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grey and there are grey war ships on the sea. This experience was unsettling, and I felt anxious all day after that dream.
Dream two: I was out in the countryside and some friends drove up in an army type jeep. I cooked them a meal, but the recipe was written in a language I didn’t understand and their name was foreign and I couldn’t spell it. This was a nice dream however and I felt the joy of sharing a meal with friends.
Dream three: My neighbours’ English Springer Spaniel was sat on her kitchen worktop. She didn’t want the dog, but she kept it through loyalty to her dead husband as it was his shooting dog. I arranged for the dog to be re- homed with a client of mine who promised to take it shooting. However, he didn’t and instead he was making it retrieve tricks with 3 other dogs. One dog in each corner of a square and each was called in turn to retrieve a dummy from the centre of the square. The dog hated it. I was angry with the client as he had totally missed the point about this dog’s needs. He is ex-police inspector and I remember thinking how stupid the police are as they just follow protocol and don’t think or feel for themselves.
Prover Six
I spotted Knud Romer sitting at a round café style table alone. It was outdoors on a sunny day. I decided on the spot that I, uncharacteristically, was going to approach. I went up to his table and told him that I had been following and appreciating his contributions to the public debate for years. He was relaxed with a slight smile but never stirred, kept looking slightly beyond me.
Afterwards I thought he was almost like an apparition, as if he couldn’t see or hear me. In the dream this didn’t occur to me. I was just pleased to express my support -then I woke up at 3am and didn’t go back to sleep for about two hours. This never happens to me. My alarm goes off at
6am and normally if I were ever awake at 3am I would be very annoyed at losing sleep. Instead lay there contempl- ating life and the reasons why humans mess it up. Background info: Knud Romer is a well-known Danish Writer, TV and radio host, lecturer, and all-round brilliant commentator on the ways of the world. He famously once interrupted the Minister for education during a round- table discussion he was chairing because he got fed up with her dry referrals to tests and educational targets and went on a 10-minute rant about the real purpose of education (lifting the human spirit etc etc). Knud Romer is now tragically going blind due to glaucoma.
My thoughts between 3am and 5am on Tuesday morning were pleasantly drifting from being pleased that Geoff hadn’t given us something horrible, or at least if it was something horrible, I was getting the post-apocalyptic what-went-wrong-for-humanity contemplative mood of the proving. Whether it leads to Culloden fields or Ground zero or any other place symbolizing the failure of humankind, our curse has to be our innate tendency to see the world as “us/me versus you/them”.
I was thinking about the root of the problems in the world and about competitiveness being where we first go wrong. The Olympic games have been in the news a lot recently and for the first time it occurred to me that rather than embodying human achievement, this sort of idealizing competitiveness is dangerous. Why do we always want to pit two individuals against each other? Why do we celebrate competing, one versus the other, me against you? I thought about how the way people everywhere are logging their achievements, running marathons etc are examples of the same mentality. Run if you enjoy it and find it fun but why compete against others (or even yourself)? If only we could engage in these activities for the pure joy of doing them rather than want to measure the effort and achievements. Why time the run? This is how
we destroy the world. Playing, whether sports or board games or any other game is fun and interactive and, by all means, try with every fibre of your being to score or get points in the spirit of the game, give it all you have and let yourself go and have a blast, but never take these things seriously. We must all know in our core that there can be no winners or losers. My conclusion, therefore, was that the root of the world´s problems is personified by adults who don´t enjoy board games because they are sore losers! Before drifting back to sleep it occurred to me (with the grandiose wisdom of 5am) that life is like a proving: You are never going to get the whole picture, but here is your little snippet, learn from it and get from it what you can. And what a magnificent thing that is.
Physical symptoms: During the day I had sore stinging and watering eyes, a tingling and slightly swollen upper lip and very dry lips.
Dream two: I think there were several brief dreams on the theme of anxiety, stress, worry, being in over my head and just hoping for a safe outcome. The one I remember is that I was alone in my parents’ Summer cottage (with no facilities, let alone inhalation aesthetic) having sedated my daughter´s old precious and much-loved dog because I was going to do a proper-vet-thing and clean her teeth. Now the dog was out cold, and I was sweating the cold sweat of dread, terrified how I could have started something so stupid and praying that she would wake up again. As I was cleaning her teeth, it turned into her having skin wounds all over her body that needed stitching. The project was doomed. What had I been thinking embarking on it and please, please let it end ok. If the outcome is ok, I won´t do anything this stupid again, I swear!
Dream three: I had several dreams but only remember one clearly.
My niece was of royal descent, a princess, or a queen and a very beautiful and gracious one. I was invited to spend the
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