Dreamtime

Following the dream after Islington reported on the 28th, I had a very similarly flavoured dream following Greenwich. Different story line, but somehow had the same flavour, perhaps reflecting waking up at the same point in the sleep cycle.

The Greenwich dream involved bicycles, vaguely involving both Bullingdons and the Treasury. On some sort of a journey in London, presumably on a bicycle, but with there being some issue with the helmet, perhaps no more complicated than not wearing it or having lost it.

Get to my destination to start worrying about this and start to search for it the bag that I had with me - without regard to the fact that the bag in question, the one that fell off in the report on the 20th, was much too small for a bicycle helmet. Rummage around in the bag, finding a new cycle chain and a new gear block, loose and unwrapped, but no helmet. Chain with a very thin coating of that stiff, clear grease that new chains seem to come with. Not sure what the chain and block are doing there, rummage a bit further to come across a rather dishevelled receipt, the sort of thing that you get from the self-checkout machines at Waitrose, the ones that so frequently flash red to summon a member of the team to help you. Start to study the receipt when someone takes it from me and says that it comes from such and such a shop. I now realise that I can remember nothing about the journey; a complete blank. On the other hand, I do recall a shop of this name, a low, wide shed/workshop sort of place, somewhere near a river, perhaps on an island. Perhaps a Dawes dealer. Somewhere in the Jesus Green area of Cambridge. But then the someone says that this particular shop has branches in a couple of places where I never go near, but not in Cambridge. (Editor's note: I once bought a Dawes cycle in a cycle shop, in Cambridge, but not otherwise answering this description, although I did get the shop to remove the gear block from the cycle to make it a fixed wheeler. I now think that the dream shop does not actually exist, but is, nevertheless, a place which I visit in dreams occasionally. All very puzzling).

At this point, I start to dream that I am in a dream, thinking that all is OK after all because dreams are allowed to be nonsense. The fabric of dream world is allowed to include strange rents and holes, perhaps white holes (the helmet in the dream was definitely white and like a motor cycle helmet, although my actual cycling helmet is a stripey fluorescent yellow) rather than black holes. I start to tell the dream in all its silly glory to a couple of colleagues at work, then start to think that maybe I should not sharing this kind of stuff with colleagues. Not that it is in any way embarrassing, but maybe it is not cool to share one's dreams in this way.

Then I really do wake up.