Another night of broken sleep due to incessant dreaming. I’m not enjoying it. Not only am I less rested than I should be, but it also does my head in. I wake occasionally in the midst of it all, silly thoughts revolving around and around in my head as if they are profound truths I need to understand.

It’s disturbing in other ways. For the most part, they are not happy dreams, though they are not nightmares. By themselves, the dreams can seem innocuous, though meaningful. Taken all together themes emerge, and a general sense of sorrow pervades. Last nights dreams seem to be all about grief and loss. It’s getting to the point where I wonder if I should seek some professional help.

Once more I only recall fragments of dreams. What amazes me is how vivid and real they seem. Dreams are often surprising like that, but it has come to the point now that I seriously wonder at their provenance. If they are ours alone then our dreams come from an entirely secret place I think.

Often I dream things that are true but which in my waking life I do not know. They are like plays that have been written off stage and performed live, surprising often with their unexpected twists and turns. They seem foreign like that, not of our doing, not entirely of our own personal agency. Though I participate in my dreams, I have little control over the direction they take. Often I find myself wishing they would go a different way, and dreaming still think that I should be able to influence that – yet rarely is that the case. I am like a performer who does not know his lines until a moment before and knows nothing of what the other actors will say until they are said. Like that performer, I watch sometimes feeling that curling surprise at the quirky interventions, the unlikely intelligence, the surprising revelation. What am I to make of all this?

The first dream I recall featured a handsome, middle-aged man, once a leader or politician of some repute, but now fallen on hard times. He is a good man though, a worthy man. He attempts to arrange some kind of community demonstration of unity and harmony. Slowly it comes together while on the side a cynical journalist (a woman) – like a Greek chorus – looks on derisively. She comments on the futility of the campaign and how this mans time has gone, never to come again. Her inference is that this is a last desperate attempt for relevance. So it might be, but then another character enters the fray, the current leader I think. He rebuts the journalist and highlights the fine qualities and achievements of the man, and concludes with the enigmatic and slightly wistful comment, “if I could use him I would.”

Whilst all this going on in the background there is a flurry of activity and colour, symbolic I think of the success of the man’s campaign.

It seems a hopeful dream in some ways, but I don’t necessarily like what it’s telling me.

Following that there were a lot more dreams, mostly about grief, loss, sorrow it seems. One I remember only the final fragment. There is my grandmother, my mum’s mum, nanny as I use to call her. I loved her, and she adored me – I was always her favourite. She died about 30 years ago. She’s there, smiling at me just as in my memories, “I loved you didn’t I?” she says to me, reaching towards me like a grandmother seeking to comfort a sad child, “didn’t I love you?” she says again. And I, like that child going to her and feeling her comforting arms around me answer, “you did,” I say, sobbing.

I woke at that moment and was full of it. I don’t know what all this means, but feel like everything is now coming to a point.

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