For some bizarre reason I’ve recently been emerging, still knackered, from my night’s sleep only to catch my subconscious mind unawares that it has been caught red-handed in the act of, what I can only fairly acccurately describe as, ‘arsing about with words’. Now for most of my life to date, the act of awakening and finding oneself obliged to kickstart the old metabolism into gear is usually accompanied by a short continuation of a dreamlike state in which pictures and scenes swirl around, as they do in sleep, before full-on consciousness rears it’s ugly head and it’s time to get up and let the images fade to grey. So far so normal.
Of late, however, I still get the familiar dreamy state only now it’s words and sentence that rush about in a mad stream of consciousness. Words tumble and fall, tripping over themselves in a rush to make themselves heard, and then what happens is that they seem to shape themselves into short bursts of rhyme. It might be only a few words, and then suddenly two or three sentences will start to buzz along and then these give way to little bits of doggerel that conjure themselves up seemingly without any effort on my part.
Indeed, just as in a dream, if I try to concentrate on the words they seem to recede out of range. I’ve learnt to just let the show flow along and see what happens. And what happens is that occasionally, one of these bits of doggerel pops out fully formed very quickly - probably in less than 30 seconds. Mostly - and this too is just like a dream - no sooner has the verse appeared than it starts to fade and I struggle to remember them. However, some of them appear to be more memorable to my creaking neurons than others so I memorise them before they disappear. Here’s one them:
I saw a spider on the stair,
I squashed it flat with half-a-pair
of ballet shoes my daughter bought.
She used them once. It came to nought.
Now I know it’s not exactly Keats or Wordsworth - or even Lear, for that matter - but as a piece of stuff that my subconscious brain kicked out in less than thirty seconds it certainly makes me wonder what else it’s getting up to while I’m not looking.
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Brilliant post, made I smile t'be sure!New comment
Thank you, Rosie, I'm glad you liked it.New comment
Muchly... and no, thank you