I am dreaming about sitting on top of The Eiffel Tower contemplating my existence. As you can deduce, the height of the object I’m sitting on in my dreams is increasing and soon it will be a mountain although a very low mountain. This means my concentration is improving although I shouldn’t congratulate myself too much otherwise I will soon be back contemplating on the park bench when I’m asleep. Karma doesn’t like smugness or self-congratulation. The dream is complicated by my observance of my own journey up a large river towards a Black Hole. This is because I’ve been reading Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. Joseph loved adjectives and descriptions the way Virginia Woolf loved adverbs and semi-colons. These descriptions make every scene like a large detailed painting which takes a long time to picture as it were. Joseph had obviously swallowed a Thesaurus at an early age as he repeats adjectives that mean the same thing or are very similar. This makes the reading very turgid although this could be intended to mimic the path of a dilapidated steamer up the mighty Congo river against the current. I should give him the benefit of the doubt. I should also try and produce abridged versions of these books for cats with short attention spans like Gemma. Heart of Darkness would be “Marlow recalls going up The Congo looking for Kurtz who dies after saying ‘The Horror, the Horror’. Lots of trees, locals, and ivory.”
Anyway, all this is swilling around in my dream – what I think of as the washing-machine of my subconscious mind – when there’s a tapping at the window. Back in the real world, I open my left eye to see Reg the crow waving at me to come outside.
Julian Worker UK Blog 