On Waking Up

I woke up with a stinking headache. That was very unusual.

It was pitch black. There was no electricity. Where was the bedside torch? What happened to my emergency lighting? I became quite disorientated. What was happening?

Eventually, after what seemed like an age, I woke up - properly.

The first 'waking up' was a dream (headache included). However, I then lay awake for ages before eventually getting up around 0630. I could not stop thinking about the millions of people in the world at the moment for whom such an event can be commonplace (not always in the pitch dark but nevertheless....). I suppose I was thinking particularly at the moment of Gaza and Ukraine although they are just the principle ones in the British news. 

However it's not 'just' being disoriented. What about millions of people who don't just get up and go. For example many people (including me) have some degree of 'external plumbing' or prosthetic limbs or are on a breathing or sleep aid of some sort. For many many people getting out of bed is not a straightforward matter at the best of times. 

And then there's the millions who don't even have a bed.

Since the Iraq war was brought to us live on television, we are now at the stage where we see all these things on television in our own homes and we take them for granted. We do nothing because they are happening 'somewhere else' to 'someone else'. 

For the time being......

PS: My next post will be cheerful....promise!

Dreams

I'm not a big dreamer and if I do dream I rarely recall them.

Last night was a complete departure.

I woke in the early hours because the preparations for a huge family party were not going to plan. Given that in my lifetime I have never been to a 'huge' family party this seemed rather strange. I woke up. Then returned Lethewards once more. 

The next thing I knew was that the huge family party had been planned and was in full swing. I was a bystander. 

This repeated itself with different details and subplots several more times.

Eventually everything got too much for me and a row ensued over someone trying to tell me that a huge rice dish had been prepared two weeks ago to let the flavours meld. As everyone knows rice can be one of the least safe dishes to keep hanging around for two days never mind two weeks.

I lost the plot and woke up for the umpteenth, and final, time and despite not yet being 0630 I got up and made coffee and started this whilst I could still recall any of it.

Does anyone have frequent or remembered dreams? 

A Son, A Death and A Dream.

I dream a great deal and have blogged about dreaming in general before. 

I slept very deeply and for a long time last night. Just before I woke I had an extremely strange dream.  I usually forget the contents of even my weirdest dreams just after I have wakened. Today it lingered - all day.

I was in a very large house with my New Zealand family. My two sons were there as well. When Andy (the elder son) appeared he was immensely tall (which he wasn't in real life being just under 6'). However all the members of my father's family including his sister were over 6'6".  The exception was my father who was 'tiny' at 5'10½".  The height of my father's family had been a subject of discussion yesterday so I suppose there may have been a link in my mind there. 

I've been thinking about Andy most of the day today for an entirely different reason. Had he lived, he would have been 48 today. In the past I have never speculated on what he might have achieved. He was just completing a doctorate (in computer science) when he died and already had a very well paid job and a flat and life in London. Today my mind wandered into the realms of 'what if'. Not in a melancholy way just a wistful one.

This evening sitting in the living room listening to a concert and sort of watching it on the big screen and drawing an 'envelope picture' it suddenly struck me: the significance of dreaming about Andy this morning of all mornings.

The mind is a very strange place. Well mine is anyway.

Dreams By Any Other Name

Yesterday I wrote about sleep. I have posted several times on the subject of dreams. It is not the lack of sleep that concerns me these days nor the number of times I actually get up during a night. What disturbs me most is the variety and number of dreams I have almost every night. If one gets up during the night the, as I understand it,  pre-waking time is often REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep. I 'suffer' from that constantly.

The first post I wrote on the subject was on 2 September 2008 entitled

Dreams and Things

For some time now I have been having vivid and prolonged dreams. Unfortunately most of them are not particularly pleasant. I have got to the stage where I classify them as dreams (ok, perhaps even pleasant but I'd rather just sleep), night ponies (I'd rather have had a dream and, in any case I don't usually remember them), night mares (not very pleasant at all but usually forgotten within a day or so) and, worst of all, night stallions (which cause me to wake in a fearful sweat, which often remain with me for weeks and which come back again and again both when I'm asleep and awake).

I'm up early this morning because of a most unpleasant dream. I slept very well indeed and was, I thought, awake listening to the cockerel as the dawn was breaking - the bedroom windows were wide open. All of a sudden I was in Stornoway at the harbour and a lady I was talking to fell into the harbour and was trapped under the water just out of my reach and still blowing bubbles. I can still see her face. It was one of the most realistic dreams I've ever had and all the more horrible because I was convinced that I was awake. Every time I thought of sleep I could see her face again so I got up.

Somewhere out there there must be an explanation or a reason or even a cure. Has anyone any ideas?

Things haven't changed much apart from the numbers of dreams which have increased substantially. I wish that they hadn't.

Thankful Thursday: Dreams....Again

I've blogged quite a few times on the subject of dreams.  I've 'suffered' from the problem for as many years as I can remember although sometimes I seem to go for periods without any.  I  know that I posted in 2008 that I had got to the stage of classifying my night escapades as dreams (ok, perhaps even pleasant but I'd rather just sleep), night ponies (I'd rather have had a dream and, in any case I don't usually remember them), night mares (not very pleasant at all but usually forgotten within a day or so) and, worst of all, night stallions (which cause me to wake in a fearful sweat, which often remain with me for weeks and which come back again and again both when I'm asleep and awake).

Anyway I've been having a lot of dreams and mild night ponies recently and I woke up this morning to one bordering on being a night mare and the first thing I said to myself was just how thankful I was that it wasn't a full-blown nightmare.  Then I realised that it was Thursday and my Thankful Thursday post was already written for me.

I'm very thankful for a relatively 'quiet' period in my dreaming life.

It's All Frances's Fault

Well given that we live in a blame culture nowadays Frances is as good a person to blame as anyone.  It was, after all, she who posted on dreams and things happening with horses.  

I woke in the middle of last night whilst being chased by horses.  

As if that wasn't bad enough I had to get up at 0430 to see off David and Molly who were getting the early ferry from Tarbert and I woke in a state of considerable confusion given that my bed was in a glass sided pyramid occupied by a cobbler on the top of a turret of a stately home. 

Now at 2320 I've been up for nearly 19 hours and feel remarkably fresh and not tired at all.  Bizarre.

Have you ever noticed that Shakespeare never used 'ing' in the present tense of words?  I wonder when it came into general use and how it developed.

I was communicating with Wendy in Napier today.  It was hot there.  It was 5℃ here.  It's nearly winter there.  It's nearly summer here.  As the newscaster said this evening "Just 40 days before the nights start drawing in again".  With this sort of view from my kitchen window can you blame him for being rather negative.

Night night.  

Feed Your Enemies' Children!

The wind and rain are beating ceaselessly and noisily on my (double-glazed) windows.  There is half an hour to go until midnight.   I'm sitting in bed.  I was out this evening for dinner. 

Thus did I start a post last night.  And that was as far as I got.

I was going to go on and quote from Keats' Ode to a Nightingale and his reference therein to the River Lethe:

MY heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:

But I'm afraid that I fell into the river faster than I'd intended.

At 0520 this morning I woke to the rain still beating ferociously on my bedroom window and the occasional flash of lightning lighting up the room.

What triggered my thoughts on the River Lethe was the fact that I've not had any nightmares recently.  Dreams, yes.  Nightmares, no.  That's definitely a Good Thing so far as I am concerned.

This morning when I woke, though, I woke with a thought in my mind about which I had been having a mental discussion in my sleep - a really odd feeling.  The thought was 'Always feed the children of your enemies'.  How weird is that?  It was set in the situation of a civil war and it was the legitimate government who was doing the feeding of the children of the rebels.

It was a very real discussion too.  I can even recall some of the arguments.  My proposition (I was arguing for the proposition that one should always feed the children of one's enemies) was that if one fed their children then there was less chance the children would turn against one and that it was the 'right' thing to do in any case.  Children should not be made to suffer for the transgressions of their parents.  Not, I seem to recall, a view biblically supported in the injunction that the sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the children.  Nevertheless......

If anyone can make any sense of all that then 'You are a better man than I am Gunga Din'.  That's the second time I've used that quote in as many days.  Strange place this world I inhabit.  You too?

I Don’t Sleep With Men

I woke at 4.05 this morning when the chap in the next bed woke me to tell me that he thought I was going to snore.  "Was I snoring?”  “No.  But you sounded as though you might."  Eh? 

It took me a while to realise it was a dream. 

I have always been told that one of my (obviously few) good points was that I didn't snore.  Having said that "the girls" tell me when we go away to croquet tournaments that I do snore sometimes.  Ah well.  Good job I generally sleep alone these days.

The rest of my morning in bed was peppered with more nightmares.

I’m not going to bed early (ie before midnight) again if that’s what happens.

Explain This Then

I had another dream this morning.  I can recall nothing - in fact there may have been nothing - more than the following:  I was watching two insects, one of which was a brown beetle about 3" (7.5cm) long and one of which was more like a large locust of similar size, fighting.  Suddenly the beetle ran towards my bag which was on the ground near me.  As it did so it exploded leaving a pool of green goo on the floor and spattering everything including my face.  I don't like dreams like that!  I certainly don't understand them. 

I Had A Dream

OK so I am about to share an intimate moment with you but if someone out there can explain this I'll be really surprised.

I dreamed I was in bed with a lady (OK, that bit's easily explainable).  She proceeded to write out the equation for E=MC².  Then she proceeded to explain it.

And I'm supposed to be the one who's a boring old fart!

A Very Strange Night Indeed

It's all disappearing so quickly now that I am properly awake and up and about.  But I have just spent seven and a half of the strangest hours I can recall for a long time.  In fact since a year ago when I've just realised I posted on Dreams and Things.

Before it all started:  Last evening I went to Pat (Spesh Who Comments) and Dave's across the valley for dinner.  A dinner of homemade tomato and smoky (I thought there was an e in smokey but the spillchucker says not) bacon soup,  souflé topped fish pie with salmon and prawns and all sorts of other goodies topped with a cheese crust (wonderful), meringue with raspberries and strawberries and cheeses and biscuits followed by coffee.  How good was that?  Then I had a coffee.  Early on in the evening  I had two small glasses of wine (I was driving). By 9.30 I was full and sleepy with that fullness.  By 1030 I was on my way home after a lovely evening with Real Friends.

I decided that I would not spend any time in the study with Henry, Palin and Samantha but would take Samantha into the living room and wind down by watching an episode of West Wing on DVD (I'm now towards the end of Series 4 where Zoe is kidnapped.  I've seen most of it before, of course but when it was on TV). I decided to pour a very small armagnac (I'm not a great lover of spirits - I prefer wine) but it helps with a very full tum.  I never actually finished it as it happens.

When I opened my emails there was one from a friend who had just had a rather unpleasant experience and was hurting.  That upset me.  In fact various things that have happened over the last few days have upset me.

Why have I told you all that?  Well it may hold a key.  Although I think not.

Now I have never taken a recreational pharmaceutical in my life.  Given that I was a teenager in Liverpool in the 60s and went to The Cavern with The Beatles that may surprise you.  But it's true.

So just before midnight and, my earlier lethargy having left me, feeling wide awake I went to bed.  I decided to play Granados' Escenas Romanticas quietly on the bedside speakers.  The iPod was timed for 30 minutes.  I am usually asleep within 2 or 3 minutes at most.  I sleep very deeply indeed as a rule.  But not last night.  The first 30 minutes came and went.  The last of the music faded into the distant past and still I was awake.  And then I was asleep.  At 0200 I woke from a dream.  Got up for a few minutes to clear my head and went back to bed and sleep. Then I had a bizarre sequence of dreams, apparently in real time, involving a journey with Gaz to see family and which involved me buying a scooter because we couldn't get a taxi, a drunken driver on the pavement, police, stolen scooter and many more things I've forgotten already.  It went on and on (just like this posting!).  Each time I woke and went back to sleep the dream resumed.  Or did it?  Did I wake up?  And then at 0400 I was wide awake again.  This time there was no return to sleep.  I decided against getting up but put on Brahms' Fourth Symphony.  Eventually I drifted into a sort of sleep but was woken by more dreams just after 0600 and gave up bed for the night.

Life can be such a puzzle.  But now I am reassured again.  It's a grey, wet morning.  The birds have been fed and all's well with the world.

Dreams and Things

For some time now I have been having vivid and prolonged dreams. Unfortunately most of them are not particularly pleasant. I have got to the stage where I classify them as dreams (ok, perhaps even pleasant but I'd rather just sleep), night ponies (I'd rather have had a dream and, in any case I don't usually remember them), night mares (not very pleasant at all but usually forgotten within a day or so) and, worst of all, night stallions (which cause me to wake in a fearful sweat, which often remain with me for weeks and which come back again and again both when I'm asleep and awake).

I'm up early this morning because of a most unpleasant dream. I slept very well indeed and was, I thought, awake listening to the cockerel as the dawn was breaking - the bedroom windows were wide open. All of a sudden I was in Stornoway at the harbour and a lady I was talking to fell into the harbour and was trapped under the water just out of my reach and still blowing bubbles. I can still see her face. It was one of the most realistic dreams I've ever had and all the more horrible because I was convinced that I was awake. Every time I thought of sleep I could see her face again so I got up.

Somewhere out there there must be an explanation or a reason or even a cure. Has anyone any ideas?