{A Dream: A Poem about a Don}[12th March 1985]

[Redbook2:358][19850312:0021]{A Dream: A Poem about a Don}[12^th March 1985]

19850312.0021

'You have managed to write a poem about a don whom no one can now understand.

'This is so usual.'

This curious message (if I remember it rightly) was written in green felt-tip, in a forward slanting, rather angular longhand, on one rectangle of a twice-folded (crosswise) A4 sheet. The sheet rested in a parcel which contained (under the note) a neat pile of dirty sheets – in the sense bed-linen, I thought at the time, but do not now think. It had been delivered to me where I worked, which was not where I lived but not far away from where I lived – at [C]?

It was of course a dream, this morning, predicted the day before by the relaxed mental clarity which tends to precede this sort of dream*. This morning brought brief waking depression.

I hoped, and hope, to set my next book in Cambridge.

* -- This comment is interesting. If there is a link between that relaxed mental clarity and the more intense or significant type of dream – and I think there might well be – it is worth saying that for the last few years I have on the whole experienced neither that kind of dream (with perhaps a few exceptions earlier?) nor that state of 'relaxed mental clarity' – in two words, inner peace – for more than a moment at most. While this may be the nature of the times, I suspect it also has to do with the unending and stress-raising interruptions of family life. 'And tiredness overwhelms.'** <930119>

**[[Redbook1:268A][19721126:0022][The Window][26th November 1972]]

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