Coping with the challenges of the night (copied from Facebook 20 May)
I sleep well despite multi-hour blue light drenching but wake up far too early before relapsing into a dream. I am on a train, strangely an express train as Gunilla and I are packing to leave a conference hotel and I have only popped out on some minor errand. Stumbling back to my seat from the WC, I resume work on my I-pad, only to discover that it’s not my I-pad and not my seat, which is a few rows further on (and looks more or less identical, this is a weak attempt at mitigation). Fleeing from the unfamiliar statistics flashing past on the screen, I rapidly withdraw and crouch, hopefully invisibly, in my own seat.
I become aware of turbulence from the direction of the alien I-pad, where two men have returned from wherever. Unfortunately (and untypically), I decide not to lie low (in accordance with my life motto of “never try to explain what you have done or why”) but go up to them and make a clean breast of it.
The I-pad owner appears to accept my apology, his senior companion less happy and tending towards cross-examination. I think about offering him a non-disclosure agreement but feel it might complicate matters besides not being fully compatible with my principle of non-explanation.
Arriving at a station, we disembark and change to some local train (which seems oddly to run within the conference hotel) reminding me of the Docklands light railway, a kind of scenic route around the local architecture, which I introduce the I-pad man and his companion to as compensation for my mistake. Things seem to be developing quite well and I look forward to wrapping up this particular complication when I sneeze violently and uncontrollably and a large amount of very visible sneeze product of the gooier, yellowish kind lands on the I-pad owner’s sleeve. Despite my weasel quick mopping up, it’s not exactly a happy ending but they anyway disappear at this point, leaving me to get the lift up to our hotel room. Somehow I manage to press the wrong button and the lift deposits me directly inside a rather upper class lady’s room. I have seen her at the conference and start to withdraw making hasty apologies. Explaining that she is being bothered by a man, who is about to visit her, she asks me to stay, which I reluctantly do. A few minutes later, the man (much younger than her and very well tended with the charm of pre-silver temples) arrives (conventionally) at the door; she opens and he looks surprised to see me there. A complicating factor in this situation is that I seem for some reason to have taken my shirt off although I am wearing a T-shirt. I am worried that my quasi-undress might create the wrong impression but I can’t seem to find a particularly stylish way of putting it back on. Maybe the lady has nothing against her visitor jumping to conclusions.
I expect him to rapidly withdraw but he doesn’t. In fact, he’s joined by a couple of other people, who appear to be trying to make him apologise for bothering the lady. They all come in wanting to talk over the situation. I woke up at this point after becoming more and more concerned about missing our plane as the popping out to post a letter or whatever the pop-out reason was has clearly miscarried.
I feel refreshed and in a good mood but am unclear about the significance of this dream:- Is it (a) just the routine coming to terms with the chronic complications of steering David Kendall through life (b) working through age-related increasing stupidity (I bear just now a burden of guilt for calling out a washing machine repairer for a fully functional (but disconnected) washing machine or (c) a message from God that I should stop all this blue-light wallowing in the arcane and get on with my real mission in life of writing light comedies of the frothier sort where people lose items of clothing and hide behind screens and all that sort of giggle (if so, please review, God, so that I can get through life with a shred of human dignity intact…).