steepholm

I dreamt last night that I was speaking a language without ostension (would that be the right word?). What I mean is that, to refer to a plate, for example, you actually had to hold the plate up for inspection.

I found this so interesting in my dream that I woke up, and (unusually) still found it interesting even after that. Thinking about it, the development of ostensive capacity in language must have been a big evolutionary leg-up. That, and deixis. With ostension and deixis, you can do most of the practical things needed for a huntery-gathery life. You can tell stories, too. You can get a long way, in fact, without the need for abstract concepts. Although, of course, you can't dream about languages that lack ostension.

So, in my dream I was reading a free newspaper, which reported that Ollie Murs had been killed in a freak accident, in which a deer had somehow got into a party he was attending and kicked him in the head at a spot where his skull was of unusual thinness. It was an accident waiting to happen, apparently.

How do these things find their way into print, even in dreams? I've barely heard of Ollie Murs - I don't think his name has ever passed my lips, and I certainly couldn't have told you his hair colour - yet there he was in my dream newspaper, his red hair caked with blood. I can only imagine that a hazy memory of Princess Beatrice stabbing Ed Sheeran in the face with a sword while pretending to knight James Blunt must have been at the back of it.

Not content with that, my subconscious (which clearly still had some copy to fill) added that by bizarre coincidence it was forty years to the day since rock drummer Ginger Baker was strangled in bed by an octopus that had escaped from a nearby aquarium. There was even a helpful inset picture of an octopus, so that I'd know what one looked like. Cheers for that - and for the five minutes of anxious Googling I spent on waking, checking up on the health of Mr Murs.

I dreamed last night that I'd just finished a YA novel, my first for several years, and was rather pleased with the result. The denouement was that the POV character, a teenaged boy who had been through quite a lot of dangerous adventures and thought he had successfully completed them, discovered in the last few pages that everything that had happened up until now had been orchestrated by, and was for the benefit of, his younger sister, who was in the middle of a far larger adventure of which the book's events were only a fragment.

The book's final lines, which are all I remember:

"You mean, all this time I've been part of a sideshow?"
"Yes," she replied coolly, "but if I were you I wouldn't dwell on it."

Thus I awoke, and realized that I hadn't written that book at all, though perhaps I had lived it. Then I drifted back to sleep, and as I did so I remembered another unpublished novel that I really had written quite recently. Then I woke again and realized that that one wasn't real either. Sigh...

I love hypnagogia - my subconcious comes up with all its best lines when I'm in that state. This morning I woke to the thought, "The time for snottiness may come, but sheathe the fruit of your disdain in Patience's nostril." Isn't that just the kind of sentiment you want to work into a sampler and sell on Etsy?

Prior to that, I'd dreamt I was writing an article on Milton, looking at his use of long dashes in early editions of Paradise Lost and exploring the hypothesis that he was influenced by the Real Character of Bishop Wilkins, where God is represented by a single horizontal line, that having (in Wilkins's opinion) a simplicity and unity befitting the divine. The sad thing is, I now really want to look into the idea.

I read a couple of Kipling short stories last night, "The Mark of the Beast" and its sequel, "The Return of Imray". In fact Imray didn't appear in the first, so his "return" in the second wasn't a classic sequelish use of "the return of" as a title element, but in fact signalled something altogether more macabre. Still, it got me to wondering what the first example of that locution might be as a sequel alert. Hollywood gave it its great boost, of course, but is there any earlier example than The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1905)? I wonder whether in future years scholars reading The Return of the Native might wonder about Hardy's lost text, called simply The Native - and ask themselves whether the later book would have sold better if titled Native II: This Time it's Pastoral.

Also, if "The Return of..." is a 20th-century invention, what ways of alerting readers to a work's status as a sequel were current prior to that? Labelling something Part I and Part II was one option, of course, used by both novelists and playwrights, but were there no others? Wasn't The Spanish Tragedy a sequel, in fact, to a play now lost? Hence "Hieronymo's mad again". I like to think that had Kyd not had his unfortunate run-in with Sir Thomas Walsingham that play might have been followed by The Swiss Tragedy, The French Tragedy, The Swedish Tragedy, and so on, in a gazetteer of Senecan stychomythia spanning the whole of Europe.

Tonight is Midsummer's Eve - at least, as I was taught it. Many people identify midsummer with the solstice, of course - and I wouldn't like to say they're wrong. I am interested, though, in when Shakespeare thought it was. Any clue?

Last night I dreamed that my life was being blogged by the ghost of Sir Philip Sidney, in the style of the Arcadia.

When I realised this in my dream, I thought, "How exciting!" Now that I'm awake I'm not so sure. To be honest, I don't think Sidney would approve of me at all - for witness whereof allow me to quote the passage that always stuck with me most from the Arcadia, for what I think are understandable reasons. Here's Musidorus upbraiding his best friend, Pyrocles (currently disguised as an Amazon for reasons that seem good to him):

And is it possible, that this is Pyrocles, the onely yong Prince in the world, formed by nature, and framed by education, to the true exercise of vertue? or is it indeed some Amazon that hath counterfeited the face of my friend, in this sort to vexe me? for likelier sure I would haue thought it, that any outwarde face might haue bene disguised, then that the face of so excellent a mind coulde haue bene thus blemished. O sweete Pyrocles separate your selfe a little (if it be possible) from your selfe, and let your owne minde looke vpon your owne proceedings: so shall my wordes be needlesse, and you best instructed. See with your selfe, how fitt it will be for you in this your tender youth, borne so great a Prince, and of so rare, not onely expectation, but proofe, desired of your olde Father, and wanted of your natiue countrie, now so neere your home, to diuert your thoughts from the way of goodnesse; to loose, nay to abuse your time. Lastly to ouerthrow all the excellent things you haue done, which haue filled the world with your fame; as if you should drowne your ship in the long desired hauen, or like an ill player, should marre the last act of his Tragedie. Remember (for I know you know it) that if we wil be men, the reasonable parte of our soule, is to haue absolute commaundement; against which if any sensuall weaknes arise, we are to yeelde all our sounde forces to the ouerthrowing of so vnnaturall a rebellion, wherein how can we wante courage, since we are to deale against so weake an aduersary, that in it selfe is nothinge but weakenesse? Nay we are to resolue, that if reason direct it, we must doo it, and if we must doo it, we will doo it; for to say I cannot, is childish, and I will not, womanish. And see how extremely euery waye you endaunger your minde; for to take this womannish habit (without you frame your behauiour accordingly) is wholy vaine: your behauiour can neuer come kindely from you, but as the minde is proportioned vnto it. So that you must resolue, if you will playe your parte to any purpose, whatsoeuer peeuish affections are in that sexe, soften your hart to receiue them, the very first downe-steppe to all wickednes: for doo not deceiue your selfe, my deere cosin, there is no man sodainely excellentlie good, or extremely euill, but growes either as hee holdes himselfe vp in vertue, or lets himself slide to vitiousnes.

I had too many conversations like that in real life to need this kind of misogynist gender-policing repeated on a spooky Livejournal account, thank you very much, Sir Philip.

This only leaves the question, what would ghost-Sidney's LJ name have been? I favour zutphen. (Actually, giving LJ names to famous dead bods could be a diverting pastime, but I must leave it to others, for work calls me and I must not say no.)

I fell asleep reading a book about Japanese grammar, and dreamed that I was at school and late for German class - a class that my own daughter was also attending (though a little embarrassed to be seen associating with me). Also present was someone known only as Trolley - who I realised even in my dream must actually be Sir Walter Ralegh, since Wat Ralegh (pron. Rawley) --> 'Trawley --> Trolley. Why pay psychoanalysts to unpick the kind of verbal legerdemain that you can decode in your sleep?

The thrills of conjugating Japanese adjectives aside - though they truly are awesome, that's no jest - I put this dream down to my being about to go to York for a couple of days to visit my old doctoral supervisor and his wife. He's the man who commissioned me to write an article on "Colin Clouts Come Home Againe" recently - Spenser's poem about travelling to England with Ralegh. Not only that, soon after I left his care he and his family went to Japan for a year, whence they returned much impressed with the culture. All roads lead to Whipmawhopmagate (by way of Kyoto).

Moral: I must buy an omiyage.

Kath Langrish writes here of an interesting case of an "inherited" dream.

I suppose the key question, as far as the inherited aspect is concerned, is whether the dream really is confined to her family. Maybe many people have a variant on this dream, and it's just that Kath's family is sensitized to it by family tradition? I don't remember having it myself, at any rate.

Do you?

I woke this morning from a strange dream in which I was watching film with a kind of reverse-Scheherazade scenario, in which a young husband was trying to reconcile his bride to her forced marriage by telling her stories. In the end, he told the tale of a sage who passed a gold coin from one hand to the other, declaring "This gift I give from myself to myself, and behold I am one coin the richer!"

At that, her eyes were opened, and she perceived that she was truly loved. "But," she declared, "I mourn my name in you buried."

People talk that way in my dreams sometimes.

I woke in the middle of last night with what seemed a terrific plot for a thriller in my head. I was about to turn on the light and get it down on paper, when I remembered blearily that I had to get up at 6.30, and moreover that on previous occasions when I'd had this kind of revelation my golden idea had invariably turned to stones and dry leaves at the touch of sunlight. So I let it be, and this morning can't remember what the idea was, or whether it was any good after all. I wish I had written it down, just so that I could be certain it was rubbish.

Meanwhile, my prediction for the must-have executive gadget of 2025? A Desktop Hadron Collider ("Now With Boson Dispenser").

I've been having very vivid dreams recently, and while nothing could be more boring to relate to others, last night's was unsettling enough and I woke from it suddenly enough for me to want to record the end of it. The earlier parts involved missing children, dark woods and severed limbs, so let's not go there, but it ended far more spookily, with a chorus of ghostly infants singing me this eldritch music. I don't recognize the tune, but could well have dredged it up from somewhere - any ideas? I've always disliked 3/4 time for some reason, and I think my id knows this and chose to twit me with it. As for the lyrics, all I remember is the penultimate line: "And you'll be sorry you knew that dreams come true."

And with that I started awake.