Night navigation

It was an eventful day, not without its petty annoyances, but our house-guests were happy, that’s the main thing, and enjoyed a merry evening. I was exhausted and as soon as politely possible retired upstairs.

My dreams were scantily populated, and their spaces were wide. I was in a tall office building, looking for the men’s room, but there were few people to ask, and I preferred to look for myself. So I found myself descending an echoing staircase. Three floors down, I found the men’s room. Someone was in there. It’s a place where men don’t speak to strangers, an unspoken rule, though I understand it’s quite different in the ladies’ room, where they chatter uninhibitedly. When we were well clear, the man going down the stairs and I going back up, I called to him: “Would you like to see something?” Without waiting for a reply, I took a leap down the stairwell to a lower level, in a gentle parabolic trajectory. Landing lightly, I bounced halfway back up, and without any effort hovered in the air, at eye-level with the man. It was a good feeling, vanity of course, but as it seemed to me, I was being generous to take such a risk, and show something beautiful to a fellow human being. I have done a similar thing in real life, on a smaller scale. It was in a bookshop in Great Missenden. I performed a Baldacci levitation for the benefit of the assistant, then left the scene before he recovered to ask questions (see

Back in the open, the beautiful city was starting to light up against a luminous indigo sky; a futuristic version of London, or perhaps the city in Blade Runner, a film I saw probably 30 years ago, when it came out. (Checking up now, I see that Blade Runner had a dismal atmosphere, but my dream was an idyllically peaceful tourist’s London, though it looked as bright as Tokyo.) I’d walked from Crystal Palace in the southern suburbs to where it was all happening—Piccadilly Circus—with a new girl, on our first date. Knowing from the stairwell trick that I could resist gravity, I must have been trying to impress her, for there cannot be any other explanation for my shinning up a tall electricity pylon, to the very top. Using my legs to grip its topmost arm, I leaned at an absurd angle to seize one of the wires, detach it from the glass insulator, and then, with a little difficulty, reattach it. The difficulty was that it broke. The ends were very springy and it was hard to keep them from touching other wires, but I managed to pull them closer and tie them in a series of knots, and hook them back on to the insulator.

In another scene—I wasn’t conscious of a chronological sequence or cause-effect relationship—we were on the Thames waterfront to get to Crystal Palace. The roads were almost empty of traffic, and there were few pedestrians. The skyline was dimly visible because some buildings were outlined in neon lights, but all the street lights were out nearby and we were enveloped in a blue-black gloom. How could we find our way back? No public transport, no taxis, no landmarks to help us walk in the right direction.
On reflection, I think this was influenced by my Satnav device (see previous post), which changes its colours to dark blues and greens for the night hours; thus impressing upon me the theme and colour scheme for this dream-scene. Oddly, I never connected my trick on the pylon with the subsequent power outage over part of London.

In the final scene it is bright day, and I’m at the edge of a village green, approaching a booth selling sweets of several kinds. I pick up a wrapped candy and see that it has a web address which I can’t quite make out, because the ends are twisted. The woman selling them, educated and precise in manner, starts to ask me a number of searching questions. I form the opinion that she is a psychiatrist, touting for business. The candy is a lure. As soon as you take an interest, she does a rapid personality analysis and tries to sign you up for a course of treatment. This is a bit much, think I. And then I wake.

The night is still, the bed is comfortable, I don’t want to move. It’s enough to lie here, but I don’t want to stay awake. How can I get back to that dream-world, where anything is possible, and I’m not oppressed by thoughts? With no conscious effort, I find myself focusing on the act of breathing. The more I try not to, the more it happens. It was my main religious practice for thirty years. The purpose of religious beliefs is to prop up the practice, and vice versa. Now I have repudiated both. You’d think, after this, I could come back with a traveller’s tale; or if not, I could give an opinion on breath meditation, to praise or condemn. But, in this moment, I’m ambivalent. It’s powerful but then so is modern technology, including weaponry. Perhaps I’ll write about it in my next, and then you will judge for yourself.