Dream of morning of 20 Sept. 2024

I was caving. Right at the beginning of the dream, I was standing on a ledge, in Propantes, and I was derigging the cave on my way out at -70m of the continuous entrance pit of -285m. 

As I derigged, a maillon dropped and fell, clanking on the rock as it went the 200m to the bottom of the pit. As I looked on as it fell, I realised that I was not on rope. I had somehow come out of my harness and let the rope go. The rope was dangling about 3 feet away, just out if arm's length amd I was just stood there, on a narrow ledge, holding on to an oval anchor, alone.

"Hey, koumpare, please come down here, I've done something silly." I said to Alexandros, some tens of metres above me. I looked up and could see daylight in the distance towards the shaft's exit. Alexandros started coming back down, I started feeling a little exposed and weak at the knees and the anchor felt very small and hard to hold on to, but Alexandros appeared and went to get my harness and put me back on rope. 

A big burley guy in a green MTDE suit appeared going down (Rustem?) and then I saw Costis in a red AV oversuit coming down, too.

Then I woke up kinda glad I had been caving again and happy that the incident had resolved. I have not been to Propantes since 2006 or 2007 when I surveyed the pit with tape and a suunto tandem... I have not taken my harness off and left the security of the rope, ever. Now feeling a little meh with a faint bit of happy that I was caving.

Morning dream sequence for 22 Feb 2024

So I saw an old friend in my sleep this morning in between the snoozing alarms. I had this large liver. It was sometimes just large, like a bag of onions, and other times large like half a room like some sort of whale liver. I wanted to cook it, but it had stayed out of a fridge too long. I tried to bring it back by kneading it like clay and while a large part of it was OK, the top had become rubbery and could not be blended back in to the rest. When I spread it out, it looked like a pizza dough, with diced peppers and fried aubergine slices in it, all going wild.

And then she came into the next room, and she was naked. I was more shocked because she was naked than because she was alive. So young, unchanged and naked with her hair in a bun at the back. I wanted to embrace and kiss her, but held back - still not sure why, writing 90 minutes after. I had given up on shaping the liver-clay into a something. There was a muslin bag full of stuff half showing through, like papers and documents and maybe a wallet. I am not sure whose. 

It was otherwise totally unremarkable in my mind that I was in a room with her naked, not a shock. Not sure why. It was only after I woke that it registered that she was dead and only as I wrote this that it registers that she has been dead more than 20 years. I woke up calm, happy, content, with a little worry about how to explain that my first reaction on seeing a naked dead friend in a dream was to embrace and kiss them. I now feel that she needed that hug less in the dream than twenty five years ago. I can no longer believe in an afterlife, so am I glad I brought her memory back? Perhaps not, but perhaps I was glad to see her there, confident, owning the moment.

I haven't recalled a dream for months, maybe years. I haven't recorded one for years, maybe ten, maybe more.

Keeping time and calendrical concerns in time of lockdown...

 

Being as I am essentially secular - that is, aware of the ecclesiastical calendar but not tied to it in any way that affects my behaviour beyond visiting people to eat lamb on Easter day, I find it hard to know where I am in the year, in the month, in the week, even with the aid of the calendar in the bottom right corner of my screen. The fact that I don’t go out much anyway, let alone in lockdown, means that normal calendrical markers, such as the range of products available at the seasonal shop on the corner are not there for me to see.

Crap lockdown first of March is come and gone already and we totally forgot our red and white wristbands. So here we are… one year on and entering March without the мартеница / Mărțișor / Μάρτης. I don’t even know if we had red threads in the house. Apparently some of the girls’ classmates are appearing in their teleschooling windows dressed in their carnival outfits. So that means the triodion has started as well. As long as we don't let tsiknopempti sail by without marking it, everything is going to be ok. 

Καλό μήνα.

Happy March to Balkan friends.

Doublets...

So there we were watching the Lyra Silvertongue show, which is now partly set in Cittàgazze, and Lyanna Mormont mentions the spectres which appear when a child reaches adulthood.

So A, happily reading the subtitles, asks me, "So why do they call them spectres; and not ghosts?". And I was really happy to be able to go into the history of the English language and talk about doublets, so I said, "Well, there's a really cool story to explain that," and I asked her to remind me to explain when the show was over. 

She never reminded me. So we haven't had the chat about the Normans and the Saxons, yet.  

I live in hope.