I had a horrible night last night which featured a graphic and disturbing nightmare. In restrospect, it was just as well that I was up late doing my assignment because it meant that I had less time to endure the horror of my imagination for the four hours or so while I was asleep.
I do not know what prompted the nightmare. It may have been the horrific images of a large fire that sent a tower block in London up in flames. I had seen the reports during the day and then stopped reading them after the reporting began to focus on very distressing details. I could see the situation was distressing, I did not need further distress so I stopped reading.
I have a history of dreaming in metaphor. I suppose many people do, hence the famous anxiety dream of suddenly discovering oneself naked in public. I have never had that one, for which I imagine the public in my dreams are eternally grateful. When we ran a pub many years ago, I had a dream one night that there was an enormous rat that kept appearing in the pub that we could not get rid of. It was about the size of a cat, and would appear without warning behind the bar. I spent quite a long time in the dream watching while a number of characters either tried and failed to get rid of it, or just refused outright to try.
It was only later the next day when I was pondering on the dream, that I realised what it was about. There was a local pimp who had started coming into the pub and, profession aside, he was once of the most unpleasant men it has ever been my misfortune to meet. He, of course had been the rat in the dream.
I am not sure what inspired the dream last night, it featured a body and it was graphic and awful. I have never been so pleased to have been woken by an alarm at six am. It may have been partly influenced by the fact that I was showed my husband the film From Dusk Until Dawn over the weekend.
I am pretty sure though, that the ‘body’ in my dream was actually my assignment, which has been very much on my mind. It is the fifth assignment that I have had to do for the course I stupidly thought was a good idea and which still has three more to go. I have been unable to motivate myself to get started and then I did start and regretted it because it was so boring. I then tried to write about the boring thing and just could not get any words in any order that looked anything like an idea.
Today, though, I buried the body. I finished a draft of the essay. It is not yet quite finished, it needs a bit of polishing and tightening and I can be confident when I say it is not good, but it is finished. I have arrived at the word limit and I have inserted word numbers into the document – always a satisfying moment. I will stay away from it tomorrow, finish it on Saturday morning and upload it for submission and as far away from my subconscious as possible.
fifilab 