©Julia Welstead

Sometimes I wake up with a head full of words and streams of thought, but I have to get through an hour of kitchen time – getting boys off to school – before I can sit at my desk and blurt them out onto computer screen. It’s excruciating. I try not to speak or look at anyone because interacting with the outside world – even my own darling children – somehow begins to dilute my thoughts, or creates a conduit through which they begin to flow and dissipate into the wide free ocean of thought. So I have to keep closed off and dam them up within me. If any of the boys need attention I’m in trouble. Last minute help with homework has been banned (get it done the night before!) and missing parts of uniform are dismissively found within the stretch of a hand (mothers can find things intuitively, without having to resort to conscious thought, that are irredeemably lost to boys) but a genuine attempt at interesting conversation (thankfully rare from a teenage boy any time before midday) guilt-trips me into responding, and a headache or tummy ache pulls at my maternal attention strings, and either of these threaten to throttle the foetus of creativity within me.

The real stinger though, the event that can stymie my working day, is weather. Dry weather saves the day: I can see the boys off at the door and double-stair-jump up the two flights to my desk in the flick of an eye. Wet weather means driving the boys to school, and the twenty minutes through clamouring traffic that that entails zaps my powers of concentration and snuffs out creativity. Because of this, the boys have to walk through all but the most severe conditions. Drizzle, light rain, warm rain, flakey snow and wild winds are all walkable conditions. Only heavy, cold rain or freezing sleet or hail can persuade me, with much huffing and puffing, to put a jacket over my nightie, wellies on my feet and grab the car keys.

Dreams often spawn these words and streams of thought. I seem to spend a lot of time in my dream world. In fact I recently pondered how easily I can dip into and out of my dream world, often feeling more involved in it than in my ‘real’ world. It’s possible that I even spend more time in it! I think in terms of being on the right-brained-creative-delusional end of the consciousness spectrum, this may be a worrying sign, but as long as it’s enjoyable I’m not going to stop doing it. I don’t smoke, drink much, do drugs or gamble, dreaming is my vice. There are places that I regularly inhabit and I have discovered recently that it is not unusual for me to refer to the contents of one dream within another: I have begun to cross reference. The people in my dreams seem to have less significance than the places, they are shadowy figures usually not recognisable. (The exception to this was visiting M and D.)

In my dream world I can clearly see the patterns of life, the overview. It reminds me of when I used to have (unfortunately rare) flashes of clarity in school maths lessons. Maths has such an attractive logic, such musical rhythm, and such beautiful overarching patterns, you can spread them out like a map of the universe in your mind and there’s a feeling of deep serenity when you iron out all the folds in the fabric. I imagine that top chess players and mathematical geniuses feel this, although perhaps to them this level of insight is quite normal and their torment lies in not being able to see beyond their own particular intellectual boundaries. Whether it’s intellectual talent, physical strength, spiritual insight or material wealth, we are humanly driven to want more. (I am reminded of once witnessing a grown woman actually stamp her well-heeled foot and pout her lipsticked lip when told by her Daddy that she couldn’t have the 12 million pound home-counties estate unless she gave up the 2 million pound swanky London townhouse. Not fair! boo hoo! stamp stomp! Given that she had been brought up in an environment where that behaviour reaped rewards, she was doing exactly the right thing, and probably won her battle (although I didn’t wait around for long enough to find out)).

But I digress. Here is the problem with dream-thoughts. In the night they are all laid out like said map of universe, as clear and easy to interpret as ordnance survey, but with the added delight of being multi-dimensional. Quite divine. Yet by the time I get to my desk I am left with a jumble of pedestrian words in my head, plus a few indecipherable scribbled notes in various notebooks or on paper scraps – whatever I have found to hand during the night. Taking notes at night would seem the obvious solution, but the trouble is that even the simple act of putting pencil to paper interrupts my stream (river, ocean) of thought, I guess because it engages the left cortex and therefore subdues the right. I am going to try using the Dictaphone abilities of my mobile, although I suspect that the act of finding the right buttons and speaking will likewise break the spell.

A recurring dream of mine, which I work on and develop at intervals, usually when I’m having a very busy time in my daytime world, is one that I will distil into the title ‘creating space’. It’s all to do with finding extra space and time, discovering nooks and crannies of time/space, usually within a house, although sometimes within a busy day (hence why I’m not sure if it is time or space I’m looking for – probably both). In the house scenes I always discover new rooms, most often in the cellar and sometimes in the form of finding a door or curtain off the kitchen, which reveals a whole extra room, or even a few new rooms. It’s never an attic. Once I’ve seen these new spaces, I then seem to remember them, as if I had just forgotten them rather than never having known about them. The ‘time’ scenes always involve a lot of people constantly blocking me on my way (to do what, doesn’t come into it) and me desperately trying to find a way through or round. Is this just a discharging of my unfulfilled desires of the day before – just a domestic issue – or is my mind trying for something on a higher plane – trying to find another way through the space/time continuum? I do kind of hope it’s the latter. It’s very uninteresting if all I’m doing every night is discharging my stifled hopes for some extra space and time in my daily domestic life.