Coffee with Dream

Ok, stupid title. Just refers to me drinking a coffee while relating a slightly strange dream I had in the night.

I was having a holiday which consisted of day trips to Greece. On this particular day I had arrived in Ioannina, where, as you regulars will know, I used to live. I was staying in a hotel which was a madeover dream version of the block of flats where I lived there and the room was an enlarged and very much smarter version of my room with its balcony overlooking the lake.

I had just had a shower and got ready to go out when I met a mate of mine who plays in a band with me. We started playing a song in the hallway onto which the hotel rooms opened. From behind one door we heard two voices joining in, singing rather nice harmonies and then the door opened and these two people, a girl and a bloke, invited us in.

The room was quite enormous and well furnished - for some reason I noticed the carpets which were new and light. The somewhat unusual feature of the room were three large pedestals at intervals around the walls upon which were three enormous cylindrical glass tanks each containing a very colourful and large squid. And in the far corner of the room next to a broad window there was another huge squid, about the size of two couches, sitting happily on the floor looking around.

I sat down on a couch and two little squids came over to investigate... like a couple of dogs. I had a coffee and then suddenly remembered I had to leave to get back home as it was only a day trip.

Right, get your dream books and tarot cards out and tell me what all that was about!

A Few Random Disjointed Bloggettes

Arthur C. Clarke, and his amazing imagination, died yesterday at the age of 90.
I have read quite a lot of his books from my teens onwards and while I never really, totally liked his writing style, which I sometimes found a bit awkward and bathetic - with the exception of 2001, A Space Odyssey where I think the influence of Stanley Kubrik made a huge difference, his ideas, his visions of the future were breathtakingly imaginative and always based in a sound knowledge and understanding of the current cutting-edge of science. Sometimes I found myself enjoying the explanatory footnotes and references at the end of his books as much as the story itself!
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Who has not stood in the kitchen early in the morning or late at night, taken a tub of crunchy, chocolaty, yummy ice cream out of the fridge and felt the strong urge to eat the lot?
Just happened to me - it was a tub of some American crunchy, chocolaty yumminess and I was only stopped from a pig-out by realising that the spoon I was furtively using to dig out little dollops of delight had come from a dishwasher which had not yet washed the dishes... bleeuuugh...

However, I did return some minutes later, when my coffee was ready, with a clean spoon, a teaspoon, and hewed out some very decent and well mannered chunks into a small cup and then, on an impulse, mixed in a spoonful of peanut butter.
Not in the A.C.Clarke category of great ideas... but not bad.
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A couple of weeks ago I had a cold; a sort of cold; a cold from a parallel universe maybe (sorry, reading David Deutsch's The Fabric of Reality at the moment); a cold but not a cold... anyway, along with having some unusual effects, it had the standard effect on me of putting me right off coffee and black tea and making me think that peppermint tea was quite a nice drink. This, actually, is a better way to define a cold for me than the effects and symptoms - a sort of Descartian 'I like the idea of drinking peppermint tea, therefore I am sick'.
This 'not liking coffee' continued though; a couple of days, a week, a week and a half... I kept asking myself, 'you do fancy a coffee, don't you?' And the answer would be a puzzled, 'no, actually, I don't!'
Family and friends were starting to get worried about me... in hushed tones they would ask,
'has he still not had a coffee...?'
Well, I am back to liking coffee again now but the strange thing during that time was not the not drinking coffee - I simply didn't want any - but all the time there was a feeling that something was missing, that there was some sort of invisible hole in my morning routine, some sort of black hole, some sort of black coffee hole...
(Cue Zarathustra theme... daa-daa-daaaaaaaaaaaaa - da-daaaaaaaaaaa...)