Desks and Dreams

I had a lovely dream last night. I’ll tell you more about it in a moment. But first, some words justifying a picture.

I haven’t been blogging a lot lately but I have been busy. I’ve been doing stuff on the house. I’m trying to get all my furniture sorted and my spare room transformed into a room a guest could stay in rather than just a room full of boxes. In a few weeks I’ll have lived here for a year and it’ll be nice to feel like I’ve actually moved in!

Another thing I’ve been doing is I bought and assembled a desk. I’ve been doing a lot of writing lately and it’s nice to have a proper desk rather than the little folding table I was using. It was the desk in particular that caused me to re-arrange lots of furniture. I’ve turned my bedroom (the biggest room in the house) from bedroom/lounge to bedroom/office and am going to use the lounge as a lounge (what a concept! as my old boss used to say). I’ve also moved the mythtv box downstairs. So anyway I’m rather pleased with all this and here’s a picture of my desk:

The other reason it deserves a pic is the inordinate amount of time it took to assemble. I don’t mind putting together flat-pack stuff but I do seem to be slow.

Back to dreams. I had a lovely dream last night. But before I get to it (!) something more general on dreams.

I was thinking about how we use the word “dream” in two different and distinct ways. Different and distinct to me anyway. There’s 1) the screen-in-your-head that plays random nonsense whilst you’re asleep and then there’s 2) the stuff we aspire to and hope for. I guess these are related. My dreams are always pretty random. I know that other people’s aren’t necessarily. M’s dreams are very coherent compared to mine. She’s told me she’s been dreaming lately of an event she’s worried about in real life. From what I understand it’s pretty much just playing out the scenario with a conclusion she’s nervous about.

When I dream it tends to be less straightforward. People morph into other people, strange context-switches occur, unusual things happen and seem normal. But having said that maybe that’s just the detail, the underlying dream can still be an expression of what’s on my mind.

So did I mention I had this lovely dream last night? Actually it was this morning. I’ve had a week of late nights and last night was a late one too, so I had a long lie-in. This dream was so nice that when I woke needing the loo, I got up, pee-ed, then got straight back into bed and continued the dream. Usually I can’t do that but this time I did.

The dream was basically this: I decided that I would just stop being worried about what people thought, that I would be less passive and I would just be more “fun”. So the dream sort of followed me going out for a day/evening doing various things. I was deliberately trying to be more extrovert. Not in a hey-look-at-me way, but in an attempt to get away from my usual hey-don’t-look-at -me way. I was aware that I might come across as wacky and weird and some people wouldn’t like it but I decided not to care and do it anyway.

And what happened is that I had a good time and that people liked it, liked me, liked being with me. And when I say people I of course mean women. There was one in particular who I was having a lot of fun with, who really liked me, and I liked her and I was really happy around. And when I woke up, it was her I wanted to get back to, spend more time with.

The thing I wondered about when I woke up properly was, was this just a dream in the 1) sense or is it also a 2) dream? Is my unconscious mind telling me something? It was lovely but in the real world I’ve been thinking a lot lately that I’m happy and that a relationship, whilst nice, would be a lot of work – both to find someone and the daily compromise to share your life with someone. But maybe that was all denial?

You may think this has nothing to do with desks. But being a writer is a 2) dream. Building a desk (and using it) is a real concrete expression of that. It’s a practical step I took to make my dream happen. It’s also a sign that I am prepared to come out and say this is what I want rather than cherish it as a secret desire but not do anything in case others tell me it’s stupid or wrong to think I could ever attain it, in case I tried and failed to get it. Interesting that in the dream I had to stop worrying what others thought in order to make myself more out-going and attractive.

But then it’s my unconscious so I would think that wouldn’t I?