Caught with my trousers down

As I am sitting here, I am thinking: why do dreams never have sensible endings? I think it is because that is how things really are. In our waking life we try to make sense of things that have no sense, by making up ‘explanations’. I know I have probably said this before, but I think chaos is the real reality. No it is not quite that, rather that there is an entirely different reality.

When R D Laing and Huxley and Tim Leary and the rest of them experimented with LSD, they were trying to break down the barriers that keep us constrained in our mental straitjackets, and so reach that other reality.

In his forward to the book “The teachings of Don Juan” Walter Goldschmidt says that Carlos Castaneda “…takes us through that moment of twilight, that crack in the universe between daylight and dark into a world… of an entirely different order of reality.” To reach this world he was aided by “peyote, datura and mushrooms”

Well, I think that dreams perhaps are a also a way of accessing that world which is “not merely other than our own, but of an entirely different order of reality.”

Well, I’m with you there Walter, but I’m damned if I can understand my own dreams.

Last night, during a brief snatch of sleep, I had one of my recurring dreams. If I had to use one word to sum up the theme of these dreams it would be: Failure, writ large. (I know that’s three words but you get the idea.) Last night I failed in some exams, failed in relationships and, really, failed in life. Does this mean I am a failure? Or just that I feel a failure? But more important: what are these dreams telling me? What am I supposed to do?

I think I lost myself a long time ago, and have been trying to find myself ever since.

I wonder if Myra has got any prunes in the house. If not, I shall have to get a tin when I go down the shops. In fact I should make a shopping list. I need some essential medications. (Not the brain pills – Freddie has put a prescription in the post for those, and I should receive it Monday), these are for my personal needs.


I have finished now, and I reach for the toilet-roll. There isn’t any. Not a scrap, not a vestige of paper anywhere. What am I going to do? I panic. I push the flush-button. Nothing happens. I jab it again, and again. Still nothing. I am sweating now.

There is a knock at the door. Oh my God! Now someone wants to use the lavatory! And me: caught with an un-wiped arse and a blocked bog!

Then, Myra’s voice. ‘George. I’m leaving you a toilet roll and a bucket of water. We don’t use that lavatory – it’s out of order.’

Oh the humiliation! My first morning in the house and I have disgraced myself in this fashion.