CONTORTED PASTA

This seems to have become a dream journal now ... Only it's so infrequently I remember them that I don't keep a real dream journal anymore, and I feel the few I can hold onto warrant recognition, somehow.

The premise of this dream was that I was setting off on another sailing trip with the Jubilee Sailing Trust, the organisation with which I did my hands-on research on tall ship sailing for Vol.1 of Worst Journey. I got to the ship on time, and some of the first part of the dream was settling in, chatting with some of the NPCs I was going to sail with, etc. At some point the 1st Officer came to the mess and joined the chat. It was forecast to be quite stormy that night so I asked if this was indeed a "beginner" trip and not "intermediate" as I'd only done one before and hardly had experience with choppy water, nevermind a storm. She said it would be fine. I also asked her when we were going to set off, and she said about 3a.m. – something about the tide, I think. It was, at that time, around 7p.m., so this was good news because it gave me the chance to pick up a few things from my flat(? friend's flat? Air B&B?). It was not a short distance away and I needed time to get there and back on the bus. The things I needed to pick up were:
- my enamel mug, which somehow I was without
- some small but important thing like my wallet or phone or something, or maybe I'd forgotten to turn something off
- clothes, which I had completely forgotten to pack

I'm sure this is mostly a travel anxiety dream – I will be travelling later in January, and now that we're past Christmas it's on the horizon. I have to say that going on a tall ship is a lot more interesting than the usual "can I get to the airport in time" paradigm, and while I've had a few dreams that I've forgotten to pack and have to throw things in a suitcase at the last minute, I've never dreamt I've arrived at my destination without having the essentials. As I sat down to write this, I think I've figured out why it was a ship: my January trip is to Madeira, which was the Terra Nova's first stop out from Britain in 1910; obviously a sailing ship is how one gets to Madeira (though I don't think that's where I was going in the dream). I don't know why the flat I had to get back to was just off Lonsdale Quay, though. Many of my bus dreams still take place in Vancouver, where I did most of my bus riding, but that location hardly features, I suppose because one rarely encounters difficulties there. Oh well, the subconscious wouldn't be half so much fun if it weren't a mystery ...

I've just started a new hormone therapy (see previous posts about Feminine Issues) and to my great surprise, I've started having dreams again that are not mind-numbingly tedious everyday frustrations, but the sort of nutty things one is supposed to encounter in Dreamworld. And I'm remembering them, which I've only managed to do a few times a year for the last decade or so ... though this may be because in the brief instant I've remembered my dream upon waking up, it's been so boring that I immediately erased it.

In the last week, I've dreamt that someone clumsily tried to pickpocket me in the queue at a National Trust property, and I dragged him to the counter of what my waking mind can only describe as the National Trust Police. They were some sort of unified security service across the whole of the NT, but apparently staffed mainly by women in their 50s. The pickpocket was quite an attractive man, actually, in a greying kind of way, but that was no excuse for crimes.

I also dreamt that I had been part of a study whose first part involved installing an app on my phone, and whose second part was some kind of in-person medical test. When I arrived for the latter, it became rapidly clear that it was not just science but mad science, the kind that involves strapping one to a chair and very Weimar-looking contraptions. I flipped out, demanded the app to be uninstalled, and with some difficulty made my escape. Weirdly, getting them to take the app off my phone was harder than evading them physically. The app was called "Monster"; it didn't look exactly like the energy drink logo but it did have the same colour scheme. As soon as I woke up I knew this had been a dream, but I was still super paranoid about digital privacy for a few days after. I would never ever install the kind of app this was in the full light of day, but even so ...

I used to have such mad dreams when I was a teenager. It's nice to have them back again. And, bizarrely, given I have had quite an anxious lead-up to my current trip to Denmark, I have had no travel anxiety dreams at all.

I am no stranger to the anxiety dream. Usually these start a month or two before I'm due to travel somewhere, and involve losing an important item or not getting to the airport on time. I've been having a certain amount of real-life travel anxiety lately, around getting (or not?) a work visa for my usual teaching gig in Denmark. I don't know if this is too advanced for my lizard brain to process, or if it just doesn't know how to translate vague bureaucratic uncertainty into something to panic over, but somehow the usual airport anxiety has been translated into ... bus anxiety. Falling asleep and missing my stop. Missing my stop, getting off at the next one and crossing the street to catch the bus back the other way, but there are no buses going the other way. Not realising how close my stop is and having to scramble to gather up more stuff than I could possibly have carried aboard, and not having sufficient bag or arm capacity for it all. Usually this takes place in Vancouver, I suppose because that's where I took the most buses.

Last night, the usual bus problems were compounded by a trip back to my old houseshare in Cambridge, where I was supposedly still paying rent for my room even though I didn't live there, and discovered a great pile of mail for me on the counter – mostly junk, but a few returned envelopes and a some other things of interest. I had to sort through it while Troublesome Housemate hovered awkwardly behind me, and the sound of very young and raucous undergrads bounced around the house. And then it was back on the bus for another misadventure.

What is it like to have fun fantasy dreams that throw crazy stuff at you, instead of the most tedious or uncomfortable aspects of waking life? I feel like I'm missing out here ...

In the Before Times, a regular feature of my otherwise quite dull dreamscape was the Travel Anxiety Dream. They were dependable as sunrise if I were within a few months of planned travel – which, in recent years, has meant having them fairly constantly. Usually they involved confusing the flight time with the time I needed to be at the airport (always the wrong way around) and often forgetting to pack until the absolute last minute; if I turned up at my destination (usually something like a blend between London and San Francisco) it was without passport, wallet, or phone, or some combination of the three. When I wake, I know the dream is preposterous, because I get extremely wound-up before I go anywhere and am usually triple checking that I have the essential items round about the time I would be remembering, in my dream, that I still needed to pack at all. But they are anxiety dreams. They wouldn't serve their subconscious purpose if I had my conscious wits about me.

I haven't gone anywhere in nearly a year, now, since I was flown home from Denmark last March just before they shut the borders. The only travel I've done is going two stops on a mostly empty train to meet a friend for a country walk last summer. So the travel anxiety dream has mostly left me. But what would life be without anxiety dreams? So we have welcomed to the nocturnal cinema the new and exciting genre of Mask Anxiety Dream.

On one hand, these are more believable, because it's entirely in-character for me to leave the house without a mask, and I have done so on more occasions than I care to count, because, living in the country, I generally don't need one until I get where I'm going. But in all of those cases, I have realised, within a short distance from home, that I don't have one, and either turned around or aborted the trip. My dreams, however, usually start when I'm already at the place (most often Cambridge) and find me defenceless in a sudden and unexpected high-risk situation (usually being thronged with maskless youth). These dreams have begun to fade away under Lockdown III, however; whether because I'm not even going on errands now, or because I spend so much of my day lost in work that I sometimes forget there's even a pandemic on, I couldn't say. But last night I had a new one: I was on a bus in Vancouver, and had got on just before the end of its run, so sat in a bus full of people for 20 minutes waiting for it to start the route back the other way. It only occurred to me once the bus started moving again that there was still a pandemic, and I had been in a small damp enclosed space with a dozen other people, none of us wearing masks, and that it was practically impossible that I hadn't caught Covid now. It was such a dreadful certainty that I even woke up with it, and had one of those waves of relief when you get your bearings and realise it was just a dream.

The chances of my getting on a bus just before its terminus are slim to none, and there is no way I'm getting on any public transit until the numbers go way, way down, but I know that the next time I am in Vancouver and the bus pauses at a timed stop, instead of chilling out and sketching the passengers I'm going to think of this dream. Thanks a lot, subconscious.

It was early nightfall – still enough light in the sky to see, but not well. Two dark foxes leapt over the back wall into the garden of the house to the west of us, and one of them eventually climbed in their back window, which was open for their cat to come and go. The other fox waited outside. Not long after, a black bear climbed into our garden and stood outside our glass door, watching the antics of the foxes over the wall. I was concerned for the cat but felt no malice from the foxes and no sense of danger from the bear – they were just animals doing their thing. And I wasn't surprised to see the bear in central Cambridge: this is after all why I cannot be relied upon to put the bins out the night before, Because Bears. You can take the girl out of Vancouver ...

Anyway, those neighbours don't have a cat.

So apparently, a midsummer night's dream is that you've booked all the legs of a big trip except the last one, because you were waiting to hear about something, and then you forgot you hadn't booked it, so you're up late in your surprisingly fancy hotel room trying to find a last-minute deal, while Armando Iannucci has a trivial conversation on his mobile on the balcony of the room above yours.

And you think, "Well, for all the travel anxiety dreams I've had, they never prepared me for this feat of stupidity!"

I mean, I guess it's fun, but once in my life I'd like to dream about the thing I have my head stuck into during the day ...

I'm not behind in drawing but I am behind in scanning... Thanks to being preoccupied with silly Valentines yesterday. So. Here are my sketchbook entries:

( Friday )

( Saturday )

3:07 pm
Attending a choir practise as an instrumentalist while the choir is rehearsing a song that has no sheet music can be hazardous to the sanity:

I love to go a-wandering
Along the mountain track
And as I go, I love to sing
My knapsack on my back –

Val-de-ri, val-de-ra,
Val-de-ri, val-de-ra-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha
Val-de-ri, val-de-ra!
My knapsack on my back!

In case you were wondering, this was done without any sort of reference at all..