cheese free cheese dream

I had a series of weird dreams last night despite consuming neither cheese nor booze before bed.

I recall bits of a dream. The dream either woke me up or had me in a follow up dream in which I had woken up from the previous dream. Either way I was thinking the original dream was a bit horrible but was the bones of a good short ghost story.

The brief synopsis. And yes, it is not particularly original, and yes I used to watch Tales of the Unexpected a lot.

Man has young daughter. Daughter is probably 4years old. It's my dream so man is probably me and daughter is probably H. Daughter is actually a ghost of the recently deceased daughter. Only the father can see, hear and talk to her. She is real to him. Not a nice dream but it stopped well short of a nightmare.

So I started thinking about my ghost story.

This father is so consumed with grief, his denial so absolute, that he believes the daughter is still alive. He speaks to her, behaves as if she is still there. The only difference is that he now makes endless excuses about why she can't leave the house. His relationship with the daughter plays out in the home while the he manages - just - to keep functioning in his day-to-day life.

His wife is torn. She knows the truth but cannot bring herself to tell her husband and risk destroying him. She plays along. The couple grow old but his ghost daughter is frozen in time, always a 4 year old. It is all rather sad, but the wife has her husband - or enough of the husband he was - and he has his daughter.

Then one day, an old man, the father dies.

After the funeral the mother returns home.

She opens the door. Her 4 year daughter rushes up and hugs her. "Mummy, where have you been?"

A slightly confused look on her face she asks "where's daddy?"

Will Ferrell has kidnapped my father-in-law

A brief departure from the song-theme of this year's Juneathon blogging.

Despite the title, which I'll admit does suggest Will Ferrell has kidnapped my father-in-law, I am reasonably sure that Will Ferrell has not kidnapped my father-in-law. If my father-in-law has been kidnapped by a famous comedy actor then it is more likely to be Steve Carell who, of course, played Brick in the Anchorman Movies that starred Will Ferrell. This is probably my mistake; things can get a bit muddled in my dreams - the location of last night's kidnapping.

At the weekend I watched Foxcatcher, which stars Steve Carell and has a wrestling theme. There was, I think, some wrestling in my dream. Ferrell had me pinned down and I bit him on the leg. It might not have been wrestling, he may have simply been being a git. No idea what he was up to, despite it being my dream.

The maybe-wresting-and-biting incident may explain why Sally and I rapidly left the B&B he was running. That's right, Will Ferrell was running a B&B. Sal and I headed to collect some of our things from lockup storage but, when we got to within sight of the storage, decided not to go and open it. I'm fairly sure we were running scared from Will Ferrell who was staking out the lockup, knowing that is where we would head.

We instead found ourselves in what looked like the entrance hall to a library where a lady was calling a pharmacy on our behalf. Don't ask, I have no idea. The possibly-a-librarian was enquiring about medication for Sal's dad, my father-in-law, when a look of dread came across her face. She put the phone handset down - without hanging up - and backed away, picking up another phone to call the police and let them know that WIll Ferrell had kidnapped my father-in-law.

As this was happening a car pulled up outside. Inside the car was my brother-in-law - who shares a father-in-law with me. His brothers and his father were in the car and they looked pretty pissed-off. They were a vigilante group racing the police to find Will Ferell and rescue my father-in-law.

And then I woke up.

I'd had a pretty rotten night's sleep, awake for a couple of hours and feeling a cold take over me, before nodding off and finishing the night with that dream. I'd eaten no cheese before going to bed.

Anyway, running.

I'd woken up a little later than usual at 05:40. As I took Rowlf out for his morning walk I didn't feel as crap as I had in the middle of the night. The dog had a shorter than usual walk and I had my morning coffee. It felt a bit muggy. Back home and although I packed some running gear for a lunchtime run I thought I'd only do the morning commute today. By the time I headed to work, about an hour after leaving to walk Rowlf, the temperature had dropped and it was drizzling and grey. Pretty miserable actually. OK to run in. It was 11km by the time I got to work. I wasn't sure the cold and damp was precisely what a doctor would suggest you treat a cold with, but I'd run-off an overuse injury last week, so why not run-off a cold this week?

Just before noon I decided I was well enough to do my lunchtime loop. Glad I did, despite more drizzle. I ran past Tobes, a friend who I thought was under doctor's orderes not to run. Good to see him out and we shouted something about catching up for that beer as we went our different ways. I didn't do the full loop, but pretty close. It was 9km which brought up 20 for the day. Happy with that.

Scraped through 200km in 10 days, a few km light on what I'd hoped for but a few more than I should probably have done if I was a smarter man.

some stuff

cheese

Two things I believe to be true. If I eat cheese just before going to bed I will have odd dreams, and the memory of a dream fades quickly so if I want to remember the details I should write them down as soon as I wake up. Saturday night I had a chunk of Edam before bed and sure enough had an odd dream. There are two things I recall from this dream; one is that part of it was set in some old-London seedy area, very dim, possibly a gambling den. And the second thing I remember is writing down the details. But I wrote down the details in the tail end of the dream, so alas the rest of the detail is gone. It was a good dream though, I remember that.

no cheese

I had the cheese because I was hungry and I was hungry because I had not eaten between 13:00 Friday and 13:00 Saturday. This was a fasting day of my 5:2 "diet." I put diet in quotes because I'm not dietting per-se, just following it because it may do me some good health-wise, and hey, why not? I like the idea of fasting for 2 days and eat what you like on the other 5. I've been having two periods of 24 hours without food each week for a little over 3months (excluding the week prior to the Glow Worm Marathon. I figured it wise to feed-up prior to a 5hour run.) The Friday-Saturday fast was my first with zero calories. I am allowed 600 calories on fast days and these normally come in warm, milky, caffienated form. Last Friday-Saturday I had only water. And really, I wasn't that hungry by Saturday afternoon. One thing I have learnt from the diet (and "dry July", also in quotes) is that I have no trouble with abstinance. As long as I have a hard and fast rule I can stick to it. I think I would be shit at any other diet, and if there is beer and chocolate in the house I will drink and eat it all.

reno

The renovation moves on and last week Stuart ripped the 4.8m wide sliding doors out from our rumpus room and replaced them with boards. Our new slab was poured and we narrowly avoided disaster as Rowlf bolted down the side of the house to investigate. The scaffold has gone and the new bits look all lovely and new while the old bits stand in start contrast and leave the viewer in no doubt as to why we are giving the facade of the bunker a bit of a polish.

pics

I took over 400 pictures this weekend with 4 different cameras, 313 of which were with my old nikon D70s SLR. It is a brick of a thing compared to the point-and-shoots I've become accustomed to and also to the Micro 4/3 Olympus Pen Mini I recently bought. But the brick just encourages you to take more pictures. I think it is because it feels like a real camera, and I know it is because it has a viewfinder. Two things that give me far more pleasure than you would expect them to; framing a picture in a viewfinder and not on a screen, and changing camera lenses. Neither of these things make my pictures any better, but they make me feel better when taking them. The downside; carying an SLR does nothing for my time management.

home brew LSD

OK, not LSD but cheap red wine and not-so-cheap milk chocolate with hazelnuts. Fuck me that combo has given me some crazy dreams this week. Sunday night. First I was near a parade of shops that in my dream led to a lake I used to go fishing at as a kid. I was considering whether or not I should go diving in the lake - the water looked fairly clear - when a line of buses came driving, on the lake surface, towards me. That, I thought, would ruin the visibility so I decided against going in the water. There was other craziness that I can no longer remember.

Last night, after another shiraz and chocolate supper, I had more weird dreams. I was standing on the middle level of our garden, clearing the top level with a shovel when I uncovered what looked like a cow hoof. But no, as it turned out I uncovered was a live zebra that distracted me long enough for the dogs (my dogs) to escape from my garden into the playing field behind my dad's old house.

Go the shiraz and chocolate! It has officially taken over from Newcastle Brown Ale as my mess with your sleeping mind tipple of choice.

weird dream

A very odd dream last night.

I was in a crowd at a World Cup football match with my dad and brother. The stand in which we sat was a small, nondescript room. In the context of the dream it was a stand of a football stadium. The chairs we sat on were the horrible chairs Sal and I have in our sunroom. A desk (or similar) draw was opened (my dream, things like this can happen) and dad lifted out a pile of windowed envelopes. In each envelope was a blank crossword grid - no clues, just the black and white squares. The paper had tough edges, as if each had been ripped from something. One of the crosswords had the letters D E A and N roughly written in block capitals, in biro, in the middle of a puzzle. Three letters were in a row, one off to the side. One of the letters had been written over and over as if it had been corrected. Dad explained that mum, towards the end, got confused. That is why the word "dean" was not writtin in a straight line. The clue was something to do with a university. And that was it for my snippet of a dream.

Dad died in 2008. Mum died in 1993.

Told you it was an odd dream.

For the record. There has been an advert on tele for a programme about crossword puzzles. Apparently Bill Clinton loves them. So that explains a bit of it...

pieces of a dream

Before it fades further, the bits I remember from my dreams of two nights ago. I was trying to spray paint some graffiti - no idea where - that had a black outline and was in-filled in white. I was having a tough time and too much paint was running for my liking. In short, I was making a right mess of it. Sometime after that I was walking down some narrow stone-or-concrete steps that led to an underground passage-or-tunnel that has bare walls. The steps had no guard rail and were quite steep, the place I was walking down to quite dark.

In the tunnel, as I moved along, I found several shops, or at least shop type things, each of which was selling hard-rock-tattoo-piercing-and-similar wares. I walked past. Then, with no continuity, I was on a grassy hill with several other people who I cannot identify. I was very excited to have seen, in the air, an "invisible" aircraft. It was, of course, visible while in the air and that was how I managed to see it. But, as I explained o the people with me on the hill, it would become invisible when it used it's camera-things.

As it was my dream I was able to explain it perfectly to the people I was with and they, of course, understood. Now I have to try and explain it here. Somewhat trickier. The British military (and maybe others) have a technology that basically puts little screens and cameras all along the sides of their vehicles. The idea is that the cameras pointing, say, west will display on the eastern side of the vehicle what can be seen if you look west. Therefore, if you look at the vehicle from it's east you see the screens that are playing what you would see if the vehicle was not there. So it is kind of invisible. Well, not really...this explains it better...

I've forgotten the rest...

Addendum...there were no cars in the dream tunnel. There were cars in the pictured tunnel that I found at lunch time on Friday while looking for graffiti. So, no surprise a couple of those elements made a comeback when I slept...

snooze

There is a bed store here in Aus named Snooze. They have a television advert I wish I could embed here but, alas, I cannot find online. Why do I want you to see it? Not to encourage you to buy a bed. No, I'd love for to listen to the soothing music playing in the background. It's the Gary Jules cover of the Tears for Fears song Mad World.

And I find it kind of funny, I find it kid of sad
The dreams in which I'm dying are the best I've ever had

Nice work Snooze!

Hold on! Nice work The Foundry, the marketeers who came up with the original campaign. It is targeted mainly at women who, presumably, don't mind nodding off to Donnie Darko imagery. And they do have the ad on their website.

pieces of a dream

It's been a while since I've woken up remebering a dream but this this morning I have some snippets.

Snippet one. Rowlf in the garden surrounded by a scene of utter devastaion including a destroyed, presumably chewed, back fence. Note to the IWS fans. Rowlf has not been chewing the fence and the garden is secure and he is safe and he is doing very well thank you very much. He-he!

Snippet two. Running a trail run. Part of the run was through long grass and I could not see where my feet were falling. Part was down hill and someone bumped into me on purpose, something that really pissed me off. I had a go at the bumper, letting them know how dangerous their bumping on a trail is. I can see where some of that comes from; I ran into a guy this week while running home and before I went to bed last night I was reading about my next trail run. So it figures that would come back to haunt me in some shape or form.

Snippet three is where it starts to get a little weird. I was on the foyer of a hotel-like building where an enormously fat person was insisting that an area they were reclining in be made even larger, presumably to acocmodate their expanding girth. It was all very fancy with a lot of oppulent gold on display. I was approached by a woman wearing a lot of gold and tanned an unnatural gold. She held a small spoon that was various shades of gold. She helpfully told me that I could guage my tan by reference to the shades of gold on the spoon. Thanks for that.

And how about this. For no apparent reason, in either snippet two or three I was chatting to William H Macy.

dream a little dream

I was awake a little after 03:00 this morning, dozed but felt as if I were awake until 04:40, nodded off properly until 05:15 and then again until 06:00 when I got up. It's a pain in the arse when that happens. I toss and I turn, I try to sleep on my back and my front, I arch my back and stretch my shoulders in an attempt to find the OFF switch for my whirring brain. I pull the covers down and then up to see if a temperature change will help and I breath deeply and deliberately to see if getting a bit more O2 onboard will shut me down again. None of this worked last night so I lay there, eyes closed, observing (probably not the correct word) my brain as I tried not to use it but it went about it's nocturnal activities. For the record, this is not a common occurence; every so often, when I have a lot on my mind I'll wake in the night and think about this and that and everything and nothing...but usually I just get up, take a piss and go back to bed and straight back to sleep.

I am used to having strange disjointed dreams that I ocassionally remember, but that fade away as the day gets going. Often they manage to make sense even when linkages are utterly random. In one dream a man turned into a fish; in the context of that dream it made sense. Last night there was no morphing; there were just snippets of what has been and is on my mind. No one thing dominated and nothing persisted, things came and went and came back and went again in no particualr order. I - no, my brain, I don't think I was in control in the way I am when awake-proper - dwelt on nothing. It would consider the workload I am about to inherit as a member of my team resigns (a worry) and then jump to Australian Idol (not a worry) before skipping again to how I would phrase the blog entry for this weirdness and then on and on some more. All very strange.

In other brain news! Sal, copping another weekend of my moodiness, yesterday started searching the internet for anything that might suggest I am either clinically depressed or bipolar. She had asked if I ever awoke in the night and had difficulty getting back to sleep. No, I'd said. Deep joy thought I, at about 03:45 (guesstimate, could have been any time). For the record I scored low on the clinical depression test, failing on several sections (including siucidal thoughts.) So we're going for bipolar (we're! ha!) The question 'can you scuba dive on Prozac?' visited me in the night...and then left, probably replaced by thoughts of how to make an Irish Water Spaniel sit, stay and not chew it's owners arm, or how good it would be for England to win back-to-back World Cups. Weirdness all round.

misty water coloured

By the time I arrived at work this morning several things had happened that I thought blogworthy. Can I remember them all? Can I bollocks. But here goes.

Feeding the dog when I spotted, climbing next door's oak tree, a possum with small-possum attached to its back. Damn cute. Found myself wondering if this was the same one I'd seen some weeks earlier in the evening. That time there were two little ones in tow. Hope she's (he's? Not sure about parenting duties in possum society) not lost one. That said, it probably means one fewer possum living in our roof.

There is a small patch of blood on the bottom step of the steps leading to the deck of the Bridge. I took a picture of it - you may have noticed. That had me wondering if it was from a biker riding the ramp down the middle of the steps. And as I wondered that a guy on a mountain bike cycled past me up the ramp. Calfs and lungs ahoy.

Another weird dream last night. Remember virtually none of it but at one point I went into a park that looked something like Battersea Park and The Domain in Sydney. I was on my mountain bike that mysteriously (well, not mysterious at all, I ws dreaming) disappeared and I was letting my dog have a swim. My dog in this case was an Airdale Terrier and it was wearing a t-shirt. It was a great swimmer, better still once the t-shirt was off. I woke up after that.

Best news of the day is that next door put fertiliser on their garden last weekend. Good news because I have spet the week suspecting the smell to be the Rumpole shit in the back garden. He's off the hook.

the dog and the smoker

Feeling quite good about myself. A lass I saw at lunch had a small puppy under one arm and a cigarette in the other. So up to her I wanders and politely aske her to keep said fag from said pup on account of his little lungs. She was taken aback but happy to comply.

Weird dreams last night. Something about diving in crystal clear waters in Norway, at one point I was stacking unrelated objects into pigeon holes and either I or Sal were shouting what I suspect was the wrong name to attract the attention of a woman walking a red setter. And I'd not eaten cheese. Go figure.

consilience

I'm reading a book called Consilience by Edward Wilson at the moment, a book given to me by JCJ who had three copies of it for reasons I forgot. I'm enjoying reading it, unlike the reviewer from the London Review of Books who pans it. I got bored reading that review. Anyway, I read in the book a bit about how and why dreams are as they are and coming so soon after a weird dream I think I'll share.

In condensed and dumbed down terms, possibly even inaccurate, when you sleep a couple of chemicals in the brain alter the way they work; one quietens and one wakes up. The quietening one is the one controlling pretty well all motor skills and that is why we're paralysed when we sleep. As part of the chemical (electrical? I'm vague on whether this is chemistry, biology or physics; probably all three) movement messages travel through the brain that stimulate parts that process vision and motion. But because we have no visual image or movement the brain fill in the gaps with whatever it can lay its metaphoric hands on and the result is a dream. The brain is mostly just making shit up. Which is why dreams are weird. Also explains why you can see and sense motion while dreaming but cannot smell anything; that part of the brain is switched off.

And here is the best bit...because the brain is being stimulated in the parts that process normal, wakeful (is that a word?) sensory input it believes what it senses. Which is why you tend to accept what is going on in a dream and the odd linkages. Such as fish eating parrots. It is, in fact, a form of temporary insanity. The chemical happenings impact memry and that is why we rarely remember dreams, but we all dream; anyone who tells you they do not dream is kidding themself. External stimuli can break in...a clap of thunder (real) may become a gunshot (making shit up) and so on. Cool huh?

awe

an overwhelming feeling of reverence, admiration, fear, etc., produced by that which is grand, sublime, extremely powerful, or the like: in awe of God; in awe of great political figures.

Moving to Newtown from just down the road; not awesome. Having a friend, with car, help you move; not awesome. People, stop overusing awesome. Now I have that of of my grumpy not enough sleep chest, I can continue.

Weird dream last night, in the moments of sleep between spells dealing with barking dogs - the neighbours doberman cross kept jumping over our garden fence and Rumpole took noisy exception to his prescence in his yard. In the end I let Rumpole into the house and that was fine until Boston got bored and lonely and homesick and started to whine. Loudly. Eventually my stress levels fell and I nodded off. Rumpole nodded off way before me.

So the parts I remember from this dream. A couple of lorikeets on a couple of lamposts, and next to them fly in (don't ask me how) a couple of blue grouper. Yes, fly in and yes they are large fish. One fish manages to get one bird into it's mouth and starts eating it. I saw blood and feathers as the bird was gluped down. Somewhere in the dream I was getting a lift form the guy who works next to me and, in the dream, he had a really shit car. Already fading from my memory, the last thing I remember is that in the dream I was reminding myself that I had to write down what was happening in so I would remember it when I awoke. I was using the phrase 'nature red in tooth and claw' as I way to remember it. All a bit too self-referential for my liking.

Cracking word heard at work today. "Decomplicating". Love it. Far better than simplifying.

dreaming

Another night and another weird dream snippet. Alberto, cafe owner from Earlsfield, was showing me around his neatly manicured garden. It had those small white pebbles that I guess look nice and keep weeds down. There was one type of flower growing and Alberto was showing me where other flowers had grown. Fast forward and I am in a musty old pub, a few patrons clinging to the walls and a quizmaster, in front of a big screen, explaining the meaning of the terms he was using in the quiz. Biblical stuff, only word that sticks in my memory is Satan...new job stirring up the grey matter at night? Don't know. More weirdness though.

And waking up for a pee at 4:23 really sucks. Back to bed I feel that I have to fall asleep quickly, and that stresses me (with a small s) and keeps me awake. Bugger.

Day has gone by and work seems pretty relaxed so not much to report. Other than I have a window seat overlooking the docks in the harbour. That rocks. Took me 20minutes door to door to get to work, then 7minutes to wait for a coffee.

standard day

Awoke from a very strange dream that I thought I should note the details of before I forgot them, promptly didn't and have now forgotten the details. Sketchy bits remain, of which; I went to place a plate on a table, Sal told me not there and then put an identical plate of her own in the same spot. I muttered fucking typical or similar, her dad Mike had a go at me, I blew up and stormed off. Then there was a bit with me walking around Mytchett Farm lake...only there were no trees around its banks and it was surrounded by fishing rods, shoulder to shouler, so to speak. I remember the rest of it being waaaaay weird, but the only bit I recall is lacing up a pair of desert boots. Go figure. Damnit, I wish I'd noted it. It was one of those weird night's sleep where I awoke thinking it must be about 5am and it was about midnight. I like nights like that.

So the first day at my new job with Michael Page. Could not really be further from Westpac and there is plenty for me to get my teeth into. Young crowd, friendly and laid back. Decent chance I'll enjoy it. At least I have access to my internet mail from work...now that's an improvement. Checked out the showers and spot to chain the bike - tick in that box. At lunch time I had a stroll in what for me is, sort of, a new side of the City. Part of that took me through Wynyard station and on its wooden escalators. Felt a (very) little weird seeing them; made me think of the Kings Cross fire of 1987. Always mention of wooden escaltors in the reports.

Damnit this is dull. Went for a run..blah...still not feeling great blah...Rumpole being a bastard on the lead...blah...ZZZZzzzzzzz.

tec trot thursday

Thursday means TecTrot and today, for shits and giggles, I did two laps of the 4.6km course. First was 19:08 and the second 19:27. Did a bit more to make it a 10km lunchtime run. Sweated buckets, but happy to have got in a low-middle distance run. I've been getting the long runs done - just - and plenty of shorter stuff but think I've been slacking on the 10-20km range. So hurrah for me!

Hope you like the picture. Wanted to get the arc of the bow of the QE2 nd the arcs of the Opera House sails. Black and white because I am so the artist.

My left ITB, the one that has been tight for a while, feels better today. This may be due to some stretching I did last night that was at best weird and at worst plain stupid. The stretch in question; lay on your back, keep one leg straight and bend the other 90 degrees-ish at the knee. Twist your trunk so that the bent knee comes over the straight leg and gets as close to the ground as possible. Arms are typically out straight from the shoulders, flat on the ground. Not sure what the stretch is called. So I decided last night, having gone to bed alone as Sal is still in NZ, to sleep in that position and see if this would, overnight, loosen the ITB. Arms out, trunk twisted, knee over I fell asleep. I'm not sure how long I'd been asleep, but a while later I awoke with no feeling in one of my legs (I already can't remember which one.) I could wiggle my toes and as I shifted position, sort of rolling and dragging myself with my arms, I got a sort of pins and needles sensation and regained the feeling in my leg. I nodded back off in a more relaxed position. And at some stage in the night my brother (big shout out) featured in a dream snippet. I've recalled no part of any dream for a while and ths was only a bit. I was in what seemd to be an office corridor, went through a door into a well equipped kitchen that was massively untidy and got in trouble for something or other. There was someone else there - the housemate I assume - and the kitchen looked nothing lik my bro's. But it's my dream and I know where it was meant to be. So there.

Traffic chaos update. This from the local rag

Elderly people were forced to scale fences to escape the Botanic Gardens - after authorities decided to lock the gates

Escape! Old people are escaping! Made me chuckle. More traffic chaos expected as Dick Cheney arries in town. We're told to expect sudden road closures without warning when this oldie wants to get across town, presumably taking routes that avoid as many goddamned hippies as possible.

not an owl

Not an owl
Originally uploaded by Auswomble.

A good end to the day. Two hours thirty minutes and ten seconds, not all of which was hell. I ache a bit and feel vague and vacant, but managed to get a reasonable amount of fluid down my neck so think I should pull up OK.

On my long runs, if it is quite warm, I often finish with a small tide-mark of salt in each eye socket. Makes me wonder just how much fluid and other stuff I actually sweat out. Sports drinks, instead of just water, are the way to go.

As I was post-run stretching in the garden I saw my favourite Australian bird, or rather one of. Looks like an owl but is not. It is a Tawny Frogmouth. The pic is of one that nested above my car when I lived in Neutral Bay. Tonight I saw one fly into our neighbours oak tree and from there into another tree in the garden that backs onto ours. You have to see these things; they have a sort of spoiler on their wings that enables them to fly almost silently. When they land they sit perfectly still, close their eyes and look like a bit of a tree. They sit still most of the day and are active at night. Not an easy bird to spot.

They're very cool and I'm glad we have at least this one in our hood.

Other wildlife in our hood include, according to local a local park ranger and confirmed by the internet (which never lies), the red bellied black snake ("one of the more common species of large venomous snake still found in the Sydney region"), and the eastern brown snake ("one of Australia's most dangerous reptiles. It is fast-moving and aggressive".) Cool! Various other snakes and bugs and birds and lizards and I will be spending some time in the gully, where they hang out, with a camera.

In animal-dream news Sally tried to scare the crap out of me last night when she leapt out of bed at around midnight, convinced some bug or other was crawling over her. Lights on, arms waving, bed-clothes flying. No bug found. The night before, when I made my way to bed a little later than her, she gave a strange yelp and greeted me as if I were the dog. More asleep than awake, confusion reigned for a while and I'm not convinced that when she did go back to sleep she knew whether it was me of the dog in bed next to her. That was weird; I had been expecting odd dreams of my own, having had a cheese sarnie before retiring for the night, but I, eventually, had a sound dream free night.

A quick work bit. Things have gone to shit, technically, this week and I have found myself far more involved than I am used to. I quite enjoyed that. A bit like discovering the fun people and places a couple of days before you end an average holiday. Had it been like this from day one I'd probably have stayed. C'est la vie.

say cheese

Does cheese make you ahve more and weirder dreams? Possibly an old wives tale. On Sunday night we had pizza for dinner and I had a weird dream for desert. A couple of days have dulled the memory, but I recall a rocky shoreline with some small waves breaking as white water in which I was standing. And this was very close to the outside void-where-there-should-be-a-wall of a house. Someone passed a baby to me from the water and I handed it back to someone in the house. As is usual in my dreams I do not know who these other people are. In fact, I don't actually see them, I just know they are there because of what is going on. Straight afterwards the water has calmed and I am about to go in. From the square wooden pole I am now perched upon, located between the house and the water. A cockroach scambles over my hand, then I see a couple more nearby. They don't put me off, but the snake does and I shout loudly, but get no reponse, for a helping hand to get from the pole to the house. I should have blogged this on Monday when the memory was fresher because there was more. Dad gave me some advice about something that I took offence too - but I have no idea what.

And so to a little analysis. I have just finished reading a book about cockroaches. Sally and I are considering etting a puppy and on Sunday night I was looking at how we could fence off some of the garden for a dog. Between the slab our sunroom's poles sit in and the garden is a small rock slope and I reckon the room/rocks/water/baby of the dream are the house/rock slope/garden/puppy. Probably morphed to a shoreline because I am missing being in the water. Dad's advice was likely because I had a mini blow-up with sal in the afternoon, borne of utter knackerdness. No idea abou the snake. That's the best I've got for now.

And according to The British Cheese Board's somewhat limited study the stuff may aid a good night's sleep.

more nocturnal surreality

Another night, another weird dream made of disjointed images mashed into something that does not quite make a story. Or if there is a story it is fairly surreal. Anyway, last night went a something like this.

So I am in a car and the feeling I have is that Sal's brother Adam is in the car with me, though as often in my dreams it is a feeling rather than knowing by sight. We are driving along the road my maternal grandparents lived on and see, in a driveway, a kayak. Then another, and another and in fact quite a few. From there we jump to a place that sort of switches between being my Dad's lounge room and an electircal applicance store. Again not by sight but by sense I am sitting next to DJ. I have had a row with Sal, and given the location I suspect it is about the fridge door colour-cost thing. ANyway, Sal storms out front of the shop (exit dream right) and I take issue with my Dad (dream left), who I DO recognise by sight. I have a go at him for telling me how to treat my wife. Looking forward to analysing that one. Dad is wearing a brown overcoat. No idea why I remember that. Anyway, Dad goes out front of the house and gives a lift down to Morden to Sal, DJ and maybe others that I do not regognise; not sure on numbers. In his early 1980's Granada. Nice motor, though to the best of my knowledge he has never owned one. I head over to get the bus from the stop outside of St. Lawrence's Church, Morden. I'm on my way to work. Opposite Dad's house was a very large queue of traffic, but I cannot remember if it was actually a traffic queue or a load of parked cars. Not sure where this next bit fits in, but the downstairs front left window of Dad's house is covered in plastic and taped up because someone - I cannot recall who - put a bit of concrete through it. The concrete chunk was still in the front garden. There was something about breakfast downstairs near Morden station, and a pair of jeans in a draw. I have no idea where those bits fit; I just kinda recall the images. The bus I got to Morden was a futuristic affair with a hydraulic loweing door and lots of plastic. Few, if any, windows. It also had a conductor, who joked that my fare was thirty two pounds before telling me it was actually forty pence. I remember very small handles to hold on to in the bus. And that is about it. Weird.

Some analysis. I am thinking of getting a kayak, partly because Adam has a surf ski. That is easy. The argument and the appliance store is our new fridge, and the argument is, well, Sally and I argue over stoopid stuff. Dad's Granada is likely to be a reference to a very well maintained 80s Ford Fairmont I saw in the city yesterday. DJ was there at breakfast, or thereabouts, because last night I uploaded to flickr a picture of him at a brunch. Dads overcoat was like a coat worn by the Irish bloke on Australian Idol last night. Why I had a word with Dad about telling me how to speak to Sal, and the thing with the concrete through the window and the traffic - in fact all of the Morden references, and the one I think was Mytchett, where the grandparents lived - have me stumped. The row with Dad about speaking may be because I have not managed to speak to Dad on my last few attempts, just leaving a few messages. All very odd the way the brain shuffles and rearranges itself when my lights go out.

another night, another weird dream

More disjointed malarky as my brain goes through it's nocturnal filing. There was a bit about internet searching for a new Camelbak - obvious, as it was that last thing I did before going to bed - and for asics trainers. Less obvious, but fair enough as I think I need some new runners. Then I was discussing with someone (anonymous) a flat block of land on Sailors Bay Road that was over 2000sqm and I was at some time on a bus approaching the northern side of the harbour bridge. Ah well. From there I was travelling on a narrow road through some thick vegetation, kinda rainforest like. On a bus. With Sally, I think. We approached a narrow wooden bridge that had a couple of large cows blocking our way. So our bus driver decides to do some off roading and takes the bus down a steep gully to the right of the bridge and through the undergrowth. However, next to the bridge were a couple of calves. Our bus approached the calves and in the next few moments it stalled or stopped, the driver pissed off, the bus turned on it's side and the large cows came to the defence of what I assume were their little cows. I awoke with the bus on it's side and a fucking enormous cows head inches away from me on the other side of an unbroken window. Deal with that one Freud. Oh, at some point in my sleep I was arranging to dive in Fiji with DJ when we have a free weekend. I assume it was DJ, could have been JCJ, Chad or anyone else. I rarely positively ID the cast members in my dreams.