The Daily Novel

It is 3 AM. I have just had a dream unlike any dream I have had in my life. Very lucid and rational. No emotion. Science and reason. Like a good explanatory lecture. Or a work of perfect journalism reporting honestly on how it is.

The content was to do with the current state of play in the project that has been occupying most of my time and energy since the beginning of February;  selling the house in Gospel Oak, buying a small house by the sea in Dorset and finding a small flat in the next street.

The dream thoughts came from someone unspecified who is in possession of all the facts, including what was going on in the minds of the various people, who have considered, or are considering, buying the house. Including one, I did not know about, who was prepared to pay 1.5 million, a higher bid than any I have had.

I had no visual image of the dream character who was talking in the dream. But I had a clear impression of the kind of person he was. Although he was claiming the kind of knowledge that is claimed for God, he did not seem at all Godlike. More like a patient lecturer explaining things to a group of students. 

He was telling me that the various potential buyers were having many different thoughts about whether to buy or not to buy. Mostly these thoughts were not to do with my house, what is right and wrong with it or even how much I am asking for it. They were to do with whether this move fitted in with what they wanted to do in the next phase of their lives.  The dream lecturer was telling me that there was very little I could do about it. No amount of skilled interviewing by me would reveal all the factors involved. Because there are so many things involved in the decision to move house that even the potential buyers themselves cannot be sure of precisely what drives their decision.

In thinking now about this dream it helps me to understand a bit more about the nature of dreaming and what use to make of these sleeping thoughts. The dream is of no use at all in predicting whether the present firm bidder will actually sign on the dotted line in a few days time. It is of no help to me in knowing what I need to find out from him that I do not already know. 

But it does tell me quite a lot of useful things.But using the dream is not as easy as it seems. First, there is the practical difficulty. Even as I lie in bed I realize that the memory of the dream is fading, even before I have gone to my desk to write down what it told me. Even if I were in a sleep laboratory, with a researcher by my bed ready to take down my immediate report of what happened in the dream, I would not be able to prove to the satisfaction of a scientist that what I was telling him was just the actual dream, rather than my waking thoughts about it.But thanks to my training as a journalist I can make a decent stab at no embroidering the actual dream.  Of censoring myself when I move away from the dream itself. 

When I say it was much more like a thought than most of my dreams, I mean it was the kind of thought when several thoughts come into the mind in a single instant, which I sometimes write of as a stream of insights, but that metaphor does not convey the reality. Because a stream suggests a flow, whereas this kind of thinking, whether in dreaming, or when awake,  is when we think many things in the same moment. 

A better metaphor is what happens when we look at a picture and take in many things at the same time. But, as I have already written, this was not primarily a visual dream, but it did contain one episode when several bid prices for my house flashed up a series of written down figures on the whiteboard in my head. Most of these figures were the actual bids for the house (and I have the letters from the estate agent to prove it). This is important because the dream is doing quite a good job of reminding me of the facts.

So it leads me to the thought that perhaps it is useful to focus on the way dream thoughts and images are just like waking thoughts and images, rather than different from them. Like some waking thoughts they do demonstrate the extraordinary and varied abilities of the human mind, which processes things in a ways that no computer yet built has got near to equaling.

And it leads me back to a thought I, and others, have had several times before.  That man invented God to explain this kind of thinking, vision or insight, which is so different from everyday reasoning. And it reminds me of one of the problems of having a manic depressive temperament.  When you try and describe something like this, which I still find amazing, people think that it just a sign of mania. And that makes me discontented with what I have written. Particularly the headline, ‘Any dream will not do’. I could just as well have taken any dream and made similar points.

What I am writing has in essence been written by many poets, novelists and playwrights. Andrew Lloyd Webber said it much better.

I close my eyes, draw back the curtains,

So I know for certain, what I always knew.  

He was right.

Any dream will do.