What dreams may come

I don’t know why I don’t write more about dreams and sleep when they’re such an important part of my life. I sleep a lot; much of my life has been spent sleeping. I look forward to it and can sleep almost anywhere. After lunch is usually the deepest, most perfect. Or in a chair in the sun. I sleep on the floor in my office, in trains, on journeys. Even when people are talking to me I’m half asleep.

I remember lots of my dreams. From years ago. Sometimes I revisit them. I sometimes get confused and am not sure whether I’m dreaming or awake. Sometimes I’ll see words or whole sentences and then wake up to scribble them down in pencil on a scrap of paper. Dreams can be so deep that you do t remember them but when you wake up the feeling carries over well into the day, dissipating by 10 or 11. Often, the first word in your waking life is just a continuation, or a summary of, or a connection to the dream, a floating bridge to that carefree world which you love to inhabit.

Sunday morning lie in has its own unique charms. The ‘king’s sleep’ ( I.e. after breakfast) is something of an indulgence. Sleep after a hard day’s work is supposed to be superb but I wouldn’t know.

In lots of my dreams I’m in London, on the underground. Very rarely in Lahore but, recently, like Drummer Hodge, the south has seeped in. Is there something to who we see in our dreams?

To the moderns dreams mean very little (perhaps because they live in a dreamworld anyway). They tend to see them as the working out of the subconscious, a frustrated expression, perhaps, of what is repressed. But there’s nothing quite like the sense that one’s seen a true dream or that it somehow gives you insight into one’s own life.