I feel like I’ve been dreaming a lot recently. Mind you, I’m not sure. Many years ago I would get up in the middle of the night if I had a really interesting dream, and I would write it down. Then one day I re-read one of my descriptions of one of these dreams. The plot of the dream was not all that interesting, and my description of the plot was not well written. Then once I had been reminded of that dream, I couldn’t get it out of my head (in fact, as I write this, some forty years later, memories of that dream come back to haunt me). I decided I no longer wanted to clutter up my memory with sad boring dreams. Ever since then, I have deliberately not remembered my dreams.
But it may not be dreams at all. It may simply be that I’ve had a great many ideas bubble up in the past few months. I feel like I’ve finally shed most of the stress induced by lockdown and the pandemic. I feel like my mind and my imagination are finally returning to normal, after two and a half years of high stress forced me to think and feel and imagine differently. And half a dozen years of busy-ness before that kept my mind running in predictable grooves.
How fragile imagination and thought are. Imagination and thought happen best when you have time and space and a lack of stress. How rare it is for us to lead lives that are not cramped for time and space, that are not filled with stress.