Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Decoding

Life as a word nerd has some remarkable moments, as when, emerging from the fog of anaesthetic some years back after the same operation from which Ampersand Duck is currently in the throes of recovery, I had a kind of dream in which the actual word PAIN, in sharp, spiky capitals, was inhabiting my innards, the points on the A and the N in particular sticking very nastily into the tender flesh of my surgically ravaged interior.

It was a very vivid sensation, halfway between a dream and a hallucination, and I remembered it the other night when I had a dream in which people were talking about me (always a horrid sensation) and one of them -- someone I'd thought liked me -- said 'Oh no, not her -- she's turned into a nightmare.'

This was so intensely distressing that it actually woke me up, and I only figured out the next morning that my dreaming subconscious was telling me this was a nightmare and I should wake up out of it sharpish.

I have great faith in my subconscious. So now that I'm sitting here working up the other end of the house from the kitchen late at night and could swear I can smell coffee, I'd very much like to know what metaphorical coffee it is that my subconscious wants me to wake up and smell.

2 comments:

TimT said...

Did you ever read that story about WB Yeats? - I can't quite remember the details, but apparently a friend was visiting him and his wife, and Yeats related a dream he had. He said that he dreamed a spirit visited him and he was surrounded by the scent of roses.

His wife then took great delight in announcing that it was her perfume bottle, and that she'd left the lid off the bottle on the previous night.

Smell dreams seem quite unusual and rare; I think I specialise in occasional musical dreams, because of my musical training.

M-H said...

I have been having frightening dreams since moving back to my renovated house. Dreams of invasion and general lack of safety. When it was in the demolition phase I had horrible invasion dreams too. This morning I had a really bad one, in which I thought I'd woken up and I was safe but I hadn't and there was more to come, but of course I thought it was real because i thought I was awake. It is odd, what we dream.