Last night I had a dream about looking for writing materials
in a crappy shop. In my dream I was supposed to attend a lecture but had forgotten my
briefcase so I had no way to take lecture notes. Hence my attempt to find pen
and paper in the crappy shop.
Crappy shops are crammed with ephemeral junk, dross which
nobody would set out to buy but somehow these shops manage to exist principally
in tourist spots, especially the seaside. They sell anything from confectionery
to twee ornaments, cheap toys, novelty Dad’s Cuppa mugs, china fairies seated
on a china mushroom, glass paperweights, novelty signs to hang on the bathroom
door, tasteless coasters, postcards, hologram pictures of tigers, plastic
dinosaurs and so on and so on.
Dreams seem to be an amalgam or recently stimulated themes
whereby we make sense of the real world, so presumably the crappy shop is one
of my themes. Frustration would be another theme, not so common since I retired. Another theme is the lecture - I recently watched one on YouTube. Two others were the Victorian red brick institution where the
lecture was to be held and the old leather briefcase I’d forgotten. I recently saw a fine antique leather briefcase on the internet.
Other
themes are bright lights, because crappy shops tend to be brightly lit and
cheap ballpoint pens because the crappy shop in my dream had a big glass bowl
full of the cheapest of the cheap. I knew I’d have to buy two in case one didn’t work properly. That's a more subtle theme - just in case. The modern world is crammed with just in case themes.
The trouble was I knew I would never find a pad of A4 paper
suitable for those lecture notes. The crappy shop had heaps of pens but unless I wrote my
notes on Post-It notes I knew I wouldn’t find anything suitable. I had to search
for the paper by squeezing round lots of other customers and that’s another
theme, the crowded shop.
Then I woke up.
Phew - I didn’t need the paper after all. The dream has also
left me with an aversion to crappy shops, but presumably I had that already.
6 comments:
"Dreams seem to be an amalgam or recently stimulated themes whereby we make sense of the real world..."
Indeed. The crowded, brightly-lit crappy shop could almost be a metaphor for the direction our entire culture is currently taking.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fH-E6J5TJTY
Re Dyer, in 1851 the father of Reginald, Edward, is at Frog Lane, Islington, St. Stephens, Finsbury, aged 21 or about.
You could set one up and make lots of money.
All I ever get in dreams is the trip to the big town failure to find my destination , return and can't find where I parked the car followed by a long walk to the station to get home and then discover I have no money, is someone trying to tell me something !
Sam - good point.
Sackers - crikey I'd forgotten Reggie.
Demetrius - thanks - I'll follow that up.
James - I'm sure don't have the customer empathy.
Wiggia - sounds like a heavy dose of frustration. I used to have vaguely similar dreams but not so much now - or maybe I just forget them as soon as I wake up.
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