Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again...

..well not actually Manderley, California to be precise.  I dream a lot: full on technicolour, action, drama, interactive, cinematic blockbusters.  Sometimes my dreams are so involved I don't want to wake up and miss the ending.  So this morning I woke after a night of travelling,  I travel frequently in my dreams and last night I was in California.

A recurrent dream of mine is going to the States to visit family.  In the real awake world I used to go the US a lot, I'd fly to LAX and get a connection to Salt Lake City where my family would collect me.  However the connection between LAX and SLC was tight and if immigration had a queue around the block I'd invariably miss my connection.  So the recurrent dream is always  me worrying about the connecting flight and what I'm going to do if I miss it - it's actually a very irritating dream that never goes anywhere.  However last night this recurring dream had another element to it - I was at the beach in Cali sat on a grass verge, I was with my brother and his family and we were watching these huge waves seemingly take people to the heavens on the cusp of their waves and bring them crashing to the floor.  It was so exciting and in my dream I had the scary gut feeling of being in these huge waves but also the exhilaration of being thrown around in the sea... it was amazing.  (I won't bore you further with this dream and the wedding planner stuff I was doing behind the scenes with Marc Jacobs - we just couldn't agree on Anything!)

Dreams are pretty easy to decipher and this was incredibly clear to me.  Tonight I'm meeting a very old and dear friend tonight who is a surfer.  We met when I was travelling many years ago and at one stage he was living in La Jolla in South Cali where I used to go and visit.  He now lives in Ireland where he still surfs the big waves... but with a lot more clothes on!  Also I was on the phone to my brother last night hence his inclusion in my short but epic film.

This type of dreaming is called lucid dreaming where you're aware that you're dreaming and that you're able to control or interact with the incidents actually occurring.  I sometimes feel as if I'm making a film and if I don't like the direction it's going, I can change it.  Looking online for more insight into this phenomenon I find it's a much discussed subject and a great deal of books have been written around this subject.   Creative minds find they can solve mental blocks in this dream state and there are hundreds of web pages dedicated to teaching you how to lucid dream as if by lucid dreaming it will solve all your problems.

In my experience lucid dreaming is generally a positive one, a place where I travel the world and experience all the things I can't do in the awake world i.e. body surfing 30ft waves in the balmy pacific ocean.  A bit like this.... but I've yet to meet Leonardo... and the next one makes me laugh, a lot.  Happy Weekend y'all.

California Dreaming

I lay in bed wide awake around 0430 this morning and for some reason I started thinking about a much wanted pair of skates (pre roller boots) that I was given on around my 8th or 9th birthday.  My birthday is in February and by the time I got home from school and had my tea it was dark and probably freezing outside but I didn't care.  I put my roller skates on and skated to the top of the hill where we lived and skated back down again a hundred times, well until I got called in for bed.

But what I was thinking about this morning was the blonde-haired, faded jeans, converse wearing kids over in California around the time I was skating up and down a hill in a small town in the north west of England.   I was a child of the 70's and every summer was endless.  The sun always shone and rain didn't exist, sadly we didn't have the Pacific Ocean at the end of our street.  Around this time I remember a neighbour coming back from a holiday in the US, we were all so in awe of his haul of American goodies: popping candy, Levi's and more importantly, his skateboard.  It had red polyurethane wheels and even though skateboards weren't my thing it symbolised so much and was the coolest thing I'd ever seen.  

And so all this memory rush is to do with a coffee table book that I came across by a photographer called Hugh Holland, titled "The Locals".  Hugh spent the summer of the late 1970's running around the canyons and beaches of LA photographing these kids.  California at the time was in the midst of a drought and most swimming pools were left dry.  These kids would break into back gardens and skate the empty pools until it was their time to go home for tea.  Great photography and if there were a portal in time, I'd want to be part of this gang.   

At the time these photos were taken we were 7,000 miles apart and I know that I would have slotted quite nicely into this life, riding my Cruiser, hanging at the beach, all day, every day.