Dreamlife

I’ve ignored so many fads in my years on this earth, why jump on the blog bandwagon? What is there in my outwardly humdrum existence worth recording? The major events are few enough for me to keep straight and of interest to few people besides me. What’s the substance of my life? Chiefly my philosophical hypotheses, most of which are contained in one way or another in my work. No need to blog those. Then there are my explorations of various kinds of artwork. Arguably, my memory of these could stand some help from a virtual crutch. When I went through my stacks of concert programmes this summer, I was amazed to see what momentous-sounding events I had apparently witnessed and then forgotten. I mean, if I can forget I saw a Mahler 3rd performance with Maureen Forrester, what memory is safe? (I try to tell myself that it’s not that I hit senility as a teenager, but that M3 hadn’t yet acquired the importance for me it would come to have in later years.) I’ll start seriously worrying when I forget the St. Lawrence Quartet’s Op. 132 but it might not be a bad idea to document some of my impressions before it comes to that. But there’s one important aspect of my life of which my memories seem to be even more fleeting: my dreams. Not only do they leave a fey imprint in my conscious awareness, but their meaning is usually less accessible to me than an artwork’s. I could stand to keep a record of those, then, to keep them in conscious focus a bit longer. And hey, the gods of cyberspace might send some astute psychologist to my page to help me unravel them.