On dreams and disconnecting
Because I didn’t want to be always-on anymore
Pull Up A Chair is a weekly newsletter containing all the things I’d like to be chatting about if we could hang out together in real life. If you’d like to access paid content, but can’t afford to, do ping me an email and I’ll happily give you free access.
🥤 Cold Brew coffee. The temperatures have finally risen here in Edinburgh, and I’m fully in iced-coffee mode. While I love a homemade take on the Starbucks brown sugar iced shaken espresso, I’ve recently got into making jugs full of cold brew. Without any special kit, I’ve been using coffee bags and following these instructions. A splash of milk, a touch of maple syrup, and they are *chef’s kiss* delicious.
📚 The Agency for Scandal by Laura Wood. It only took reading one of Laura Wood’s Young Adult romances, A Snowfall Of Silver, to put her firmly on the list of authors whose books I’ll always pre-order. Readalikes of Eva Ibbotson, her books are all historicals in various periods, and Wood has the gift of writing the swooniest - yet still appropriate for young teenagers - love stories to be published this century. This book combines the historical setting and ‘Robin Hood’ approach to justice of Cat Sebastian’s The Queer Principles of Kit Webb (note: not appropriate for young teens!) with the girl power vibes of Jennifer Mathieu’s Moxie. If you enjoy it, I’d also highly recommend Evie Dunmore’s A League of Extraordinary Women series (also not for young teens!) (Bookshop.org | Amazon - affiliate links)
🎧 Operation Mincemeat cast recording. I’ve been aware of the fantastic new West End musical Operation Mincemeat since its early runs at Riverside Studios and the Southwark Playhouse, because one of the writers whose Instagram I follow is best mates with one of its creators, but for a variety of logistical reasons which mostly come down to my living in Scotland, haven’t yet been able to go and see it. Although a couple of the tracks were released before the full album came out a couple of weeks ago, I waited until the whole thing was out to do a start-to-finish listen. It’s fantastic. If you’ve read Ben Macintyre’s book or seen the Colin Firth film you’ll probably be able to follow the story, and if this military intelligence caper from 1943 isn’t something you’ve heard about before, you have a treat ahead of you! As a bonus, it’s an excellent album to play while in the gym, as musical theatre recordings often are. (Spotify | Other players)
Have you ever had the kind of dream where you wake up and it feels so real that you have to try and figure out whether the thing actually happened?
When I was seven or eight, I had a dream one night that I had kicked my teacher and been given a yellow card (the first level of formal discipline for bad behaviour in my primary school). I was terrified in the morning and did not want to go to school, until (I think with my mum’s help) I rationalised that if that had happened I would definitely know about it!
It speaks to what a nerd I was (…am) that that’s what I was having nightmares about.
As a teenager and student, and into my 20s, these anxious dreams tended to be about text messages and WhatsApps instead - my dream self would go into full wish-fulfilment mode and I’d wake up believing that the person I’d got emotionally invested in had texted me back. Until I checked the text thread on my phone.
That’s why I was so interested to see a discussion on my Twitter feed recently about phones appearing in dreams. Apparently this isn’t something most people are experiencing?
The more I think about it, though, the more I think that what appears in our dreams is largely (though not entirely!) just a reflection of what we spend our time doing, thinking about, or trying not to think about.
Last night, I had what might be the closest thing I’ve ever had to the cliched ‘exam I haven’t studied for’ dream: I showed up at a German lesson 25 minutes late, because I had lost track of time talking to someone in a cafe, and then the teacher corrected my German when I apologised for my lateness.
The reason I was struggling to articulate (in German, while asleep)? That I’ve stopped wearing my Apple Watch, and can no longer set timers to help keep track of time quite so easily as I used to.
As a news junkie, it took putting in place some quite strict rules for myself about scrolling the news for me to stop dreaming of headlines on the Guardian app (paid up member of the tofu-eating wokerati here). In the same way, I realised over the past few months that being that connected and always-contactable probably wasn’t good for me. So I put my Apple Watch in a drawer, and bought a fun Kate Spade watch for £50 from TK Maxx. It took a few days to stop feeling a phantom ‘buzz’ on my wrist, which in itself reminded me why I had done it.
And the only downside, so far? I can’t set timers on my wrist to help stop time zooming past me. But I can use Siri to set them on my phone, and that’s almost as good. And I’ve gone from dreaming about receiving emails and reading messages to being late for lessons. Which has to be healthier, right?
Speak soon,
Lily
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