You know those stories of great scientists who wake up in the middle of the night with a dream image in their heads that provides the answer to a problem they’ve been working on? Like that chemist who dreamt of Ouroboros and came up with the structure of benzene?
I woke up in the middle of the night with two words burnt into my brain, convinced at that moment that they were incredibly significant:
Cat flip-flops.
Um, right. I mean, look at that: they wouldn’t even stay on its feet properly. I’ve just balanced the cat on the flip-flops there.
My son has been talking about dreams lately, and I’ve explained to him that they’re how our brains sort out things we’ve been thinking about recently, while they keep working through the night. And that would apply here, because he also asked me about flip-flops the other day, and I had to dig out my old pair to show him what they were.
This is a boy who’s grown up in the Land of the One-Day Summer: as in, there will be a summer one day, and it will last for one day. I’ve probably only worn them once in his entire life.
I had to be careful to call them “flip-flops” and not “thongs”, against my Australian instincts, because I don’t want him going to nursery and telling everyone that Daddy showed him his thongs. In the UK, that would lead to a world of pain. Don’t even get me started on “pants”.
As for the rest of last night’s dreams: why I had to go and start year one at the local primary school with a bunch of other adults, I have no idea. Although I think his impending first year at school is implicated.
(And also: I’d been thinking about cartooning again for some time, and this is the first new drawing I post here in almost eight years? Man.)
21 January 2012
Despite the feeling at the time that the insight was immortal and had transformed my consciousness and would shortly transform humanity's, I once remembered my resolution to write the thing down. Sure enough it was there in the morning; "The peel encompasses the orange"
Added by David Buckle on 2 May 2012.