to look much more like my dad. I have always wondered why we accept such strangeness in dreams. All these things which reflect exactly how the real word is not do not make us flinch - we can be perfectly happy in the midst of events which would have us needing months of therapy should they ever happen to us in real life. I suppose certain theories on dreams would suggest that this is purely to help us examine our minor fears using obvious triggers. Dreaming of a worry about a few grey hairs wouldn't make us remember it in our waking life but a rapid ageing process gives us a jolt which carries over into consciousness.

It is sad to see that Colin Bean, who played Private Sponge in Dad's Army, has died. Boiled sweet to anyone who correctly lists all the members of the cast who are still alive.

Scintillaphobes Unite

Accidere ex una scintilla incendia passim

The sky here at the moment is exactly like that at the start of The Snowman, which has already been watched in our house this season. Christmas doesn't really start until we have broken out The Muppet Christmas Carol. Light the Lamp not the rat!

I'm not sure that this story of a machine to map dreams is anything like it suggests. It would of course be nice to have a machine which would document dreams in a manner more efficient than the scribbled notebooks I have and it is a long time since I was consistent in my notes; I would say that I only record about 1 in 20 dreams. This is disappointing as I have many memories of interesting things. What I can do is list the various recurring themes.

- Regression of time back to when I was doing the exams for my degree.

This is always uncomfortable but actually makes me feel happier on waking when it turns out to be just a dream. Possibly links every worry with the stress of exams. Actually I don't think I worry about this when I am dreaming, just for the few seconds when I wake up and before I realise that it is just a dream. I do recall one specific dream set in some dome-like lecture science lab, all wood panelling and models of complicated molecules. Didn't have walls (see below) but I could still tell it was round and dome-like.

- Being in buildings without walls or ceilings I've not actually seen Dogville but I know that it is performed on a minimalist set with just door frames. I did get the impression that there was actually some special effect in my dreams suggesting the walls, which chimes with my dreams. I rarely get an impression of being enclosed in buildings when I am dreaming, though I do sometimes have to squeeze through small gaps which I always take as a worry about putting on weight.

- Giles annuals. As you might know, I have a copy of every Giles Annual (though of course some of them are just facsimiles). It was a major milestone to get the last one to have one for each of 50 years. My dreams about them involve finding out that there are other, special annuals out there which I have to acquire to maintain my collection. These specials are very poor when compared to the true 50 - they have random collections of characters and no punchlines. I imagine that this is something to do with completing things. It may be about letting simple things go in life or it may be about my habit of dumping books in the middle of reading them.

- Being let loose in some sort of shop where I am looking for a decent model kit to build. I never actually buy anything which may be related to the above feeling on non-completion.

- Trying to find a library in some weirdly-shaped shopping area. Never actually read anything.

- A general, dream-like version of Malvern Link where I grew up. All of the shops in the various other themes are often to be found here but they change location and design with each dream. This has another link to the Giles Annuals in that the Giles Family (Grandma etc) live in a different house for each cartoon they feature in. They would change class and wealth as well.

I am sure there are many more hangups in there (or should I say here) but I cannot tease out any themes at the moment.

Degrees of Separation.

The day is like syrup, sweet and heavy, with the birds suspended from the thick air. I cannot tell the time – the lights are on but it could just be the afternoon of a thick storm. This is a high street, seemingly busy with activity and commerce but empty of people. I have been searching for someone to whom I am attracted but I have forgotten her phone number - it comes to me in segments which slip away like egg white when I try to pin it down so I have had to actually come out to find her. Now the timing of all this activity is not quite clear in my head. It is possible that what I am describing after now actually happened before I left the house for the search. I do know that my house is a strange balcony around a central room. One part has a tiny arched door which I have to squeeze through sideways and as usual my house has no roof and probably no walls.

The street has a normal mix of shops and businesses, but they all seem vaguely foreign to me, though at the same time I remember them from some time ago. Maybe they are from an alternative world that I have already made up once in my head. I reach the door of the place that I know this woman to be. It is some sort of performance place, with a huge arched front, pierced by dark, stained glass windows, possibly in the form of writing which I cannot remember or might not understand. I knock at the main door which has a large clear glass window and the person I am search for appears behind it and too one side as if she has walked through the front wall to my left from a magic room which exists in a different space to the pavement outside. She is pleased to see me contrary to my normal quests in these circumstances. All things are finished and resolved.

But yet there are events which happen after now, in this place which I remember from before the time I first got there, quantum resolutions perhaps, the door opening and ending the story, is just the collapse of some equation. My new friend and her family perform a stage show for me. It involved real actors and what are obviously robots performing in the pit of the theatre round which the audience sit, though the actors come and go through the audience as if they are not there, walking like ghosts into the scenes. The robots amongst them are marked with a hazy white label that hovers around them – just the writing, no surface onto which it is written, like a computer game to indicate that they are indeed mechanical. I am not aware of a plot or even of dialogue though there is music from films and the whole thing appears to be a choreographed battle, with the ugly robots being easily circled by the beautiful real people who do nothing more than this. There is no contact, just this weird ballet without meaning but it is beautiful and absorbing and makes me love the real people.

And then it hits me that everyone in this act is a robot of some sort. The woman I have come to see, although she seems happy that I am here, does not seem entirely simpatico as she did to my blind eyes earlier. No one tells me this – it just becomes a fact in front of my eyes, the trashing of the brilliant idea of this quest and in its place the knowledge than any affection is the result of a program, a neural net which has been trained using saps like me. And this is the real end – the last event that happens in either my house or the theatre of robots. I am possibly part of an audience, captive or otherwise but drawn into staying here for ever by the discrepancy between the beauty of these people and the simplicity of their behaviour, the trusting affection that now seems abhorrent. There has been no love in this transaction. But maybe some understanding of the world and how we fit into it has made itself clear.

Some dreams like this leave me happy despite the sadness they carry deep down and some with overtly violent or miserable natures, leave me happy simply because I wake up happy that they are over. The description of limbo, which by God will not exist for long in any of my universes, has us all in a quiet, calm place with infinite sadness. I am sure that this creation is designed to justify the glorification of ancient infidels on whose knowledge, the wonders of the renaissance were based. Here is Virgil, the guide, and all those philosophers who were born before the possibility of enlightenment. And here is the link with my dream; if God is all things at all times, can he not lift these clever, laudable people from their heathen times and bring them into the light? Time is only for us humans and outside that we have no understanding.

Venerate Plato and Aristotle.

Random Walk This Way

Well I suppose I have to review Goodbye to all That now don't I? Well as I said above, it is a lot less literary than I was expecting - anecdotal and down-to-earth rather than what you might expect from a poet but then again I suppose that even if you are a poet, living in the mud of the trenches might colour any prose with mundanity no matter how much good whiskey, silver cutlery and tasteful lighting you have in your dugouts. My overriding view of the trenches from the section I have already read is one of soft-lights, an ambience almost like those scenes of Victorians shopping you get on the top of chocolate tins. I know that this is wrong but not even the description of the poor sap who blew his face off with his own grenade gave me anything other than a slight jolt. I suppose that this is the horror – the acceptance of that horror as normal – the slow descent into trauma-causing disaster with out any real awareness that things are as bad as they can get.

Material World http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/thematerialworld.shtml yesterday was about Locusts. This together with the new Powergen advert for greener electricity involving millions of helicoptering sycamore seeds gave me a terrible dream of being in a world with thousands of locusts filling every available space and me being unable to avoid stepping on them. Actually there is a third influence for this which is Robert Graves description of stepping on mice and frogs that had fallen in the trenches. All of this dream happened in ten minutes sleep between seeing that it was nearly time to get up and then realising that I was late. I can still hear the crunch of the insects under my feet.

I have always wondered why we do not try and turn all the protein created in a swarm of locusts into something edible? Maybe the problem in locust-affected areas is that eating insects is against some local religious code. Locusts look like prawns anyway. I used to look after the locusts ate school. I had to go and gather grass for them at lunchtime and drop it into the cage through the hole at the top. There was always the thrill that one of them would escape. We made our own fun at that school.

Diary of a Somebody

It was nice to see (a clean-shaven) Hugh “Pooter” Bonneville reading the bedtime story on CBeebies yesterday. The BBC must have something their actor’s contract which says that the Children’s TV producers can bags any actor they like as they come and go about the BBC studios, dress them up in causal clothes and sit them down to read the stories. It might also be a sly way of putting the programmes that the actors are in later in the minds of any adult minders who might happen to watch as well. Mr Bonneville was indeed on BBC 4 later in the last episode of Diary of a Nobody which had a satisfying and poignant ending – much more poignant than I remember from reading the book. The main problem with watching it is that Mr Pooter looks uncannily like my dad though that might just be the beard.

I have to say that I was worried that I wouldn’t get into the central story of Cloud Atlas after reading that some people skimmed it because of the strong dialect form but it’s actually quite intriguing – I was fearing it would be like A Clockwork Orange but it’s quite easy to follow most of it. It also has a strong ability to lead you forward to wanting the next bit. As this story is the central one in has no split – at least one story would have to be left unsplit in order for the book to finish – but I wonder if there is a point somewhere in the middle where the split would go. I already know the link between this and the previous story so I have an idea where the split could be.

There were fewer correspondences between Cloud Atlas and yesterday’s tranche of I am a Strange Loop. I think I dreamed something connected with it the other day though – it was very vivid at the time though of course without writing the details down at the time it is now just a fuzzy memory. There was a book of poetry in it somewhere – an icon of something – I could see the cover in great details though I didn’t get to see any of the actual words. This was probably triggered by the poetry I was reading at the Viking demonstration at the weekend. I did also think of something which I thought really quite staggeringly interesting while I was getting the boy to sleep yesterday – something regarding structure of systems – but the detail of that has vanished as well.