Michael Blencowe Redux

If Michael Blencowe comes to a venue near you, do go and hear him. Or if you are local, sign up for one of his walks.  You will learn so much while being entertained.  I have already praised his wonderful "GONE" in previous blogs, but here is another heads-up for it.  I wish everyone would read it out of respect for the beautiful creatures we have so callously wiped out.  He brings them back vividly, and in the face of the sadness, entertainingly, in that he keeps you reading.  Maybe we will get them all back when the earth is under the loving rule of the Kingdom of God?

I hope we will all be there to find out.

This is Michael's website:   https://michaelblencowe.com/

The anti-depressants I was put on came with a warning: "People say they give them nightmares, so don't take it just before bed".  I followed the advice, but also prayed to Jehovah that I would not have any nightmares, because when I was a child, I used to have terrible ones and do not want them back.   So when a nightmare situation promptly started up in a dream I tried to give a Kingdom witness to the threatening person. And, as they were not interested (a common experience, alas), the bad dream melted away along with them.

The tablets obviously affect specific areas of the mind as I have had repeated dreams - barely remembered - about the home of my childhood, which appears as 5 Disraeli Crescent in my books. I must point out again that I am not taking anti-depressants because I am depressed - I am not, not in the Clinical sense - but because they may help with one of the very painful manifestations of arthritis. It works for some apparently.

Thursday was my last night on the tablets, and yet again 5 Disraeli turned up, in circumstances which could have been nightmare-ish.

In the dream, I was walking through its dark cellars, up the steps to the cellar door, to the house which turned out to be locked. Spoiler alert: It is where my long short story "Till They Dropped" ends back in space and time, in the dark cellars of Disraeli Crescent.  This story ends the collection in "The Umbrellas of Hamelin".

So the potential for a nightmare was there. But the dream door was so flimsy I could kick it open. And when I found that it had been boarded up, the boarding turned out to be cardboard - also easily kicked through. So I got back home, and was not trapped in the dark cellar.  For which I thank Jehovah profoundly, although I also don't want to be presumptuous and think that He is carefully monitoring my dreams, as if I was so important...  

But I can't overstate how much Jehovah cares for us through his congregation - and how much he wants to extend this help to all who will accept it.  An obvious example, is that the Kingdom Halls were closed and we were into Zoom meetings a day or two ahead of the official lockdown.

So the dream was not a nightmare.  But there was a sadness about it. There was the house of my childhood, empty of people apart from someone who had made the kitchen a studio and was painting in it. Could it have been my brother in law Ken - a painter, who died just before Lockdown and so is painting nowhere now?  Maybe the sadness of missing him got into the dream too.  But some of our old furniture was there. It gave the feeling of people a long time gone - of a house that had not been a home for a long long time. As indeed it hasn't been as the University bought it from my parents and turned it into a Department of Something or Other. 

So the sadness was natural.  It was, as Janet Frame put it, "the sadness that belongs to the world".

And I have no wish to go back.  I want to go forward into the restored earthly paradise and meet all my family again, my parents, my uncles and aunts - and the family I never met - the ones who were cut off from us by the Iron Curtain that clanked down across Europe in the wake of World War 2.  Will they be there?

Will I be there?  Captain Butterfly and I were at the Memorial of Jesus' death last night, the night of the full moon, the night of Passover, to be reminded of all that his sacrificial death made possible - and that it is an undeserved kindness being offered to all the children of Adam. 

And I got to hold the Captain's hand through the prayers.