177 How Disappointing

Before reading the first piece that follows, you must know that I have virtually no musical ability.  

I have never thought, even for a moment, about writing a song or any kind of musical composition.

In the early hours of the morning of Tuesday March 23rd, I had a dream.  In that dream, I was with a group of people gathered around a radio.  We were listening to a singer who was singing a song that I had written.  

Everyone was congratulating me and telling me how wonderful it was.  Someone asked how much I had earnt from it.  I had to admit that it was the first song I’d ever written and until that moment, I was completely unaware that anyone had recorded it and so I’d earnt nothing. 

When the song ended, the singer was interviewed, and he told the interviewer that he had come across it by accident and all he knew about the writer was that his initials are TW.

I was woken from the dream by the noise of a police helicopter hovering somewhere close by.  It was 3.35 a.m.  (I haven’t found out why it was there or what it was doing)

I was disappointed to be woken because I had just been told that I was certain to win a Grammy.  I was just as disappointed as the time in 1966 when my roommate in my first year at Durham, splashed cold water on my face just as I was about to set off on a walk along a beach with Brigitte Bardot.

Four hours later, Caroline was in the shower and I was lying in bed drowsily listening to the Today programme on Radio 4. 

I was suddenly wide awake as I heard an item encouraging people to write a song inspired by the Lockdown.

Spooky!

sadness or displeasure caused by the non-fulfilment of one’s expectations or hopes.

That is the dictionary definition of “Disappointment”. 

I think it is a very poor definition.  There is a big difference between the feelings arising from the non-fulfilment of expectations and the non-fulfilment of hopes.

Until December 2020, when the odds against winning with premium bonds went from 1:24500 to 1:34500 (making it 40% less likely to win), I expected to win a minor prize occasionally in the monthly draw.  Every month, I hoped I would win the top prize of a million pounds.

When I didn’t win a minor prize, my expectations came to nothing and I was disappointed but when I didn’t win a million pounds, I never gave it a thought.  I was certainly not disappointed.  There is, I think, a big difference between dashed hopes and unfulfilled expectations.

Caroline was disappointed recently when the item that she had bought, online as a birthday present for me, arrived through the post.

“Oh!  It looked a lot bigger than that in the picture,” she said.  She had expected it would be larger and so she was disappointed.

Caroline had bought the chocolate caramel pralines thinking that when it was empty, the very attractively decorated tin could be used for biscuits or cakes.  

Even though it had cost around £20 (really?), the tin has a diameter of just 12 centimetres with a depth of 3 centimetres and so it could possibly be used to store odd buttons or assorted screws but certainly not cakes.

The landline phone rang the other afternoon.  I was immediately on guard because as far as I can remember, the only calls we’ve had on the landline for the past 6 months have been from scammers. 

Nonetheless, I answered the phone but all I heard was coughing.  After a few seconds, it stopped, and a croaky female voice introduced herself as a representative from Barclays Bank.

“Here we go again,” I thought.  “Another thief who will shortly be asking me to log into ‘TeamViewer’ so that she can share my computer screen to “help me” stop some transaction or other that I haven’t authorised but in fact, what she wants to do is to gain access to my bank accounts.”

Then, I had another thought.  It was the afternoon, not the morning, and she spoke with what seemed to be a genuine English accent.  She sounded English.  

Every scammer who has called me every morning between 8:45 and 11:45 for the past two years or so, almost without fail, has an Indian accent that is so thick as to be almost unintelligible. 

“How do I know you’re from Barclays and not a scammer?” I asked.

“Would you like to call me back on this Barclays’ number?” she replied.

“No, I wouldn’t.  I’ve read about how scammers clone phone numbers to make people think they’re genuine.”

“Why don’t you let me tell you why I’m calling and then you can decide whether you want to talk to me or not?” she said.  

“Go on, then.”

I waited patiently while she had another short coughing fit.  “You paid off your mortgage in April last year and because of a mistake on our part, you are owed money.”

“How much?”

“I can’t tell you that until we’ve been through security but….,” she coughed again, “it’s not a negligible amount.”

I quickly supplied her with my address, postcode, date of birth, memorable word, hat size, mother’s maiden name, the name of my first school, inside leg measurement, my first car and the name of my first pet.

“Okay,” she said, “You’ve been overpaying every month between April 2003 and March 2020 and as a….,” she started coughing again.  “Sorry about that,” she croaked, eventually.  “I’ve got a tickle in my throat.” 

“As a result of overpaying every month for two hundred and twelve months, you are owed a total of thirty….”  This time her coughing fit lasted longer.

My mind was racing.  “It’s been building up over seventeen years and so it must be a lot.  Thirty what?  Thirty thousand?  Thirty-nine thousand?  It’s got to be more than a thousand as she would never say, ‘thirty hundred.’  What are we going to do with a windfall that size?” 

At last, she regained control and her composure.  

“Where was I?  Oh yes.  As a result of overpayments, you are owed thirty-one pounds and thirty-four pence.”

Now, that was really disappointing.  I was expecting, not just hoping, for a lot more and despite what the lady from Barclays told me, it is a relatively negligible amount.  

An overpayment of what amounts to less than fifteen pence a month is, by any measure, insignificant.

On the bright side, we did win £25 in the March Premium Bonds Draw but in case you’re wondering, we didn’t win the million.

66. Dream on.

In April 2011, I wrote about a dream that I’d had the night before.  I dreamt that I was watching television and saw two explosions from within a crowd of people lining a street.  They were watching something.  

As this was the day before the Royal Wedding, I assumed that a tragedy was about to take place and I vowed to prevent it by not watching television that day.  As I suspected and as I wrote at the time, nobody has ever said, “thank you”.

I have wonderful dreams.  In my dreams, I am always fully fit and I am at least twenty years younger than I actually am.  I do not have arthritis; I walk freely, and I can even run.  

Neither Caroline, my daughters nor any living relatives ever appear in my dreams but friends and even slight acquaintances feature and so do my parents.  My father died 19 years ago and my mother 14 years ago but in my dreams, we are often together and we have conversations that I remember the next day.

You will have heard the words, “I had to pinch myself to see if I was dreaming,” said by someone when they were in a situation that was so good and so unexpected that they couldn’t believe that it was happening.  I’m sorry to tell you that pinching yourself doesn’t work and I know this because I have done it.

Thirty years ago, I was at Lord’s cricket ground on the players’ balcony sitting next to David Gower, the England captain.  We were both padded up and waiting to bat.  I watched as the two opening batsmen walked through the pavilion gate beneath us to the middle.  

“I can’t believe this is happening,” I said to Gower.  

“Pinch yourself,” he said.  “You’ll find that it is.”

I did pinch myself, really hard.  

“Bloody hell,” I said to him, “I really am playing cricket for England.”

In a similar vein of sporting fantasy, I once dreamt that I was playing on the wing for Charlton Athletic against Port Vale.  I’ve no idea where that came from, as I have no affiliation with, or interest in, either club.  I remember the game though.  The pitch was very muddy and I ran around like a mad thing but nobody ever passed the ball to me – bastards!  

It’s interesting I think that in my sporting dreams I never get to actually play any sport.  Running around a muddy field at The Valley was as close as I have ever got.  In my many cricket dreams, I have never faced a bowler and the other night when I had my first ever dream about playing golf, I never actually hit the ball but spent all the time discussing with someone which club I should use for my next shot.

I had a sporting dream of sorts recently.  It featured George Best.  He was wearing what looked like short, flexible, orange, rubber flippers on his feet and was doing clever things with a football.  He looked older than he had in his playing days but better than he did near the end of his life.

“I thought you were dead,” I said.

He said nothing but smiled and carried on twirling the ball about with the flippers.

I heard a neurologist on the radio once saying that when you dream, the light levels and intensity never change.  Recently I’ve had two dreams that prove this to be true.  

In the first dream, I came down the stairs in the middle of the night and pressed the light switch.  The light would not come on because the bulb had broken and for some time in my dream I was stumbling around in the dark searching for a bulb.

In another dream, I was standing on a street corner waiting for somebody.  It was dusk, almost dark and cars on a busy main road were passing me but I was seriously worried as none of them had their lights on.  

“What on earth’s going on,” I thought to myself becoming more and more agitated and concerned.  “Nobody has their lights on.  There’s going to be an accident.”

Just then Roger pulled up in his dark Volvo.  

“Want a lift?” he asked.

“What are you doing, you bloody idiot?” I screamed at him.  “Turn your lights on!”

Have you seen the film “Inception”?  I won’t spoil it by giving much away but in one scene the lead character tries to convince a young girl that rather than sitting with him at a pavement café, she is in fact dreaming.

She laughs at the idea and tells him that of course she isn’t dreaming but he proves that she is by asking her to tell him what she was doing immediately before she was sitting with him at the table.  She can’t. 

Two nights ago, for the first time ever, I had a dream and I knew that I was dreaming while the dream was still going on.  When I woke up at 4:30 that morning, I could remember every detail of it.  

This experience is called a ”lucid dream” and in a lucid dream, a person becomes aware that he or she is dreaming and is able to manipulate the events of the dream.  Actually, I am able to do this all the time but I usually can only do it while I’m awake and it’s called “daydreaming”.

That night I was so certain that I was dreaming that when a woman I used to work with, who never worked very well or effectively, asked me what was going on, I was rude to her and told her to go away and do her job properly for a change.  I was fully aware that as it was a dream, she would never really be offended at the way I spoke to her.

In my dream, I had returned to the school I where I used to teach and while I was there, I saw and spoke to ex-colleagues.  When I decided to leave I couldn’t remember where I had parked my car.  There are only two places or areas where it could have been.  

I stood outside the music room and tried to remember arriving at the school.  Which gate had I come in by?  I realised that I had absolutely no memory or recollection of the journey I had made to the school and therefore I deduced, in my dream, that I was really dreaming.

It was at this point in my dream that the unfortunate woman asked me what I was doing.

Ramble:

I’ve just had an awful thought: As I get older, suppose my memory deteriorates more and more and becomes even worse than it is now.  

One day in ten years' time or so, I may go shopping with Caroline to Brent Cross Shopping Centre (it could happen).  We may be wandering around the top floor of the multi-storey car park looking for the car.

“It’s no good,” I tell her.  “I’m dreaming.  We’re not going to find the car.  I know it’s a dream.”

“Of course, it’s not a dream,” she might say.  “You’re being silly.”

 “You’re wrong,” I tell her.  “And I know what I can do to prove it’s a dream.”

 I jump off the roof!

I seem to be dreaming a lot these days.  A few weeks ago, I had a conversation with an old friend, about dreams.  I told him about reading An Experiment with Time by JW Dunne some 50 years ago.  

Dunne’s conjecture was that time is eternally present and because of this, the past, the present and the future co-exist together.  Human consciousness, defined as the time during which we are awake, only experiences time in a linear or unidirectional form and so we are conscious of only one moment in time, the present.  The past is remembered but not physically experienced but the future is unknown.

As a basis for argument, Dunne suggested that when we dream we may stop experiencing time in this way and so we are capable of having what he called precognitive dreams.  

In other words, while dreaming, the consciousness is freed to ramble across the past, the present and the future.  He suggested that time is like a book.  The page that you are reading is the present; those to the left are the past and those to the right are the future.  In dreams, he asserted, you could flick backwards and forwards from page to page.

Dunne’s experiment was this: 

Upon waking, he straightaway wrote down and dated all he could remember of the dream that he was having immediately before he woke.  These notes could be compared with real events at some time in the future. 

After studying those notes, Dunne claimed that his dreams contained proceedings that could be linked, however loosely, with approximately the same number of past and future events.

At the age of 14, I found this intriguing but I thought it was unlikely, mainly because I didn’t seem to have many dreams.  Nowadays, however, I have countless dreams.  In fact, I would go so far as to posit that perhaps I am dreaming all of the time that I am asleep.  I am certainly always dreaming at the moment before I wake whatever time of the night or morning it is.

Dream ‘experts’ contend that nobody dreams for more than two or three hours a night but I dispute this. Whenever or however I wake up, I am dreaming.  

If I am woken at 2:00 a.m. by a car horn outside, I am dreaming.  When Caroline gets up to go to the bathroom at 4:15 and wakes me, I am dreaming and if I wake naturally at 6:30 in the morning I can always recollect the dream that I was having just before.

I never have nightmares anymore.  I can remember the first one I ever had aged about five but I don’t remember having had any for the last thirty years or more.  Like mouth ulcers, spots, hair and perhaps libido (so I’ve been told), maybe nightmares disappear with age too.