Peter

The most important aspect of my dreaming is that it's always frustrating. I'm in a frustrating position when I'm dreaming. I lose things, or I'm lost in a town. Sometimes I have really exhilarating dreams where I get a lot of inspiration, but it involves my past life. I get work colleagues coming in and out of my dreams. I dream about my mother as if she was alive. I don’t know why I particularly dream about her. On the other, although I'm a dedicated Republican, the Queen comes into my dreams quite a lot, which is odd. A lot of travel: always getting lost on trains and buses and having the wrong ticket. Labyrinthian hotels with tiny little rooms and staircases all over the place. I'm a bit of ornithologist and birds come into my dreams a lot. It's kind of a rich [dream] life. I am also an amateur painter, and I often get a good idea from things I've seen in a dream, or been inspired by a dream. I'm really interested in what dreams are and why we have them.

I'm stuck in the house most of the time, and it means that I don't have an alarm on to wake up in the morning, so I wake up gradually. And I think that's a nice way of remembering your dream. For the last ten years or so, I've been really interested in dreams. I know it's supposed to be a good exercise to record them, and I do occasionally record them if they're particularly weird. Another amazing thing is that I can see a brick wall—for example, the side of a house—and I can see every brick in that wall. Or I could be in a party, and I can see 50 people simultaneously, all dressed differently. Their faces might be very plastic. But that business of being able to see a whole village or the architecture in a whole village is something that is completely stunning. It's almost like a film screen, if you know what I mean.

I also get lucid dreams quite often, which is other I understand is a bit rare, and probably a bit lucky really. I also can smell and taste in dreams, which is weird. I smelled some cologne in a dream the other day, which is quite nice.

I sleep a lot more. I find that really frustrating. I sleep in the day as well, which is crazy, but every day is a bit the same, you know. I go for a walk every day and occasionally go to the shops, but every day is a bit the same. A week seems to go past in a couple of days. I've been sleeping more, dreaming more, and more vivid and weird dreams. I mean, all dreams are weird, aren't they?

I don't really have recurring dreams if you know what I mean. Every dream these days seems to be special and different. Freud said that dreams are made up from the sweepings of the day. And it's definitely true that if I watched a really nice film, the actor in the film happens to pop up in my dream. Or if it's a cowboy film, I'm being shot at from behind a rock or something, you know? There's a definite use of the experiences I've had in the day, even though they're rather boring. You're making something out of the bits of the day, but it's not really a story of the day.

From what I've read of Freud—and I haven't read all 800 pages—it's a bit sad that psychologists are still kind of captured by Freud. I think that had he been around today and known what neuroimaging can do and the physiology of the brain, that we wouldn't be so stuck with him. I think he would be more interested in what the evolutionary purpose of dreams were, which is the thing I'm interested in.

I've written quite a lot of books, although they're not on this subject, they're on markets, but, you know, sometimes I get an inspiration, and it might be in early waking, or it might be in the middle of the day. And I think, “Wow, why didn't I think of putting that complex subject that way?” And I've been all day incapable of thinking any more brightly than a sausage. But suddenly I'm able to have a purple patch, if you like. What's that all about? If you could be more imaginative, I think that would be an evolutionary advantage. I think if we could increase our ability to imagine, then I think we survive better.

The overarching theme of nearly all my dreams is one of frustration: of not being able to do what I feel I'd like to do. I can't find my money. Can't find the right bus to go somewhere. I'm in a room with people who’ve got a special knowledge about things. And I haven't.

That's not my life at all. I'm a fairly gregarious person, and I don't ever feel discriminated against in any way, but in dreams I feel I'm not quite in the “in” crowd and, and other people have got a special knowledge about things, which is a bit weird. That aspect of my dreams has been more prevalent in the last few months. There's more of them.

At the beginning of the pandemic, I had this feeling of paranoia. In that March –April period, you didn't quite know what it was going do. I was pretty convinced I was going get it, and I was pretty convinced I was going die. I had a bit of paranoia, and I did a little painting to express my paranoia. In other words, it came out as an inspiration for a little painting.

I had quite a strange and complicated dream. All I can remember about it was that it involved shopping in a shopping mall that I'd never been into. The shopping expedition ended in a butcher's shop, which really didn't sell meat, but sold sacks of something that might have been meat, but whatever it was, it was a bit frightening. People in the shop were looking as though I was the outsider. I was a person that didn't know what was going on in the shop. I was trying to pay, but all I had in my pockets were these big chunks of metal. They had angles on them; they were not ordinary coins. I knew they were some kind of currency, but it's that frustration thing: you don't quite know what's going on. I've traveled widely all over the world, but I've never had to pay for anything in big, weird chunks of metal. I know quite a lot about metal, and it does come into my dreams quite a bit. But in this dream, I woke up feeling miserable. I felt quite sad about it.

I think that the whole point of dreaming—and not just dreaming, but the other stuff that happens to us in the daytime—is that it adds an element of randomness to our thinking. And I think sometimes you get bogged down in rather boring ways of working things out. To transcend that sort of thinking you need imagination. If you can add a certain amount of randomness to our ordinary methods of thinking, then we are more likely to succeed. If you are in a difficult situation in the office, or is somebody bullying you, let's say you, you might find a way of humiliating him, or you might find a funny way of making sure that your colleagues disliked him too. That might need thinking outside the box. And I think that involves a certain amount of randomness.

I'm not happy about interpreting dreams in the way that Freud did. I think what dreams do is to give you a thinking edge. They help you in your daily life. But the dreaming process—not the dream. All these cases, the guy [August Kekulé] who invented the benzene molecule, or the Beatles writing Yesterday. They're all supposed to have come out of dream. I really think that element of them is something that's very important. The randomness.

One of the things that really interests me about dreams is how I can surprise myself. Somebody is surprising me. I know there's another person inside me. Lots of other people inside me, that are a bit different. I do crosswords, cryptic crosswords, where I've bashed my brains out all day, trying to think of the answer to a question. And suddenly when I've completely forgotten the crossword, that word comes into my head. I think “What the hell's that word?” And [then] I realize it's the answer to this clue. How can that happen? That's really strange. And I know other crossword doers who have the same thing. It's almost as if there's another latent person inside your mental processes. They’re a bit like you, but they're not quite like you. And I don't think it's driven by violence and sexual stuff that Freud thought of. I think it's far more clever and logical. Almost like a waking person inside you, rather than something primitive.

The only thing I can remember about my dream last night is that I was in a wood and all the trees were a bit like telegraph poles, only ten-times as big and ten-times as tall. They were just perfectly round tall things. I was lost—as I'm always lost—but I seemed amazed that I was somewhere that was so weird and different. In other words, did I have a kind of ego? I mean, did I recognize myself as myself? That's another one, you know: I am always myself in dreams, but I'm not the, not the me that I know when I'm awake. I kind of said, “Pete, you are lost in this wood.” I knew who I was, but that's the only thing I can remember about last night.