I Have a Dream

I sent this message to my friend over a week ago. He hasn’t replied yet, for some reason.

We were supposed to read Freud on dreams as part of Cultural Studies, but if I remember correctly I didn’t bother. To be quite honest, I doubt this blog will suffer from the lack of support from his theoretical framework as it’s bound to be all about sex, and it’s very unlikely that there’s anything in my dream as a result of any crumbs of sexuality that haven’t yet been hoovered up. Dream Me was even reluctant to rub the diaphanous mini-skirts against my shitty arsehole.

The only analytical machinery I’m able to employ is that espoused by Philip Schofield as Joseph out of the Bible. Basically, he theorized that everything in a dream is a metaphor – seven skinny cows for seven years of famine, for example (although I’d be interested to hear from anybody who believes that they can count in a dream - I can’t count, or read, or do anything that requires looking closely and processing information. Probably because there’s nothing to see there.)

So, yes, metaphors. For a start, I’d guess the seventies-style supercomputer represents the records I have picked up over the last thirty years or so, which I haven’t yet sold or traded. All of these are now for sale in a barn on Frenchgate in Richmond, and although only about half of them date from the Seventies or earlier, I’d guess they could easily be represented in my subconscious by a single huge, underused object that is being carefully broken up into little pieces. It makes sense that my reply-shy friend was there in a supervisory capacity, as he worked in the same record shop as I did decades ago. And he trained as an electrician, so he is probably overqualified for his role in my dream.

The gondola I saw in close-up was, of course, our van. The idea of the pieces of the supercomputer being taken to an unspecified place far away for a new purpose is exactly where this blog started, which would suggest that the arrival and the hatching is the point in the whole chronology at which we find ourselves now. The tortoise-people can’t possibly represent my customers, though. I don’t yet know them well enough to be that rude about them. They have arrived in ones and twos, and one or two larger groups, and enough of them have wanted to buy something that I would have to consider my first three weekends to constitute an encouraging start. I am talking about customers here, not tortoise-people.

And the whole scenario might be seen to spring from the idea that by finally getting BLUES NIGHT open, I haven't finished, I've only just started on something. It really is just me selling off my records in an every-weekendly yard sale at the moment (Friday, Saturday and Sunday 12-7, come on in, you know you wanna.) The fact that it looks a bit like a shop, or a bar, or that it is in fact the only place in Richmond where you can buy records and drink microbrews, shouldn’t be of any interest to whoever calculates the rateable values of previously disused slaughter barns in North Yorkshire, as I’m not producing any waste or encouraging people to park on our street. But everything that has been achieved so far is only really relevant if it leads to something else. I’ve talked to custies about live music in the courtyard, temporary events notices making it possible for me to actually make some money out of the five beers I’ve been brewing (which have been very well received so far, and of which I am rather proud, actually), about a little niche music film night, and a bunch of other things that I’d probably do better to keep under my hat.

This would suit me very well as I’ve spent more than is healthy of the last few months contemplating my own inevitable doom. A friend's death precipitated my decision to go through with all this, and once I had arrived at what I've always thought I wanted, it became clear that if I don’t know what's next, there’s not a lot of squares left on the board. Naturally, I figured out that I have to make plans for what's next before the devil starts making plans for me, and that's where this dream slides smoothly into your typical anxiety-driven scenario.

You know how you get those dreams that you're still at school, or college or whatever, and you haven't done your homework / essay / getting dressed? Those don't happen for me nearly so much since I stopped spending most of my waking hours in an educational establishment. But for a while in the van I still got the standard teacher anxiety dream - a class of unmanageable children driving me to the point where I yell JUST SHUT THE FUCKING HELL UP and then they all look at each other and grin and chortle because they know that they’ve won. Now this, too, seems to have passed, and the DJ fail – something else I’ve stopped doing since leaving London – has come to take its place. Except that in the dream I don’t remember getting anywhere near the decks or having any records. Only the sitting on the toilet and the having done a poo, which is perhaps a metaphor in itself for some of my last few gigs.

Why didn’t my friend show up at the dream party? Is it because I’m a little lonely, having left so many familiar faces far away? What on earth was he doing, sending Indian servants to attend to me? Have I become a stupid racist in eight months of provincial living? I now realise that was never going to happen. I certainly wasn’t going to let them wipe my arse for me.

But this was just a dream. BLUES NIGHT was MY dream, and now it’s a reality. Come and have a look. I know you can’t see my legs behind the ‘shop’ counter, but I promise you, that’s a standard swivel chair I’m sitting on.

(Photo by Gullwing Photography)