The air smells different today. I couldn't say why. Smell seems to lack a coherent vocabulary to describe its characteristics. It is
September and though no Summer was really forthcoming this year, the scent of
crispness that displaces that of cleaning products and cooking smells, greets my previously housebound nose unexpectedly and I find it somehow viscerally disappointing without really knowing why.
If Summer
implies freedom, friendship, picnics in parks and carefree laughter on sunny
days (though in reality this rarely happens. But the illusion persists despite our experience.) then surely, the onset of cooler, darker
seasons must imply the loss of such freedoms: The closing down of
"outdoors" and the moving to the smaller more isolated spaces of our
social lives.
But today, the differences in the air brought
by the changes to vegetation and meteorology appear to suggest a more profound
change of emphasis with regard to mood. A more introspective, calmer period is
dawning: The resumption of "Real Life" after the frivolity of summer
days demands our sensible attention.
Ok, so there weren't really more than a
handful of long, warm days this year. Summer was officially a washout. The
worst, wettest, coolest here in over a hundred years. But the days were long,
if filled with unreliable weather.
This morning, on my way to work, people
seemed more focused, less jaunty. There is a sense that it is time to be
serious now and to shoulder responsibilities more diligently. The time for carefree is over for now. Time to settle back into routine.
I awoke form a dream where I was in
Helsinki and had to get to the airport to catch my flight home, but could not
find a taxi. I walked unfamiliar streets that looked a bit like Birmingham and
a bit like Oslo, and got increasingly agitated at the growing probability of
not getting to the airport in time.
Then as dreams are wont to do, I was at
home in my bed with no confusion at the sudden discontinuity. But the bin men
were coming and there was a panic in my head because the garage is full of
cardboard, the black bin is full of general rubbish and I could not remember
which day it was to put out which bin. In my dream, I hauled impotently as I
struggled to haul a green wheelie bin over huge bags of discarded cardboard
packaging to the drive where the truck was already moving past to the next
house.
I am not a believer in the symbolism of
dreams. That the unconscious should construct elaborate metaphors involving
snakes, horses, cardboard or thwarted travel plans seems unlikely. If I was
concerned about the direction of my life, surely it would just say so by
providing a dream in which I changed my job or moved out to live on my own? It
wouldn't couch it in oblique terms of domestic waste and impossibly cluttered
garages. Would it?
Perhaps the above is telling me that my
life is full of baggage and if I don't sort it out, time will have passed and I
will have missed the time for opportunities, whatever my unconscious might deem
those to be. Or maybe I am just fed up with the enormous amount of recycling
piling up in my house and don't want to be domestically immobilised by another
two weeks' worth.
However, the very fact that I find myself
dreaming of such mundane scenarios must surely ring alarm bells. Does life
become so grindingly quotidian that rather than dreams providing us with
unexplained powers of flight, exotic locations, or even nocturnal physical
dalliances, it instead fills our sleeping emotional landscape with concerns
about refuse collection? I would be perfectly happy to discuss possible meanings by the way. Perhaps I am mistaken and dreams do contain profound truths about our states of minds. It's just, the Freudian approach sound so "made up" and when given to such flights of fancy, anything can mean anything. It becomes subjective and unhelpful opinion. But I am willing to hear anyone's hypotheses on the subject.
However, with the winding down of outdoors life and summer pursuits, it seems the return to routine is having rather too prominent an effect on my unconscious which may be manifesting as dreams about dustbins.
Perhaps I really just need to get out more, despite the season.
