Occasional's Dream

(from 2015)

Normally I take about six hours sleep. As an internet junkie, I have to search all my various email boxes (five and rising) before retiring, and when I wake, I tend to stagger out of bed just to see what America has been up to while I have been in dreamland. But this night, our second from last before leaving a folk festival in Scotland, I slept for eleven hours.  That is unheard of. Not for several decades. I must have been really relaxed, or really tired, or really sung out. But - I did have some weird dreams, and woke up with a start (courtesy of Mrs O) so the memory sort of lingered.

There’s a well-known song in the folk world called Bob Dylan’s Dream. Occasional’s Dream can’t compete with that, and is never going to morph into song,

So, to coin a phrase from Les Mis, I dreamed a dream. I know it is difficult to dream anything else, but if musicals can resort to tautology, so can my blog post. In my dream we were going to a wedding at 5 pm, which is a strange time for the UK. The timing was very precise as was the location, a place called Ebbw Vale. We were taking someone as a passenger - but I cannot remember who. On the way I decided to stop and share in some house to house visits - but why I don’t know. We parked the car and walked into unfamiliar territory which our passenger knew. Mrs O and I got snarled up talking to someone who had a point of view - which is always an improvement on no point of view in my estimation - even if I disagree with it. When we reappeared, our passenger had gone. We retraced our steps, so we thought, to find the car - but got lost. Where were we? No idea. Where was the car? Even more so, no idea. Real men of course never ask directions. After several hours, I remembered the name of a doctor I knew and finally reaching the police station asked where he lived. He greeted us as long-lost friends but didn’t know where our car was either. As it happens, in the cold light of day, the person isn’t a doctor at all; in fact, he is one of the last people I would trust to put on a band-aid. It then got hazy. I am not sure if we ever found the car, or ever made the wedding - in time for the couple to return from honeymoon - because Mrs O prodded me in the ribs and asked what on earth I was mumbling about..?

So it was all very strange.

The night before we had attended concerts, sung ourselves (but will draw a veil over that except that the main festival organiser popped his head around the door and had the temerity to laugh at my serious opus “I Wanna Be Elvis”). But nothing out of the ordinary.

But that night we HAD feasted on what we call over here, a ploughman’s lunch - taken as supper - washed down with a glass or two of red.

I think I blame the pickles.