The Dreams Return, Big Time

I had a bit of a panic, no sooner had I started my dream journal than I had a night without dreams, or at least none that I could recall. Fortunately last night I had a treat to two dream sessions,  both with subjects, stories, and locations quite new to me. I was in a foreign country, possibly Malaysia, with lots of office blocks, and a small minimalist chapel where I sat beside a young boy.

Perhaps this had been brought on by yesterday's Authentic Self, writing exercise. I am in week 5 and I had been asked to write about my first collision (wrong word) with grief. It was my four-year-old cousin Alan, who died in a fire with his playmate, in a house no more than two hundred yards from where I lived at the time. This was in a very small village, which was completely devastated by the tragedy.

The Authentic Self is a 52 week course aimed at doing what it says on the tin, namely to reveal more about my self. This is done by encouraging me, via well-constructed questions,  to remember events from my past. At the end of the year, I hope to be able to look back and see a more rounded picture of my life thus far.

Last night's first 'Educational Film' was Visualists, about VJing, which is like DJ,s but using video. There were some amazing light art installations. As a younger man, I would have loved to have got involved was this; my forays were no more than projecting slides of oil and coloured paint, the effect was a bit like a lava lamp. Today's artists use cutting edge computing, and science to produce seriously mind awakening presentations.

The second film, Uncle Art,  turned out to be a bit of a tear-jerker. Dave Lowe, at a very early age, fell in love with his neighbour's guitar. He relentlessly pestered his parents to buy it for him, which they did. He went on to become a working musician playing six nights a week in London's pubs. He also taught himself how to program in basic, then in machine code (which takes me back to my OU days).

Fate then allowed him to use this combination, of being a musician and being able to write code, to progamme the sounds for some of the very first computer games. He became one of the top 4 in the world, and is revered by the revivalist industry which now surrounds the games.

Yet he wrote the original music as if he was hearing it on a much grander scale than what the computer games produced. To cut a long story short, his family, via a crowdfunding exercise, enabled the music to be recorded by a full orchestra in Studio 2 at Abbey Road. I can't imagine how this would have felt for a Beatles fan to be in the same place as where the Beatles made their music, let alone for him to be hearing his own music being played and recorded.