Back in Dorset now, after a journey characterised by a variety of blisters and missing public transport connections by a matter of seconds. Always feels somewhat of an anticlimax, coming back here. Makes me wish I had somewhere 'proper' to live. Still, not long til I'm off to San Francisco. Nine days, in fact. Eep, better get stuff sorted.
Had a great trip to London. Met some way cool people and had my brain stretched in new directions, the results of which you'll see on Strange just as soon as I can marshal my thoughts into some sort of form that makes sense.
I think I shall go watch Bagpuss now, if I can a) be arsed to get up off the bed and b) remember how to turn a TV on.
I woke up with a jolt this morning. I was having a dream involving a person I actually know talking to me about a situation that actually exists, except that this person was telling me something that could not possibly be true in the waking world. It woke me, because as revelations go, it was pretty damn big and would have had huge implications.
It also left me wondering how much that dream might colour my perceptions of the situation in real life. This is not to say that I am delusional and about to start thinking that dreams are real, or harbingers, or predictive, just that much of the way we react to things is subconscious, and this just seemed to be to me another way in which my subconscious can successfully fuck me about.
I'm not really talking here about what dreams are, why we have them, or what they mean – symbolically or otherwise – but do they have a knock on effect on the way we behave and think once we have awoken? Is the dream simply a manifestation of existing wishful thinking and therefore powerless to affect us in any new way, or can a dream implant such notions? Even if such notions already exist, does bringing them to the fore by playing them out in our dreams make them more entrenched, give them more influence?
Certainly dreams can fuck with my mood.
Years back Sam, my old school friend with whom I am staying right now, and I shared a series of houses and flats in Hounslow. I had a dream once that we had gone out on a speedboat on the sea and she had fallen overboard and drowned. This tragedy was particularly harsh because (in real life) her younger brother Peter had died in a car accident only a few months before. I woke sobbing and stayed tearful and upset the whole day.
Obviously the dream didn't leave me thinking that Sam actually had drowned, or that she was about to drown, or that drowning was even a remote possibility, but it did change my mood quite dramatically, sinking me into a miasma I couldn't shake off.
However, I've also had some fantastic dreams that have woken from feeling all happy and energised. So it cuts both ways.
Then there is the issue of what insights dreams may provide into cognitive problems. This morning I also dreamt of a wonderful model for explaining the cultural change lifecycle in business – complete with a diagram with four quadrants, (for some reason there were pictures of humans, monkeys, chimps and apes in the background of each quadrant), and four conditions that had to be satisfied to progress to the next quadrant. I wish I could remember what those conditions were, because in the dream it all made perfect sense. Unfortunately, I have a very visual memory, but am crap at remembering facts, words, numbers or names.
(Which probably explains why I spent much of yesterday morning staring at Jamie Cowling trying to figure out where the hell I'd met him before, because I swear I have. My visual brain was screaming that we've met before, but my memory refused to tell me where or, indeed, if.)
So anyway, yes. I suppose in one way this is all a rather stupid post. Of course our subconscious affects conscious behaviour. It's just that usually, it doesn't rub our noses in it quite so much.
