Friday, 12 February 2010

The sieve of dreams?

Yesterday morning I woke up to find on the bedside table a small notepad, with written on it the words 'solder seive'. Spelling aside, this was a mystery. I don't keep a notepad by the bed. So, sometime during the night, I concluded, I must have got up and gone downstairs, found this pad (and a pen), and gone back up in order to write this note to myself. This isn't normal behaviour for me. I had no recollection of any of this. But even more perplexingly, I had no idea what it meant.

After a few hours, as the rest of the day crowded in on me, I more or less forgot about it, or thrust it to the back of my mind - putting it down as just a particularly vivid instance of the weird psychotropic processes that happen when we think we're asleep. A tribute to the hallucinatory powers of sloe gin, perhaps. I remembered Paul McCartney's famous epiphanic revelation when (admittedly while on an acid trip) he discovered, and wrote down, the secret of the universe - which turned out, next day, to be 'There are Seven Layers'.

So, today I had occasion to dig out an infrequently used sieve (in order to drain a smaller-than usual amount of pasta, since you ask), and discovered that one part of its two-pronged handle had broken loose - something a dab of solder will easily fix.

Makes you wonder, don't it? Anyway, I've left the pad and pen by the bed.

What are your epiphanic revelations?

2 comments:

  1. Unpicking this, I've worked out that the two events - the taking up of the notepad and the writing of the note - were separate, the first when I staggered up to bed at about 1.00 am, the second sometime later that night. So that makes it a bit less spooky, but also less of a story.
    I assume that no-one knows what 'epiphanic' means. Well, it means 'revelatory' - so I actually wrote 'revelatory revelation', a truistic solecism if ever there was one.

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  2. I can just imagine if I tried that, I'd knock all my computer screens & loudspeakers off the desk trying to find the pen.

    You could also assume that no-one knows what solecism means. I presume (or assume) that it's the sloe-gin slur for solar-system, in an obscure reference to the question of upon which of the universal layers we are currently sitting.

    Or stretching the imagination & the gin a little further it could even be where you got your solder-sieve from.
    (This is a bit like slurring generals)

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