The Power of Dreams?

I’m currently trying to write the part of the novel that follows on from what I submitted at the end of the City course. I’ve approached it in an odd way as I’ve written mainly dialogue for about six different scenes — all on in the afternoon and evening continuing on from the same day as the first five chapters. I’m already up to about 4,500 words so, once I’ve added in more description and context I guess I’m going to get at least two chapters of 3,500-4,000 words out of the material — but at the moment it’s slow going and without a deadline for workshopping I’m able to flit from one scene to the next adding a bit in here and there.

I would like to get this finished asap though as I’d like to send it out to get a couple of well-respected opinions on it — but I’m also up against a deadline in just over a week to do a literature review for my MSc project.

Perhaps all this is churning round in my subconscious as I had a rather strange dream. I dreamt for some reason I had gone back to our old house in Twickenham and the postman arrived with some ridiculously huge parcels — I think one may have been a bed all wrapped up. Among these pieces of post was an envelope with my marked assignments from the last term at City University (which I’m yet to receive) — chapters 3 to 5 in my case and a commentary and blurb.

As well as the marked assignments the package from City also contained a pepperoni pizza (rectangular shape like the envelope) and two garlic baguettes.

I had great difficulty reading the marked assignments for some reason — perhaps my contact lenses wouldn’t focus?. They were covered in remarks written in large green felt tip pen. Somehow I ended up trying to read the feedback in a car near my old dentists in the terraced houses on the edge of Rochdale town centre. Eventually I made out the words ‘poor’ and I turned over a page of my writing to see that the marker had written ‘KILL’ in huge great letters right across the whole page — the letters were filled in with fluorescent stripes from different coloured highlighter pens and were rounded — rather like psychedelic worms. Obviously that passage of description hadn’t gone down well.

I saw on a cover sheet that I’d been given 60% — and that’s when I started to wake up a realise it a dream as we’re not given any quantitative marking like that on the course.

If anyone is good at dream interpretation I’d be intrigued to know what this might mean — especially the pizza and the odd locations.

4 Replies to “The Power of Dreams?”

  1. Hey Mike …your dream about the end of course assignments made me laugh…I have NO idea how they materialised in so florid a manner!
    BG

  2. Yes. The dream was really prescient. I got the assignments returned a day or two after the dream so there must have been something strangely telepathic going on and when I opened the envelope and looked at what had been written and…

    …fortunately no psychadelic worms but it was a good job Alison had used lead pencil as if it had been red pen it would have looked like there had been a massacre on there.

  3. Thats funny – I had loads of punctuation issues – but hardly any comments only at the end…when do we know if we actually have ben awarded the “Certificate”?
    BG

  4. Same with mine — comments were very brief and a bit inscrutable but I took them as pretty positive.

    I had more than punctuation issues — lots of those plus bits of grammar needed optimising, wrong spellings (Sudoku?) and so on. There was plenty of pencil over the pages — had it been red pen it would have looked like a battlefield.

    Just back from France with a few draft blog postings written off-line (some in the English Channel) to come.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *