This is the fourth in a series of blogposts about dreams. As with earlier posts in the series, the date shown is the date the dream was captured.
14 December
I was in a place where there was food and drink being served. It looked like an expensive restaurant. There were boys dressed in school uniforms and they had yellow-and-black ties around their necks that had a design on them that looked like a schoolboy with a tie on. I knew they were Scots boys. I also knew I had gone to Cranbrook and that our tie was better. Our tie didn’t have this ornate design on it, ours was just navy blue with red-and-white stripes on it.
Then there was a man who looked like my washing machine repairman (who in real life had moved into an apartment in the same building I live in). He was showing me a catalogue with pictures in it. It was a catalogue produced by a company that ran a lottery, I knew, and he was telling me how he had done so well as a result of investing in the lottery. I didn’t put money in the lottery, myself, although I knew that this is what he wanted me to do. Perhaps, I thought, it was a pyramid scheme, where the person who signs up new participants gets a reward from head office. I was doing something on a spreadsheet that made sense at the time of the dream but that now, in its aftermath, I don’t remember clearly. After the scene with the catalogue played itself out several times, with me looking at the book in my lap, the scheme, which had been giving such good returns, suddenly failed to do so, and my neighbour looked downcast. He didn’t say anything about his losses, however, although I knew what had happened. I kept my opinions to myself.
16 December
I was using an old Macintosh PC to write poetry for a cricketer who had got into some trouble. I would punch out the poems on the computer and put them in a pile nearby. Some of the poems were written by other people and some were written by me, but it wasn’t to be specifically indicated in the resulting publication which poem was written by whom. The upshot of it was that in order to get the cricketer out of trouble the poems had to be written.
Then I was in a mini van being driven up a very steep incline by mum. The slope was massive, well above 45 percent, as though we were driving up the side of a huge mountain, and I kept wondering when the old vehicle would clap out and the lot of us – there were about four people, including dad, in the van – would go hurtling back down the mountain to the bottom again. Mum would get to a specific corner then stop the van and some people would get out. We were to hold a gathering at a house near the corner at a later hour. The back entrance to the house was not immediately clear as several houses had their rear entrances at the same geographical spot. We were working out how to tell people which house it was we were all going to meet in. Other people would be coming in their own cars and I wondered where all the cars would park, as there was not enough room even to park the white van we had travelled up the mountain in.
23 December
They were on some old wooden barquentines that were sailing in the surf next to a beach. There were a number of young people who I knew, but whose faces now mean nothing to me, and they were on the boats. The boats were trying to get out through the heavy surf and were running up the faces of the waves toward the top. Then one of the boats went vertical and flopped over on its side. It foundered in the water and came back to shore, where it knocked about among the rocks for a little bit then righted itself. The young man who had been on the boat was still ok, I could see. I didn’t see what happened to the other boats, but there had been several of them.
The rocks on the shore had been sculpted by people, and then later by the wind, into strange shapes. There was one rock that represented the virgin Mary with the baby Jesus. The damage caused by the wind had meant that the sculpture was almost destroyed. Parts of the rock were very thin, as though just touching them would make it crumble into fragments. The rock looked yellow, like sandstone, and parts of it were pitted by grit that had been blown by wind. I touched the sculpture and wondered if it would fall on me. Worried, I backed away to a safe distance and looked at it from there.
25 December
Dreamed I was in a future city and the transport system comprised of pods that were conveyed from one part of the city to another inside the sewage system. You got into one of a number of small pods, which were made of metal and plastic, and it was injected into a pipe that was also filled with sewage, then it was sent at high speed to its destination. Other cities had similar systems but they were different in material respects. Some of the city systems had faults, while others were considered best practice. The city I was in had a system that was malfunctioning, and the sewage would remain coating the pods that came out of the pipe after they arrived at their destination; this was not how the things were supposed to work, I knew. The pods were very small and round and I felt unhappy about getting into one of them because of claustrophobia and because I am not very flexible, but I had to.