Aw Diddums

Mum has been looking through china, glass and pottery, saying “I had no idea I had so much stuff.” I blame that for last night’s dream.

In the dream we were travelling, leaving our home abroad. En route, we spent the night on a Pacific island. There was the sound of a helicopter during the night… I was asleep and dreaming about this helicopter. The people in it leaned over to have a close look at the island as they passed above. Dawn came, and I woke with a groan, thinking I better get ready and come out for breakfast and fruit juice, as the people in the helicopter would probably have arrived. I knew they were looking for me, expecting me to mind their small dog for them… I didn’t want to, but there was no help for it.

I was surprised to find we had no visitors… the helicopter had gone. During their search for their errant pet-minder, they’d been looking for signs near the main building of anybody having arrived there with all their baggage, such as vehicles parked all over the place, but had seen nothing. The island looked quiet and uninhabited. Not being found was a nice feeling.

Kristin, a friend, was sitting on the sofa in the sitting room, and I showed her three treasures Mum had packed in her personal suitcase. They were so important to her that she didn’t want them to travel separately. They were three furry bricks, including a talking one.

The chatterer had a glass screen set in the top so that I could read the words it spoke… which was nice. All it said, though, was a captcha-type code (individual to the brick), followed by “If you would like to guess my name, please move me after the code is given. When you move me just the right way, I will tell you my name.”

It was a kind of puzzle, worse in some ways than Rubik’s Cube. Ever since the 1960s, when this brick was made, lots of people had wasted hours shoogling the brick around, hoping it would unlock the secret of its name. Very few succeeded.

There’s no such thing, of course… it was just Mum’s dream brick.

I thought I better put all three back in the suitcase, otherwise I would be blamed if they were left behind. I scooted off to fetch the bricks from Kristin, thinking she was still on the sofa, and in her place was a woman I didn’t recognize. I flashed her a polite smile, anyway, trying not to look surprised, then realized it was my sister. She had been outside and suddenly seized up like a rusty robot, unable to move. People had to trundle her back indoors to sit down. She was still able to tell me about it, though, and turned her head slightly to look at me.

Time for bed again, I think…

The arty sites have a plethora of contests, just for fun, and I’ve been finding them a source of inspiration. I’ve only entered one so far, but got an honourable mention. I’ve been working with others in view, and it’s had the effect of making me even more prolific but not actually posting anything… just in case I post something I could have put in one of these small contests. Most of them say “only new images please.”

I’m usually reasonably pleased with the pictures I turn out, but something unsettling has occurred. The last four pictures I made… I didn’t just like them; I loved them. I was using techniques I avoided before (drawing and painting) and didn’t set out meaning to; it just happened. Even stranger, I only wanted to make one of them, and that was in the nature of a quickie (to try out a Photoshop tutorial).

A short aside: I have a bit of a mental block when it comes to talking about this particular hobby. I don’t like saying ‘my art’ or ‘my artwork’ as it sounds so pompous, and usually alternate between ‘my pictures’ and ‘my images’… but that gets old quite fast. Another mental block I have is when it comes to digital stuff, I can never say “I painted” or “I drew,” as I see those being for traditional media only (real pencils, paints, paper). I know that ‘painting’ and ‘drawing’ are accepted terms in digital media too… isn’t drawing with a mouse or a tablet pen just as much a physical process as drawing with a pencil? And it’s not even as precise, half the time. Still, I avoid it, as I know if I said “I painted a picture today,” most people would assume I’d had the watercolours out.

That leaves me with the problem of how to describe the process… “I made something, created something, did something?” Icky. Overtones of school and Blue Peter.

About the four pictures I made that I liked more than I expected to… I was fairly sure none of them would work, and if they did, it would take some hard slogging to make anything of them; wouldn’t it be easier to make a vector picture with gradients and layer styles? I was in two minds about trying these projects at all. Even worse, I disliked the raw material I started out with… two ugly fractals, an artificial vector flower (made by myself in Paintshop Pro), an untidy Photoshop brush (still be to superceded… deliberately spelling that with a ‘c’…) and a shaky drawing with the small El Cheapo tablet dating from the Year 2000 which I recently dug out from a plastic bag. (It doesn’t go with Mac System X, so I had to put it on the PC… and even then the installation was a bit iffy).

The tablet is supposed to make drawing easier, but my first effort was messy and not worth a second look. I thought “never mind, I’ll send it across to the Mac so the little white Mac-mouse can clean it up.” That’s not what the tablet is for… but the shaky drawing is now in one of my Golden Four pictures.

The thing is, you often hear people say (usually of photos) that if it was bad to start with, you can’t make it good. I disagree. You could take the worst photo in the world and turn it into a thing of beauty, though it probably wouldn’t be a photo any more.

To start with, it’s all I can do to keep on with these tough projects, but as time goes by and I see signs that something good is emerging, a sense of wonder creeps in… and you couldn’t drag me away.

This might not seem to be connected, but we were watching Stargate after missing the beginning. It was about an alien city in a dome; the citizens were linked to a main computer and were being brainwashed. People were being killed to keep the population small and manageable, and the survivors’ memories were altered so that they wouldn’t notice their fellows had vanished. I was convinced the Council (or some higher body) were the villains, but they were as much victims as anybody. At the end, I said to Mum, “who was doing it?”
“The computer,” said Mum, squinting strangely at me.
“I just thought… someone must have programmed it to do those things?”
“It was the computer. It got into their minds, like it’s got into yours, and makes them all unseeing and unheeding…”

So, the computer’s the villain. Such a weaver of fantastic worlds and things that don’t exist… even pictures that aren’t on paper. Though, the other day, someone I was talking to said it wasn’t till she had one of her fractals professionally printed and held it in her hands that she realized it was real.

Sometimes I wonder what will happen when I die… will all these pictures, including the Golden Four, be zapped? My diaries burned, disks shredded, words lost? My whole life on computer, deleted.

Mum says she doesn’t care what happens after she dies. The whole planet could blow up; it wouldn’t make any difference to her. But it matters to me. Apart from caring what happens to cats, trees, and dolphins, I want to feel I’ve left some kind of mark. If the planet implodes, so do my pictures. Maybe I will be the only person (apart from Mum and the Computer) to have seen them.

It’s funny how the subconscious mind operates. The other night I dreamed a young student was procrastinating by churning out fractals and Apophysis scripts instead of studying for his exams. His study topics included fractals but he was wasting time on fractal art instead. He even wrote a little poem which he put on his site… and this is it, word for word, not a woolly half-memory of a fading dream:

The breaks are in the wrong places but it has exactly 17 syllables… like a haiku. Yes, I suppose the computer has got into my mind.

Delilah just loves insects and plays cat-and-mouse with them. Having bopped a fly so that it lay at her feet, I thought she would crush and eat it… but she picked it up in her mouth and dropped it near Samson, alive and kicking, so that they could both bully it.

I don’t like to see anything tortured, so I scooped it up in my hands (it didn’t protest) and pushed it outside the door. The feeling of its wings fluttering against my palms made me frown for a moment… I was reminded of a dream I had a couple of nights earlier.

In this dream, I was living alone in London. I had lots of friends there but had withdrawn from their company for a little. I needed time on my own but felt guilty. One lovely sunny morning, the sky was blue and the breezes playing, and I was having a quiet little picnic on the grass well away from the crowds. There were trees heavy with pink blossom, and I stood beside them and tried to compose a little haiku.

“The may tree blooms… no, wait. The may tree blossoms…”

Pacian came up and stretched out on the grass beside my picnic basket, heaving a sigh. “What a day. So full of crowds in the Big Smoke. We haven’t seen you around for a while. You hibernating or sumpting?”
“Oh, you know me,” I said. “Just taking time out for a while. How is Geosomin?”
“Oh, fine, fine! She was asking after you too. Are you coming round to see the new baby?”
“Oh yes, the baby. I’ve not met him yet, have I? I will come round soon; just not today.”
“Don’t leave it too long.”
“I won’t. Well… I better be getting home now. Things to do.”

I stood up and packed the food away in my trolley. Sharky was in the park too, strolling around, so I popped him in the trolley and zipped up the lid. It was the best way to get him home through the streets. I was just about to set off when Pacian stopped me. “Sharky is kicking up a rumpus.”

I opened the trolley and peeked in… sure enough, Sharky wasn’t sitting purring as I had imagined – he was half standing, wailing anxiously at me, things falling on top of him.

“Oh,” I said, “I thought he was sitting comfortably on the rug, but he’s just jumbled up in there with the rest of my stuff.” I felt upset because he had been shouting inside the trolley and I didn’t hear… it took someone else to point it out.
I pulled everything straight so that the cat was sitting peaceably on the rug again, zipped up the trolley, and set off.

My way home lay through a market… it was half empty today, but I ran into an ex-colleague, Dick. He was packing up a stall.
“Nobody’s around,” he said. “I’m taking all this stuff back to the office.”
“It’s a nice day for it,” I said. “How’s Donna?”
“Donna’s her usual self.”
Once he told me Donna didn’t like the song ‘Oh Donna, you make me stand up; you make me sit down, Donna, sit down, Donna…’ I had grown up with the song, and didn’t sympathize – till I looked up the lyrics.
“How are things at work, Dick?”
“Oh, so-so. Every thing’s at sixes and sevens just now. We could do with more workers.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. “But it’s a beautiful day and I’m enjoying my freedom. Have fun!”

I took off, leaving Dick labouring disconsolately.

Near the candyfloss stall, a large moth whirled round and round me, trying to escape the attentions of a large red-coloured rat. The rat ran round and round me, scrambling across my clothing. They were both moving very fast, and I caught the moth and held it between my hands, trying to protect it from the rat. My heart was in my mouth as I was worried the rat would get the moth anyway, and then I would feel terrible for trying to protect it and not succeeding. It was fine, though; I took the moth somewhere safe and let it fly away… and the rat never knew. It kept looking round for it, and eventually gave up and went to get some candyfloss instead.

Meanwhile, Samson and Delilah are still torturing all the flies they can catch. Those insects have no idea what it takes to stay out of the wee devils’ reach. I have rescued three so far, all lightly battering the palms of my hands. Yesterday when they were chasing one which was waving the white flag of surrender, I picked it up and popped it out of the window. The cats watched it zoom off into the blue, then turned and glared at me.

I don’t think I’m Person of Note around here at the moment…

I’ve gone a little quiet, I know – I’m following more Photoshop tutorials. It’s great when I find ones I can use in Photoshop Elements 2.0. So many other Photoshoppers seem able to afford the top applications.

On Wednesday night I had a dream…. it cast a slight shade, a transparent gradient, over my day. The closer we got to bedtime, the bluer the cast of my mood.

In the dream, I went to tea with one of my cat clients, doing my best to make pleasant conversation, but she cocked a sardonic eyebrow at me. I was relieved when one of her cats shot off to the end of the garden, and a terrible caterwauling arose. It seemed her cat was picking on one of my cats, Lucky. Lucky died years back, before I started this blog.

I rescued him by picking him up and carrying him back to my seat. He seemed surprised at first, then clung closely to me, purring deeply. I could feel it vibrating through my heart. He seemed to be saying “it’s such a long time since you last held me.” I was bemused to realize it myself, and couldn’t think why such a distance had grown between us.

Later in the dream I discovered I had a huge aquarium at the back of my upstairs sitting room. It contained three large fish, about 40 cm long: two sharks and a human diver. I had to carry one of the fish to another part of the house in a red plastic bucket. I could have picked any of the three – the diver, the slim pretty shark, or the strong, sturdy, moody shark… I picked the moody one. He was the most likely to bite, but I felt he would be better able to deal with being removed from the tank. After scooping him out, I was annoyed to find there was no water in the bucket – I had to dash off to get some before I could put him in.

We were possibly showing him to a visitor, after which I returned him to the tank… he was slightly limp, but recovered quickly. Nobody had been bitten.

Sharky… I wonder if there’s a connection. Cats who have passed on… one of them missing me, and the other swimming moodily in a tank.

And then thinking how people are here one day and gone the next. Dad working abroad, making a life for himself and his family – and now it’s just us. And the baby mouse… I rescued him from the cats. At first I thought he was dead, and Samson was pinning him down with one claw, but when I got closer, the little thing was shaking. His legs were so thin and crumpled under him that one looked broken, but he was just weak. I took him straight outside with some crumbs. I don’t like wearing my nice pink slippers outside, but for the mouse’s sake, I trekked them across wet grass and placed him in a snug corner near the shed. He hobbled and wobbled slowly under the shed… Not convinced he will have survived, but maybe he found a nest of leaves and slept himself to recovery.

Mum accused Samson of nibbling the top off a muffin, but I said I gave it to the mouse.

I was in Photoshop Elements painting a light bulb in a lamp, when a song came into my head… one of Melanie’s most ’sobbing’ melodies. It might have been Candles in the Rain but I’m not sure; it’s years since I’ve played her music. It wasn’t Ruby Tuesday; I would recognize it as soon as it came up.

The Photoshop tutorial was absorbing, but while working on it, I remembered a stray comment from one of the 30 or 40 others who have already followed it. She said she decided to do it because there was nothing else to do, and she was feeling sad, longing for some human contact. I became aware in my mind of all the others tracing the same lines – some quickly, some slowly, some happily, others less so.

I’d like a nice pink gradient tomorrow, please, and a different song.

Last night I dreamed I was a nervous wreck. My cat had just died and my life was on rocky ground. I went to the local school during the night, when it was empty of all staff and pupils, and pinned my cat’s best show rosettes on the padded back of a school chair. (Since when were school chairs padded?) I also typed a couple of sheets about my unhappy experiences, and pinned them alongside the rosettes.

They stayed there for a few months and became quite a feature of the school. The teachers and schoolchildren were talking about them and hadn’t taken them down. I wondered if they kept so many chairs in the school that they didn’t have to use that one, or if there was a girl who would perch gently, half turned, so she wouldn’t squash the rosettes.

One day I realized I was feeling better; the experiences I wrote about were in my past and I didn’t want them hanging in full view any more. If I cared at all about the cat I had lost, I should get the rosettes back before the school itself took them down. All of a sudden I was filled with a sense of urgency – I had to get out there that night, before it was too late.

After waking up, it occurred to me the essays in the dream represented my blog.

I am still (very slowly) going through old blog posts and deleting many which have passed their date of usefulness. It’s true I posted them when I needed to, or when they were part of an ongoing story, but they don’t have to be up there forever. When I’ve finished editing those, I’ll start on the newer ones here. Editing is something we should always keep in mind as bloggers or site owners… though sometimes we get tired and just let things slide.

I also have desktop wallpapers ‘out there’ that I don’t like any more! They will be coming down eventually as well.

As for the cats’ rosettes… I don’t know what to do with them. I said I would go through them and keep all the best, and I did.. but there are still too many. I’m waiting to lose interest but I haven’t yet, because of the cats who won them. There’s a rosette pinned on the cork board behind this computer – Best of Breed. Could be Sharky’s, could be Thor’s. I noticed the other day some toothmarks at the bottom of its trailing ribbons – probably courtesy of Delilah. At first I was sad and annoyed, then shrugged it off. The cats never cared. One day I won’t either.

Last night I wrote about The Blob and the Flood, then set WordPress to linger over Sharky’s silhouette while I pottered whimperingly to bed. All of a sudden I remembered part of the dream I’d forgotten – the bit connected with the university.

I was me again, as a student of 20 odd years ago. I was looking for a flat to live in by myself, one I could rent. I saw one I liked, but visited a second time before making up my mind. My parents came with a few family friends. We were scattered throughout the flat, poking around the rooms, and everybody was as impressed as I was.

“You’ve found a real corker here,” said my father, “but let Jim check out a few things before we sign on the dotted line.”

A red potted geranium tumbled off the kitchen windowsill… and that was just the start. The longer we spent there, the stranger it seemed. Things fell down with nobody near them, while machinery and other systems turned themselves on and off with hummings, whirrings and clankings. A friend scraped suspiciously at the paint where a pale blue wall ornament had just clattered off.

Standing in the gloomy, claustrophobic hall, I stared at a light and had a moment of terrified clarity. Although it was a wall light, it looked like one of those old-style bankers’ lamps, and was painted in a whiplash metallic sheen similar to a layer style I downloaded just the night before.

I called Mum, pointing at the light, which was flickering and buzzing, and emitting little cracks of lightning. In the distance, something else thudded to the floor.

“I don’t want this house,” I said. “With all of you here in the daytime, it’s charming and amusing, but can you imagine what it will be like when I’m alone here at night? There’s something about all of this that’s a bit odd – nobody’s causing any of it. I would be scared out of my wits.”

Mum nodded, and Dad arrived and said “Jim has just been saying the flat is not what it seems. It’s very damp and not particularly sturdy, but someone put in a new kitchen and has done a first class job of the paintwork. It won’t last long – shortly after you move in, it will all be peeling off.”

Maybe The Blob was the landlord and desired revenge on me for rejecting his flat. Who knows?

Notes on the image
Little lightning flashes: Obsidian Dawn brushes.
Layer styles used on lamp: Shelby Kate Schmitz.

Have any of you dreamed about the character in this picture? Last night that was my misfortune.

His name is The Blob, and he has sinister intent.

I’m not sure what his intent is, exactly, and don’t particularly want to know. He’s a paranormal manifestation of some type, about the same size as a cat, and he lounges around sizing up his prey before going in for the kill.

I don’t remember much about the dream, but he was sitting on a shelf of books, looking at me. The rest of the dream is a vague jumble of deserted warehouses, a man who was helping me corner The Blob (had we become stalkers of the stalker?) and possibly even a panic room of some description. I’ve a feeling that the depressing university was somehow involved as well, but only as some form of distant backdrop.

There was another bit of my dream that doesn’t seem to be connected, but has the same dark overtones. I wasn’t me any more… I was a boy of about 9 or 10. My mother and sister were in Germany, and I was living with my father in a single attic room in Paris.

All our worldly possessions were in the room. One stormy night we were watching the news on our tiny black and white TV, the old kind with a little round set-top aerial. They said there might be some bad floods during the night. My father said we better be careful – these floods were so bad they might reach us in our attic.

We turned out the light and slept – I was at the far end of the room from the door (there wasn’t a hatch… probably this attic was divided up into rooms, and the hatch was somewhere else). My father’s bed wasn’t far away, but it was nearer the door. I was worried about all our books and stuff, but there wasn’t a lot we could do.

In the very early hours of the morning when I woke, I wondered if anything was different. I felt warm, dry and comfortable enough, but decided it might be wiser to look before leaping out of bed like I normally did. That was just as well, as the flood had come in during the night and was all round the bed, though it was particularly bad nearer the door.

I’m not sure that The Blob didn’t surface at this point… when I sat up and looked around at the flood waters, The Blob was there too, sitting on the books and blinking at me. I had to wade past him to get dressed.

I could remember so clearly what The Blob looked like that I decided to illustrate him…. and the flood as well. I didn’t start till it was nearly time to go to bed again (after I write this) and when Mum suddenly came up behind me and startled me (I didn’t hear her coming), I jumped nervously and shrieked. She peered suspiciously at The Blob, who was well advanced with his green glow and scary yellow eyes.

“What’s that?”
“The Blob… I dreamed about him last night.”
“Well that’s your fault.” (A hint I was sitting up too late making weird and wonderful pictures on the computer).
“He looks familiar,” she added, thoughtfully.

That made me laugh, because I had exactly the same thought only that morning when I was thinking about it.

“Cheeky?”
“Yes…”

Her cat Cheeky. Typical. Probably the kittens have been having this dream as well… Samson chases her as much as she chases him, but Delilah is quite scared of her. I’m sure the kittens have little games together when Samson slinks after Delilah in a certain sinister way… “I’m the big bad Cheeky and I’m coming after you!” Delilah runs off in a panicky flurry.

Anyway, I’ve introduced you to the stuff of our nightmares. Now you can dream about him too.

Last night I dreamed I had been reminded (to my surprise) that I used to have two cats, but for some reason or another had given them to someone else. Couldn’t afford to keep them at the time… that was pure dreaming, as these cats did not exist in my life!

In the dream I was shown pictures and reminded how I had called one of them after Arthur Wendell, and everybody called him Art for short.

I struggled awake, saying “I can’t tell the blog about that; I can’t give the real names of my pets,” then woke up fully and realized I haven’t called a cat that anyway. I don’t know who Arthur Wendell is. It was in my mind that he was a historian, but I’ve not been reading or researching anything by anyone with that name.

It’s odd what falls out of the mind when you let it run around by itself. I know there used to be a white cat in a catfood commercial called Arthur.

I forgot all about the dream till my sister sent an email saying she had been trundling around today much as usual, then someone got in touch with her and said “hello, do you remember these two kittens you homed with me? I know it’s been a while since we’ve talked, but I thought you might like an update.” And sent some photos.

My sister was fascinated, and said she hadn’t thought about them in a while. I looked at the photos and said one of them had a particularly distinctive face.
“I don’t recognize that one at all,” she said.
“Are they right about him being one of yours? Are they sure a goblin didn’t snatch the real kitten and leave a changling?”
“I wondered. Perhaps I shouldn’t have called him Gobbolino,” she said. (His name was changed by the owners – when I made that remark, I didn’t even know what his name used to be!)

Late at night Mum went to bed, then came upstairs grumbling that some cat had peed on her bed and completely messed up her duvet. She got a blanket out of the cupboard and was about to take that downstairs when I reminded her there was a spare duvet draped on the sofa… it was clean and washed, and all she really needed to do was change the cover.

This is one of those rather distracting moments… you know that it’s a good thing to ‘travel light’ so to speak, and rather than hoard stuff, you should get used to discarding (or rehoming!) the things you do not personally need. Storing things up ‘just in case’ is supposed to be a no-no.

Much of the time that makes sense. When you keep all the things you might use, and then go looking for something when it finally might be useful, you can never find it because of all the other things you’ve kept just in case they’ll be useful.

After a long, hard struggle, you’re just getting used to this idea of a more ascetic life and are steeling yourself to discard more things… then life throws a spanner into the works, in the form of doubt. The duvet on the sofa was a spare one from my house that we didn’t have room for. There was no room left in any of the cupboards, or in the loft, or in my bedroom. I couldn’t bring myself to chuck it out, though, and it wasn’t quite new enough for a charity shop, so I put an old duvet cover on it (one I had been meaning to throw out of course, but was quite fond of because it went to university with me), and draped the whole lot over my sofa. To keep it clean and comfortable, and so I can crawl under it and watch the TV if it’s one of those days. Why not?

Don’t you think now that it’s a good thing I didn’t throw it out?

Well, having a spare duvet was probably one of our better ideas. The real bad idea is keeping all the stuff that shoved the spare duvet out of the wardrobe in the first place… but I don’t want to think about that too much. It just proves my priorities are possibly in the wrong place, and that’s even more depressing than being labelled a hoarder.

I woke too early again, and Delilah licked my face. This always makes me cringe, for a reason. For years I’ve had to push away any cat who wanted to lick my face and it makes me feel terrible, like pushing away a child who tries to kiss your cheek. At least you could explain to old-enough children why you were doing that, but you can never explain to a cat.

You wish they would curl up comfortably in the crook of your neck and not try to do the lick. If you let them snuggle up again after blocking them, they try to lick again. If you’ve put up a hand, sometimes they sneak their nose under and lick you anyway.

When Delilah licked my face, I rubbed the area energetically, but after about 30 seconds, my skin started to itch and prickle. I had to get up and slap some TCP on – that’s the only thing (that I’ve tried) that stops the itching and prevents spots from forming. Rinsing your face with plain water doesn’t help, even with vigorous towelling afterwards.

I’ve a feeling I mentioned this before, saying that I was taking my bottle of TCP so much for granted that one day when I reached for it and tried to splash a little into the palm of my hand, all that came out one one solitary drip. I thought that bottle would go on forever and was almost in mourning.

When I got back into bed I was so wide awake I considered heading straight for the computer to type in a Google search: “skin reaction to cat licks.” Fortunately common sense prevailed and I aimed for more sleep instead. There’s something not quite right if you’re Googling for every little thing at all hours of the day and night.

I dreamed that a crime was being committed, to do with someone’s missing daughter. In my dream I contacted the police anonymously, as they hadn’t been aware of the crime up till then, and later on they came to the school (where we were all sitting in assembly) and put out a message (which somehow I was reading as a gigantic printed email hung over the top of the stage) about how everybody had to be very wary and alert, and if there was anybody there called Diddums, would she please get in touch. Informants had told them Diddums pronounced her name with a stress on the DID… that might be a small clue as to her identity.

I knew they hoped I might have more to tell them, but I DIDn’t. I wasn’t very worried, and while everybody else was looking at each other, saying “who’s Diddums?” I was wondering fretfully who it was who had been telling the police how I spoke, and how did they know that without knowing who I was, and what was wrong with pronouncing Diddums that way anyway?? Was it wrong? Did everybody else say, for example, “Little DidDUMS was acting up this morning?”

I’m constantly being tripped up by words I only know from reading them… for instance, today I was watching The Weakest Link. Anne Robinson asked “what kind of hat has a name that means ‘bell’?”
“Cloche!” I said, smugly – pronouncing it ‘closhay’.
The girl being asked the question said “cap?”
Anne said “no, cloche!” (pronouncing it ‘closh’).
Oh. Sometimes I wonder how I would do in a quiz show if I gave the right answer but pronounced it wrong.
But I’m rambling…

I had got about that far in my dream, wondering why the police considered my pronunciation was so offbeat, then my nose twitched and I smelled bacon frying. “Very nice,” I thought, “but she shouldn’t have started it so early… I’m too tired to get up, even for bacon and eggs.” Then Mum was trying to wake me up. I felt so sleepy I couldn’t move, and could only blink my eyes at her. Gradually it occurred to me that nobody was frying bacon… it was just that some kitten had been visiting the tray.

I probably wouldn’t have moved for some time, but Delilah came and slurped my cheek despite the smell of TCP.

After leaping up precipitately and rushing for my TCP bottle, I discovered a crime scene in the bathroom… plant soil everywhere. Some unknown individual or individuals had thrown the plant bodily off the bathroom shelf. The prime suspect is one Miss Delilah, along with her usual partner in crime, Master Samson. We had a bit of cleaning up to do before we could go out anywhere. Mum wanted to go right after, but I said I was hollow with cleaning up everywhere and hadn’t even had breakfast, so she said “hurry up.” As nobody had been frying any bacon, it had to be cereal.

It was not till the evening I made that Google search for ’skin reaction to cat licks’ and…. ha ha! It seems I’m allergic to cats.

I don’t know why I was so surprised. I was allergic to my grandmother’s Siamese cat when I came home after my first term at university. It was so bad I couldn’t lie down to sleep – too congested. It eased with time…

Obviously it’s a very mild allergy now. Cat scratches go red and white, and itch. I sneeze and wheeze, and my throat catches on nothing. Only today I was lining up in the bank, and all of a sudden my throat stung, my eyes watered, and I was concerned that it would be my turn to talk to the bank clerk and I would be too busy choking. Fortunately I calmed down before I got to the counter… bank queues are never that quick.

When your throat catches in that manner, the worst thing you can do is cough. You want to cough, but if you cough, it stings more. I must have breathed in a particle of musty bank dust or something, and my throat was already oversensitive. Maybe the musty mote of dust flew off another cat owner, waiting ahead of me in the queue.

Shortly after the kittens arrived to live with us, I noticed my nose was getting very red and itchy – almost sore. I said “maybe it’s because Samson insists on standing right under my nose to be stroked, and all the dust flies off him,” but I wasn’t being serious. I thought it was more likely to be pollen beginning its mad Spring whirl, or dust from hoovering the house or changing the cat litter tray. But some of these websites point out that you can be desensitized to your old cat, and when it dies and you bring a new one in, suddenly you’re sneezing and wheezing.

The throat thing was something I didn’t realize might have anything to do with cats. Ah… (light bulb switches on over head).

I would never have kept cats this long if any of these reactions had been extreme, so I don’t see my lifestyle changing in a hurry. One thing that did shock me when I was reading up on cat allergies was that some people are allergic to cat owners and not just cats. Someone described swelling up when sitting next to some oblivious pet owner on the bus. I don’t sit on buses these days, but it makes me feel terrible that I could have that effect on anyone. Oy.

My dream last night was one of the few that touched on my hearing problems. It was also one of my university dreams, which I do seem to get periodically!

I dreamed that I went back to university, and went straight to the halls of residence. I didn’t know any of the other girls except for one – my best friend Honey.

I was apparently the first to arrive, and the lady showing me where to go asked me something I didn’t quite catch… but it seemed to be about my name. “Diddums McDiddums,” I said. The lady wrote it down in a hard-backed black journal with a black ballpoint pen.

The other women arrived one by one -– I didn’t see Honey arrive as she went straight to her room. I was walking around the kitchen, looking to see where everything was. I wondered how to work the dishwasher, and started looking for instructions. There was a pile of instructions in one of the drawers – they were in a folder with black words printed on it: “DIDDUMS McDIDDUMS – Instructions”.

I was a bit thrown by this. Now that I came to think of it, my name was everywhere, on all the folders, drawers, cereal boxes and ring binders. I couldn’t imagine why. Wasn’t everything in the kitchen for all the girls, not just for me?

Suddenly I realized what had happened… when the staff member asked for a name, it wasn’t my name she wanted – she was asking me to give a name to the student house so that it could be identified. In my confusion, I had asked her to name the entire house after me.

Horrors! The other girls wouldn’t understand in the least, and would probably consider me arrogant.

I thought it couldn’t possibly get worse, but more was in store… the instructions for the dishwasher weren’t in the folder of instructions. I kept looking through the drawers, and finally spotted it in a second folder, but one of the girls spoke to me and I shut the drawer and turned away. Afterwards, I went back to get it, and there was no folder in the drawer! I went through all the drawers again, thinking I must have looked in the wrong one, but there was still no second folder – just the first one.

I decided to give up… it was time to go to my room to unpack.

I headed up the main flight of stairs, passing all the rooms, knowing my room was on the very top floor. I ended up on the floor below it… that was where the stairs came to an end. My room was still up there – I could see my door, and the door of the room opposite, but the stairs didn’t reach that far. I looked round helplessly. I was standing outside two bedrooms – one belonged to a girl I didn’t know, and the other belonged to my friend Honey.

I could see Honey, talking to the other girl – she pretended she didn’t know I was there. I considered going over to speak to her anyway, but decided I didn’t want to force her into doing something she didn’t want to do. I was so distraught I wanted to sit on the landing and bawl. I wanted someone to show me some friendliness and understanding.

Suddenly I remembered I could get to my bedroom, but only by a narrow stair round the back. For some reason it was very difficult for me to return down the main stairs – I couldn’t walk on any of the steps, but had to inch my way down the railings. I was afraid of falling, but one of my penpals appeared from nowhere and helped me. He was laughing slightly – “Diddums, you do get in the most awful pickle!” – but he looked concerned as well.

There was an odd thing about this dream – I’ve had it before! It didn’t have the same events, but I’m sure I dreamed about this same university residence hall, with the main stairs going up the middle and stopping on the floor below mine. I always forgot that I couldn’t reach my private room the same way everybody else could… and always had to go back down to the ground floor and round to the smaller stairs at the back.

I’m sure I dreamed that before. And Honey is always turning a cold shoulder on me. Depressing.

Last night I dreamed we saw two down-and-outs featured on the News – “two beautiful men in a ditch”. They lived in Edinburgh somewhere in the centre of town. They were intelligent and well-read as well as handsome, and had been interviewed giving some of their views on modern society.

My friends were so fascinated by these interesting people that we decided to visit Edinburgh to see if we could spot them. Of course they had no fixed abode that we knew of, but we began searching the edge of a forest park, armed with cameras and binoculars.

In no time at all we discovered them living in two neighbouring hollowed-out trees. One of them had been given free tins of olive green paint, and was redecorating the inside of his.

I didn’t like that colour at all, having worked to eradicate all traces of it from my own home (it’s tricky covering that stuff with pale paint), but when he told me the reason he was doing it was because he’d seen me some time earlier, and was making his tree all nice for when we got married, I couldn’t help feeling quite chuffed.

This famous, intelligent and beautiful tramp could have had his pick of anyone in Edinburgh – and he’d chosen me.

I had a horrible, desperate, regretful dream last night. I was apparently still working with the office I was angry at. They cooked up some weird socializing scheme and had us staying together for a few nights in one large open plan bedroom, with lots of beds and only a few partitions (sounds exactly how the actual office was, except it had desks and computers instead of beds…) Just like that office, it was all on one floor, and only lucky people got a well-lit space near a window.

In my dream I was one of the first to arrive, and I got a prime spot – my bed was standing beside a lovely, large, crackling fire. I had plenty of space and wasn’t too far away from the exit.

Mum and my sister arrived to play a game of cards with me. They set up the card table and then complained there wasn’t enough elbow room. They would need to move my bed a little in order to make more room for the card table. I said “OK,” and went to do something else while they did that, and when I returned, they had moved my entire bed to another part of the building.

I got very cross and demanded to know why they did that – they didn’t even need to do that. Why did they do that?? I wouldn’t have let them, if I’d known!

Mum looked guilty and said they just thought my bed would be better over in this other part of the building.

I went to look, and my bed had been put in a colder, darker, smaller space. There was nothing better about it at all.

Mum said if I didn’t like it there, I could look around and see if there was somewhere nicer. She took me behind a pair of partitions – at first sight it looked quieter and more private, as there were only two beds there, one vacant… then I realized the other bed was occupied by a harassed young father trying to feed a baby.

I said that was the last place I would choose to move to, and Mum said she had to admit she wouldn’t go there either.

Worried, I hurried back to my prime spot by the warm fire, hoping nobody else had moved in… and a lady had set up a couple of tables and was happily sitting, drinking wine. She had lots of wine glasses laid out and was obviously expecting to be joined by a party of her friends.

Shaking with rage, I marched up to her and asked how she dared to move into a space that wasn’t hers; nobody said she could set up her tables there. Looking upset, she leapt to her feet…

I thought to myself “but it’s only for a few days; it’s not the end of the world. I should stay where they moved my bed and stop making such a scene.”
The thing was, the two issues that rankled with me were:
(1) misunderstanding what Mum had in mind when she said she was going to make changes;
(2) feeling that someone had lost something of value to me that I would have left alone.

Those are true for real life, too – especially the first. It’s so frustrating (and leads to loss, damage etc) when I don’t hear properly what someone has said, or when the other person misunderstands or forgets what I have said, or both.

Another thing that irritates me is when someone brings down the loft ladder, then goes away and forgets about it so that I have to put it away…

Total Sensory Deprivation – a few nights ago I recorded a Horizon documentary on the subject. It reminded me of the office I used to work in.

You would expect everyone to have a fair number of office connections and opportunities for socializing (if only by the water cooler, though we didn’t have one). Unfortunately I wasn’t really talking to anyone after my original friends and contacts left for pastures new. I tried in my quiet way to make new friends, but people had their own friends already and didn’t pay a lot of attention. I think they didn’t want to get involved with someone so deaf and so ’shy’, feeling that I was not their responsibility. They could get on with office life in their own comfortable bubbles and leave me to my colleagues in my own small department. After all, the folk in my department were the ones who chose me.

The feeling was awful, actually, and the longer it went on, the worse I felt. I wasn’t getting any of the office news or gossip, and I had no one to vent steam with or help me get a sense of proportion about things.

Some people were quite kind and friendly, but when I asked one what happened at a pension-related meeting, she forwarded my email (without checking with me first) to the Human Resources Manager. He told me people were not allowed to advise others, for legal reasons. It was now office policy.

Because of my profound hearing loss, I never knew what people were saying at meetings or amongst themselves. It made me wonder how I was ever going to inform myself if no one was allowed to discuss meetings with me… I wanted to tear my hair out!

There was an image in my mind of what I was going through, and I can still recall it. It felt to me as though I was falling down a bottomless well. I was trying to reach out and touch the sides but all I felt was air whistling past my fingertips. Not Alice in Wonderland – more like Diddums in Limbo.

That was my state of mind not so long before I crashed.

Total Sensory Deprivation? No, not quite. But the concept reminds me of that office situation – of me falling down my dark well, disassociated from everybody else.

The Horizon documentary was interesting – in an experiment, people were shut for 48 hours in small, bare cells without light, sound, human interaction or entertainment. It had quite a disturbing effect on them – some started to hallucinate, but I wondered how much that had to do with tiredness. That’s probably the point – they’d feel tired, out of touch and less sure of themselves.

One man who was kept in solitary confinement in real life talked of his experiences. When he mentioned his auditory hallucinations, I laughed out loud. The more he described them, the louder I laughed – and this was in the middle of me grieving for my cat, so I felt slightly hysterical. It wasn’t because I thought what happened to the man was funny, but because I get those… those auditory hallucinations.

I hear music – choirs, orchestras, jazz singers, country singers, opera singers. When you allow them to disturb you, they get louder. And then suddenly they stop, just like that! As though someone took a needle off a record.

It’s very strange.

I never thought of it as hallucinating, which is probably why I’ve been more fascinated than stressed; even comforted sometimes. To me it’s a form of tinnitus. Maybe it even masks the real tinnitus, which to many people is just a wasp’s scream (description courtesy of my mother).

Nor is it like having pop hits playing in your head, or (you’ll hate me for this) How Much is That Doggy in the Window? You can HEAR heavenly choirs or beautiful baritones or whatever – the sounds are in your ears.

At my old house I abandoned my bedroom, preferring to sleep on my sofa. I was never quite sure why I did that, apart from a general feeling of claustrophobia. The documentary offered me a fresh insight. Was it so different from the kind of experiences the people in the experiment were going through? With my blinds closed and lined curtains drawn, it was fairly dark in my room – and without my glasses I’m very myopic. Without my hearing aids I’m almost stone deaf. There were no other humans to talk to in that house: lack of human interaction. Then, when you’re lying there, trying to get to sleep, there is nothing to occupy yourself with. Thus I got the auditory hallucinations quite frequently, and when I was absolutely exhausted but not dropping off for any reason, I very occasionally got visual hallucinations as well. (Like Mr Guppy). Now that DID frighten me, in a way that the heavenly choirs didn’t.

It wasn’t Total Sensory Deprivation, but it wasn’t all that far off.

When I moved out to the sofa, I had two windows and a glass door – it was a lighter room. There were the cats strolling in and out: company. There was the TV… talking people and entertainment just a switch away. I feel sure now that’s why I changed rooms… and I’m not potty or anything, I’m just like any other human being. I like to be a part of life.

A recent dream involved my black shoulder bag. I went out somewhere and realized I’d left it at home, so turned round and went back. Away ahead of me I could see a bench at the side of the track, with my black shoulder bag sitting on it – I must have left it there. There was a woman walking ahead of me who was going to get there first – I was worried in case I had problems convincing her that I was the real owner, so I hurried past to reach the bag first. I was worried for a while I wouldn’t make it in time.

I made it, snatched up my bag from under her nose, and headed home. Mum and my sister were outside – my sister was flying round the house on a special glider done up like a witch’s broomstick. Or she was trying to. She got it into the air and took one turn round the house, then it fell to bits so that she came crashing to the ground. Mum turned to me, sighing, and said, “She can never fly a broomstick.”

We went over and picked up the shattered heap of wood and twigs to examine it.
“Look,” said Mum – “the invisible magic glue has worn off already. You MUST have a broomstick checked every year to make sure it’s in proper working order, as invisible magic glue ages fast.”

I made a mental note to have my own broomstick MOTed.

I dreamed last night that I went on a trip to the moon with a group of other people. Just before I disembarked from the rocket ship or whatever it was, I checked my Mac OSX horoscope widget, and it warned me that there was a disaster in the brewing and I shouldn’t go out anywhere.

Well, it seemed a nice clear day, and disasters generally affect people you don’t even know, so I gathered together my picnic stuff and strolled out onto the surface of the moon.

It looked just like Earth. There were trees and plants and hills and flowers, and a wide, deep stream called the Bosphorus Rambles.* We stood on a bridge and looked down, and then half of us went one way and half went the other. I thought the disaster would happen to the ones who went the other way, so at first I felt safe. Before coming down off the bridge, I looked over and saw a politician talking to television cameras. He was standing on a smooth golden-brown rock which sloped gradually into the green, swirling stream. He talked animatedly, waving his arms around.

I said to no one in particular, “he’s going to fall in.”
The politician tripped and rolled down the rock, but then stopped short of the edge of the water.
“Oh,” I said – “he’s not.”
The politician picked himself up then stumbled again, falling into the emerald green water with a splash. I shuddered in sympathy even as I said “oh wait – he did.”
I turned round and my companions were walking away impatiently.

I hurried after them and we found a nice sandy bank where we spread out our picnic rugs and had our lunch. Watching the river surging not far away, I felt the first faint stirrings of unease.
“But there’s no water on the moon!” I said to myself. “Something’s not right here.”

I told my companions about the prophecy that something bad was going to happen and people were going to be killed. They laughed, and said “nonsense.” They led me down to a jagged rock jutting out of the water. “Look,” they said, and pointed. The edge of the water was drawing back. “The water is receding,” they said. “We’re in no danger.”

“Ah, but…”, I said, and led them round to the other side of the rock. I pointed at some shallow furrows in the sand which were under clear water. As we watched, the furrows grew deeper.
“They’re getting deeper and deeper,” I said.

My companions snorted and stalked off. If backs could talk, theirs would have said “NOT listening.”

In the distance there was a deep booming roar…

* Bosphorus Ramblings was the original name for the Turkey-based blog Kizgikate.