transponderings

I say ‘early’. I realise that’s a relative term. But I’m starting to write this before getting up and having breakfast or doing anything else. (I’m sure I’ll take a break at some point.)

Let me begin with the dream and see where that leads.

There was a murder (mystery). There was splitting into twos and threes, forging tentative alliances. There was nighttime. There was a train. There were toilets to be found (or not). (I should have written this down as soon as I woke up, when it was all so vivid.)

The salient plot detail I recall (if dreams have plots) is that we arrived somewhere on our train-which-was far-too-big-to-be-a-train and discovered that we’d missed some drama during the night as we slept. Apparently, the train had boarded a ferry from Trieste to Rome as part of the journey. (We hadn’t realised a sea crossing was involved, or we might have stayed up.) Just as we were leaving, an unexploded bomb from the First World War was found and had to be detonated (the person I was with said she thought she’d heard something). That knocked out the ferry’s engines or something, and our ferry had to be rowed across the sea. Yes, rowed. We missed all that.

Make of that what you will. I just take it as it is. I’m certainly not one of those people who consider dreams to be deeply and universally symbolic. That’s not to say that recurring themes aren’t indicative of something (usually anxiety, probably).

I do wish I’d written my dream down straight away, though. Instead, when I woke up, I looked at my phone (bad habit, I know) and saw that ladyananas had replied to my comment on her first unpost. I’m breaking with my unwritten rules for unposts here and including links. It’s lovely to see someone else taking my ‘unpost’ idea and incorporating it in their blog. So reading someone else’s unpost was the catalyst for me deciding to write my own this morning.

I don’t know if it was part of the dream or part of my waking attempt to make sense of it, but I spent a while pondering the practicalities of rowing a sea-going ferry.

I imagined there were a lot of rowers. (Trieste probably had loads of them on call for just such an eventuality.)

I wondered how stable a ferry would be when its engines weren’t working. (I know that they have things called stabilisers, though I have no idea how they actually work. That’s something for me to research later.)

I pondered the viability of getting across the sea just as quickly as we would have done had we not been rowed across and also without being woken and without the train-that-wasn’t-quite-a-train having been disturbed in any way by the potentially rough crossing.

Anyway, I’ll leave my ramblings here, I think – I won’t take the break I forecast. There’s none of the practical wisdom of the unpost I linked to, so it’s probably a relief to you that this is short.

A link to this post will appear automatically on Twitter, which I’m currently taking a break from, just to stay away from all the nastiness for a while. So maybe I’ll have more time to blog about stuff instead!

Breakfast!