I Capture the Castle

It’s now five months since I moved to my new flat, on the first floor of a modest block about eight minutes drive from the beach – and I can finally declare the experiment a success.

The whole thing was so rushed that for many weeks it felt as if I was living on faith in the future alone. I can now report that the future is starting to come through.

For the first time in years, I chose a place using my gut feeling. I chose a place that felt right even though I could have found a million reasons to turn my back on it and continue my search.

At 51, the moving process was so wrenching that there were countless times when I convinced myself I’d made the wrong decision. And times when, if I’m frank, I lost the plot completely. As the flat revealed its myriad small faults, it seemed like I’d jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire. But I was wrong.

The other day I met the owner of the flat opposite, doing some basic renovation before selling it. She lived in her flat before my time and seems to have partnered since. The family who were renting that flat when I moved in had moved downstairs to the flat below it a few months ago; since then she’s been unable to get tenants and has decided to sell (I couldn’t help wondering how much rent she was asking).

She invited me in to take a quick sticky beak inside her place to see the differences and similarities and for the first time I was able to talk to someone about how great this area is. We both gushed about its many hidden delights, and how astonishing it is that the masses haven’t yet discovered it. For her this now translates into worrying that she won’t get a good enough price for her place; for me it’s affirmation I made the right decision to move here.

‘I used to walk to the beach’, she told me. ‘And to the Elsternwick shopping centre.’ She used to study in a tiny postage stamp sized park which is around the corner, a sweet little triangle of land that features a summer house.

There’s also another park just over the main road, in the neighbouring suburb of Brighton. I’ve only just visited it during the day in the last week, although I’d walked past it on an evening stroll. She used to go there too, she said.

Being able to escape to the beach, even though it’s a bayside beach with industrial elements in the distance, is magical. In the last decade or so the various councils have put money into their foreshores and there are some lovely native grass plantings and inviting timber benches along the walkways. Sometimes I just drive to the shore, get out of the car and stare at the sea for five minutes. Other times I go for walks along it that surprise me with their length – the sea air seems to give me energy. The beach has become my sanity, my touch point.

After our chat I appreciated my place even more. My living room looks out onto two huge trees in the yard of the tenants below me. It’s a lovely view on sunny afternoons when the sun makes patterns on the opposite wall; later as the sun sets I’ll be able to see its orange aura sinking in the west. There’s so much light in this place and it is several degrees warmer than the old place so that I am saving a fortune in heating bills.

I’m so unused to feeling lucky in my life. My constant mantra is a sense of being hard done by – a classic victim mentality. It is unusual for me to feel the emotions of triumph and mastery. Perhaps I perceive these emotions as dangerous, even politically incorrect. When I ‘win’ and something good happens, there is a fear that someone else ‘loses’. It’s creepy to think that one of the hidden self-destructive ideas that I may have taken from my Catholic childhood is that it is fairer on everybody else if I take the dregs of life and don’t strive too hard to gain an advantage. Of course, things can go too far the other way – there is a balance to be struck when it comes to self-interest and perhaps I’m finding it for the first time.

Soon after I moved in to this place, one of the flats downstairs got sold to a brash thirty-something man who, without bothering to inform anyone, started to renovate the bejesus out it (this is the flat my upstairs family of neighbours would later move into, probably for the small yard). One morning suddenly the place was alive with buzz saws, crashes and bangs, and labourers chucking out fixtures and throwing them onto the skip out the front.

In the coming weeks our shared lobby would see an endless stream of noise and activity. But the owner never put drop sheets down. Workmen traipsed back and forth across the carpet and the square terracotta tiles. The tiled area starts inside the lobby, then continues outside, forming a walkway to the front entrance of the block.

The tiles and carpet would never be the same again. I surmised that all the flats in the block must be owned by investors – none of the owners seemed to know or care about the damage to the common property. At one stage the owner had a contraption set up on the patch of grass outside the security door, where the new kitchen and bathroom tiles he was installing would be dipped in cement and then taken into the flat. Drip, drip, drip on the terracotta tiles, not to mention that patch of grass turning into mud although moss and grass have since grown back.

The terracotta tiles now have cement stains and skid marks. The ones on the walkway from the street have new cracks and chips.

But the whole thing did get cleaned up. One day the daggy coronet carpet no longer had plaster flecks all over it. Same with the tiles, although to this day they’ve never been mopped. Inside the flat, though I never got a proper look, I glimpsed a beautifully renovated place with meticulously chosen fittings.

And since that day my mind has turned  the damaged terracotta and the neat but faded patch of carpet outside the front door of the renovated flat – carpet that now has a pale layer of ground-in dirt – into a metaphor.

That transformation mirrors my experience of moving house. The lack of method, the speed of it, the sense of being thrown out of one place and into another. I paid a high price for that speediness, but the end result was good.

For the first weeks there was psychic and physical exhaustion. With all the packing and lifting of boxes I’d damaged tendons in both arms, and for the first two or three months lived in terror I would lose the ability to do basic things. The damage was then worsened by RSI. Both arms are a lot better now. But even while I was most worried about them I thought of them as war injuries sustained in the process of my hero’s journey.

The roughness of things, their natural decay. I will damage this house, I accept that now. My kitchen and bathroom both have white ceramic tiles on the floor. There were already cracks on them and I dutifully photographed these when I first moved in. But I have noticed small chips since then and wondered if I did them and if so how. Why worry? Life is wear and tear. 

Things get damaged. My tendons got strained, and I escaped my dungeon.

In my twelve-step peer support group we are urged to ‘accept disorder in lesser things’ while recovering from mental illness. For many weeks I accepted a surface disorder while I was improving the underlying order of my life.

I certainly don’t want to discount the shortcomings of this place. The main one that I haven’t solved yet is sleep. There are two things interfering with this: the excessive light in my bedroom that the venetians don’t cut out and the fact that the soundproofing is absolutely non-existent – Victorian soundproofing standards became incredibly lax in the seventies, when these flats were built.

It’s not just the degree of noise I fear but its unpredictability. The neighbours are mostly quiet daring the week but every and now then it sounds as if someone’s clomping around the bedroom below mine on stilts. I was letting myself get very unsettled by this and it got to a point of crisis.

Then I realised I had to start changing my thinking about it. I had to stop telling myself how terrible it was and accept that sleep was hard for me, but insomnia wouldn’t kill me. I still sleep badly but I accept that now, and am getting better at sleeping without ear plugs. I can always catch up during the day if I have to. I know that’s bad sleep hygiene but sometimes 

I’ve just been too tired to function without a nap.

If life can get worse, I am discovering, it can also get better. I’ve still got a long way to go but moving house has definitely been a step forward for me.

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Dreams Hold Key to Life's Puzzles

Pic: La Citta Vita

This morning I woke with the gradual wash of a dream pulling back its hold on my brain so slowly that I was able to catch the salt granules of its content before they dispersed.

It was a healing dream, creating a synthesis of past and present in an elegant, compact way. Everyone’s unconscious is a skilled novelist in its ability to find patterns among all the disparate memories and sense impressions that people our minds.

The dream took me to a disco nightclub that was incredibly fashionable, and there I swanned around with two people from my past – yet it was set in the present. My age didn’t stop me from being relevant and accepted in this ubercool place. The two people I was with were among those I shared a house with for a short time in the then edgy suburb of Fitzroy in 1983. I have fetishised the inner city ever since this time. It represents my personal Eden, my lost paradise, my Shangri-La.

I suspect most of us have more than one of these lost worlds. My dream brought two of them together and in doing so it allowed a psychic healing.

For this dream nightclub was located in the daggy suburb of Glen Iris. In real life this was where my maternal grandparents lived when I was growing up. Their tiny orange brick veneer not only housed the remains of their own family (my mum was the oldest of eight kids) but hosted a growing horde of grandkids. The suburb was boring and middle class in that unpretentious seventies way that is gone forever – hardly the place for a nightclub!

But Glen Iris was more significant than that, because my grandfather ran a tennis clinic every Saturday morning at the tennis courts of the parish primary school. The famous ‘Mister Mac’ taught kids from all over the area, and from all social classes. Some of them came from the posh private schools, some from the humble Catholic schools and some from the ‘state schools’ as the public schools were called.

This was a cushion for a shy child. Not only did my older sister attend the clinic but some of my cousins. I had a secure base from which to socialise.

This earlier childhood experience, I now realise, is why I have obsessed about Fitzroy and its gentrification for so long. Fitzroy represents a  part of my past that I will never get back – a communal household that only lasted six months but was a cushioning influence on a harsh and lonely life in my final year of a university arts degree, where I struggled with lack of motivation, immaturity, social terror, loneliness, undiagnosed eating issues. The decrepid terrace house, before it too became frightening, was a social refuge.

The dream was bringing these two, seemingly disparate periods of my life, together. It was telling me not to worry about my own personal loss of the inner city any more, as well as the larger cultural loss caused by gentrification. For that seminal experience in Fitzroy – that unique sense of community – had already been experienced, much earlier, in a much daggier suburb. And I could therefore experience it again.

I don’t have to live in the inner city to experience community. Thanks to my peer support program, my growing up is happening right now, right here, in Gardenvale and Elsternwick.

The unconscious is incredible in its ability to show us what is happening on a psychic level. Once we start paying heed to its puzzles it rewards us with greater detail, more overt symbolism and sharper recall.

But the dream also gave me another gift. I have started writing about the social causes of mental illness. Not that there aren’t biological and genetic elements – of course there are – but a return to biology, which some psychiatrists are keen on to the exclusion of other factors, would be  a hugely backward step.

Lack of community is one of those factors, perhaps the most vital.

The dream – not just its content but its healing and synthesising qualities – seemed to be telling me I am right to pursue this line of thinking.

Because in those two different stages of my life, I experienced the strength and ballast of true community, and it gave me some protection.

And now peer support is performing this function once more as I slowly, gingerly, reluctantly, take my hesitant steps into the wider community, even as I witness that fragile community being fractured, thinned, diminished by the log cutters of neoliberalism.

Community on the macro (government policy and spending) and the micro (peer support and self-help) levels is worth not just safeguarding but enhancing. It’s not just a tool in mental health, it’s the very basis of it.

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The Afternoon Belongs to the Sleepy

I heard a saying once: the morning is for God, the evening is for humans, but the afternoon belongs to the devil.

Whoever wrote this had a circadian rhythm similar to my own – bright and shining and preternaturally alert in the early morning, lapsing somewhat around 10 am but functional till lunchtime, then going to hell in the afternoon.

The afternoon: when things that have been left unfinished in the morning are visited on the weary soul like the returning curse of a bad fairy. The afternoon, when you become an existentialist. When the garden sinks into an endless trance, except for Ferdie, the kelpie cross from the flat around the corner who, tail wagging in delight, poohs on the generous grass of my front yard.

He knows he's not supposed to, so, lacking the moral rectitude of many in the canine world, he confines his doings to areas of the yard that are outside the sightline from my office window. Perhaps he is a kind of devil – his peculiar pale-rust coat and disconcertingly light eyes suggest this – but I know the impression is misleading because, after chasing him around the corner once, I got close and thought he was cringing until I realised he had picked up a stick in his mouth and was throwing it on the ground in front of me, urging me to play catch with him. Not a devil perhaps but certainly devil-may-care.

The trouble with afternoons is that they often mean deadlines, but I'll do almost anything to avoid having to send a completed job to a client at this time of day. What horrors of sloppy diction are laid bare, what ridiculous mistakes and omissions have been left unseen by my oxygen-depleted brain when something is sent off before close of business (ie 5 pm)?

Better to be ahead of the game, to have most of the thing finished by the morning – what a shining time to get things done! My brain is like a purring engine that's just been serviced. It runs smoothly with minimal noise. Small errors that escaped my attention jump out at me. Creativity is at its height. I treasure these few hours. They are the secret to any kind of success I have in my career.

The zombie-like nature of afternoons can be minimised by judicious planning. The trick is to reserve this time for things that require only small amounts of either mental or manual labour. It’s quite a good time for starting new work tasks – to freewheel a bit, do some basic research, produce creative insights and provide an extremely rough first draft, but not to draw all the threads together or supply rigorous logic. One non-professional task I like to do in the afternoons is weeding the garden – it's mindless and refreshing. Clearing out the email in-box is also a productive way to pass the time when blood-sugar challenged.

Since I started taking antidepressants there is an added complication to the afternoon. At around 5.30 pm I like to stop work and fling myself onto my comfortable old couch under the large window in the spare room. It’s the lightest, airiest room in the house and I can't be seen from the couch when I'm lying on it because of the upward slope of my front yard (but I can poke my head up and check for Ferdie's arrival).

It's a perfect place to read by the bright light of the late afternoon sun, except that, with the drugs in my system, between 5 and 6 is the time my mental energy is at its lowest. Yet when I close my eyes, hoping for half an hour of sweet oblivion, my brain seems to be trapped in a halfway house, too tired to think but not tired enough to sleep. It feels a bit mangy, a bit old, as if it doesn't know how to either turn itself off or keep itself on properly. TS Eliot wrote:

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw.

He seems to have uncannily predicted the effects of Luvox on my early-evening mental state.

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A simple but totally unproven exercise for getting to sleep

(I was very bored with the layout of my blog, so chose another template and mucked around a bit with colours – any feedback welcome, including feedback on readability. I’ve also rearranged the links and added subject headings. Lastly, though you would never know it, I got rid of quite a few labels, but the list is still too long.)

I developed this sleep exercise about a year ago, based on some reading I’d done on the brain. I decided to include the exercise in my blog because I’ve been having sleeping problems for the last few months and hadn’t been doing the exercise for a while. I tried it again recently and it seemed to work. I thought it was worth putting in the blog, but I’m warning you it sounds very silly, and is probably based on childhood memories of sci-fi films.

I would be very interested to know if it does work for anyone else (and if it doesn’t), or if readers make their own adaptations.

The exercise

• Do this exercise slowly.

• You can do it more than once at a time.

Picture the frontal cortex of the brain being turned off (picture the frontal area of the brain, along the forehead, being plunged into darkness as ‘electric lights’ are switched off).

Picture the visual cortex being turned on (picture the centre of the lower back of the head lighting up as if an electric light is going on).

Imagine you are a director giving instructions to an operator sitting at an operating panel that includes buttons. Picture the operator carrying out the following instructions as you give them.

• Produce 200 mg GABA ( as you ‘give the orders’, picture the operator punching the amount in, the substance, and then an ‘Enter’ button).

• Produce 200 mg melatonin (as above).

• Produce 200 mg tryptophan (as above).

Now order the operator to ‘Activate the sleep process’. Picture the operator slowly moving a large lever, like a gear stick, in a downwards motion.

Now, gently focus on any images your brain is producing rather than words. Let the images turn into dreams.

Please note the following:

• This exercise has no scientific validity – it’s only been tested on me.

• I don’t have problems getting to sleep, but waking up too early in the morning and being unable to get back to sleep. I therefore use this exercise in the early hours (4 am to 6 am), and it doesn’t plunge me into deep sleep but light dreaming.

• Part of the reason it does work for me may be habit – ie my brain now sees this exercise as a signal to move into sleep mode.

• It does seem to relax me a bit, perhaps because it occupies the mind.

• If I’m really alert it won’t work – sometimes it acts like a test as to whether it’s worth trying to sleep or just giving up and getting up.

• The exercise is based on my very limited and probably completely inaccurate knowledge of the human brain. The frontal cortex is the seat of active thinking, and the visual cortex is active during sleep.
  

• The exercise refers to sleep-inducing substances that the body produces, and I am in no way recommending that people buy these as supplements.

• The ‘amounts’ of these substances are totally arbitrary.

• Everyone’s different – if trying this exercise produces distress, stop.

I know this exercise is daggy. But it works for me, and I thought it might at least inspire others to make up their own exercises.

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Cold House Blues

The weather has been on the turn in Melbourne. Summer promised to last forever, but we’ve been plunged into overcast days and freezing nights. As soon as autumn arrives, my home resembles an Antarctic station where the heating has broken down.

Although it’s double brick, which means you have a few days grace before any violent temperature change registers, once it does you’re at its mercy.

This house has everything set up for shivering, in particular large-ish rooms, glass-and-timber double doors in the loungeroom, high ceilings and not a scrap of insulation.

Sometimes it’s actually warmer outside the house than in.

The one consolation is the gas heater in the lounge. It’s fairly ancient, but it does do an initial heat-up of the loungeroom pretty well, even though I know that once July strikes it just won’t win the battle against the cold, no matter how loud and determined its rattle becomes.

I had to really persuade myself to turn the loungeroom heater on this early in autumn. The weather bureau was promising a few 25-degree days towards the end of the week, so it seemed indulgent.

As soon as the heater goes on, the wet clothes come in. During the winter my loungeroom loses its ambience and becomes a de facto clothes dryer. I have a large selection of clothes airers of various sizes that become a fixture in the lounge.

I have a large electric heater for my office, but I’m just not ready to turn that on yet; here, my green instincts line up perfectly with my stinginess and my relative poverty. The heater is a 2400 watt-er, and it also heats the space up well, but in April? I’ll shiver for another couple of weeks, thanks very much.

But heaters on or off, the whole house is cold, and the cold is an alien presence, an enemy that is forever chasing me. The only way to beat the cold is to literally run away from it. I must keep moving, keep thinking about what I’m doing, what I’m planning to do next, refuse to give in to it.

This is the part of winter I find most challenging – I have to summon up a new sense of discipline and a proactive approach while my body just wants to hibernate. Don’t stay too long in the shower; don’t lounge on the floor in front of the heater when there are things you need to do; don’t tackle the dishes too late in the evening because the kitchen will be freezing; move the clothes around to ensure they’re drying. Keep your plan for the day in mind.

This sounds so simple, but yesterday, when cold and looming clouds descended suddenly (it’s warmed up a bit today) I was at a loss. Work was scarce, I felt low and really needed to get out of the house. But I couldn’t bring myself to. The weather felt oppressive, and I felt trapped and unprepared for it.

Recently I found myself thinking about buying myself one of those wearable blankets, for telly watching at least. They may not be exactly flattering but at least they’re comfortable. I looked at a website selling these (I’m not going to provide the link – they don’t need me to help their advertising!) and they are similar in shape to a monk’s robe, giving the wearer a sage-like appearance, while the video ad would have you believe that keeping warm by simply wearing several layers of clothes was never an option – which is pretty much what I’m doing.

One glance at those things suggests that they’d be dead easy to make, even with an existing blanket – in fact one made from a wool blanket would probably be warmer. I’ve also seen TV advertisements for quilted pyjamas, a bit like wearable doonas.

But I don’t think a wearable blanket or doona would work for me anyway as it’s simply another layer – they’d have to have an inbuilt electric blanket to get my temperature beyond the icy. What I’d really like is one of those electrical heated throw rugs – now you’re talking!

During my search on the net I did find something that offered low-tech artificial warmth that’s wearable – a scarf with a neck section and hand pockets that are filled with rice and flax seed. You heat the scarf in a microwave and wear it around the house. Sounds very comforting but I think you’d also need something for the legs.

But I am one of those people who feel the cold to an extraordinary degree. I sometimes go to the house of a friend to watch a DVD on his big plasma screen. The trouble is he’s just the opposite of me when it comes to temperature, and would often cheerfully strip off to his undies, given half a chance, in a temperature that to me is merely temperate.

We now have the drill under control for all but the warmest nights – he leaves out a mohair rug and a cotton blanket, both of which I drape around me as I settle down to enjoy the movie. I also bring a shawl to drape around my shoulders, and – yes, I’m going to admit it – thick woollen socks! Well, at least it stops us bickering about turning on the gas heater.

Still, while I might complain, I do sleep better in winter, partly because the light does not break through yonder window until much later, so my overzealous pineal gland calms down a bit.

(Note – after a lovely sunny interlude the weather got cold again and I felt compelled to add to this little entry.)

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Sins of Omission and Sins of Commission: My Not-So-Beautiful Flingette

I look forward to Easter because it’s like Christmas without the angst. The weather’s normally mild in Melbourne, the streets blessedly bare and silent, there are films in cinemas waiting to be seen. If I’m working I enjoy the break; if not, I suspend the feelings of guilt and envy that crop up during these times. I haven’t eaten chocolate for so long now that I’m almost oblivious to the foil-wrapped ubiquity of the Easter Bunny’s offerings. It doesn’t matter to me that everyone else is enjoying a chocolate feast (she says with not a tad of defensiveness).

As this Easter approached I was on the tailend of a rare flingette, with the Gentleman I wrote about months ago. We ‘bumped into each other’ on the naughty website again, and this time there would be no mucking around with the niceties. It was a strange experience, and a bit sad. I don’t regret it; but, as usual, this kind of limited encounter makes me acutely aware of what I don’t have, and what so many others do – a real relationship.

It was intense in its own way, but, ever slow on the uptake, it took me ages to realise that he – the co-flinger – was even more emotionally cut off than I was. I still have no idea what he thought of me – I didn’t receive one compliment from him, but then again, I don’t think I gave him one. We both held off any kind of self-disclosure, and approached the fling as if it was a series of one-night stands. Which in effect it was.

In fact, what I’ve come to realise is that he showed me something a bit disconcerting about myself.

At first his lack of questions about my life, and his lack of demand that we meet socially beforehand, simply seemed too convenient and lucky for words. (It was also a huge relief that he didn’t want to stay the night – I don’t sleep well alone, but with someone else in the bed the night’s a total write-off.)

I didn’t have to tell him about my food allergies, the circumstances of me working from home – he fitted in with my limitations, he fitted around me. It seemed a god-given gift to be able to just have the fling without him wanting to get under my skin, so to speak.

He was easier with this kind of arrangement than anyone I’ve ever known. As if that was the only way things ever were. As if this was how everyone conducted their sexual lives, impersonally, just getting on with it, and a polite chat afterwards to show that you had digested your food before getting up from the table.

But after the second meeting I realised that he hadn’t ever kissed me, not even a peck. I knew there must be a particular reason for that, that it wasn’t accidental. I asked him why on the third and last occasion, and he laughed in an embarrassed way, as if to say, ‘I knew this would come up sooner or later.’ He then confessed that he actually enjoyed the idea of the whole thing being totally anonymous. Not kissing me was a way to keep that fantasy alive, at least partially.

He had outplayed me. Asking for emotional space, for a level of the impersonal, I had received everything I’d wanted – and more.

But this revealed something about me, too – if he was a player, so was I. If I was uncomfortable with this level of emotional distance, then why had I picked him up on a website designed to facilitate just that? I'd never thought about myself as a player before, as someone who had sex for recreation. I’ve embarked on all my encounters with a search for love being part of the hidden agenda, even if the person concerned had no chance of fulfilling that particular brief. Of course I did the same thing with him, even against probability, but that’s certainly not how I acted.

It’s not that I have anything against sex as recreation; it’s just that experience tells me it’s impossible. Sex is an energy exchange, no matter how impersonally it’s carried out.

But I don’t think what I did was wrong either. I needed to do it, and even though I’m sad about not being in a relationship, I’m a lot less resentful and angry about it. Any kind of sexual oasis can have benefits that last far longer than the actual experience. I did have a good time, after all.

Yet his lack of self-consciousness amazes me even now. I can still picture him sitting cross-legged on the bed as I undress. It’s our second ‘encounter’.

‘It’s always awkward the second time’, I say. ‘The first time you’ve got nothing to lose, and later on you’ve gotten to know someone, but this interim period’s difficult.’

He looks mildly wondering, mildly curious, as if that kind of awkwardness is totally foreign to him.

‘So how do you get over it?’ he asks.

‘You don’t. You just have to live through it.’

Of course it couldn’t have continued to be casual indefinitely and after that particular, second episode, I was wondering if it could be something more, something long-term-ish, even if perennially low-key. But there were a few niggling issues (the not-kissing being one of them), and the crunch came at the following meeting.

We were sitting companionably on the couch afterwards, he was munching on shortbread and we were having quite a cosy chat about politics – intense political discussions were one of the things we had in common. Until ...

He was telling me about how BP had had backed a coup in Azerbaijan that overthrew the democratically elected government. I made a stock remark about BP probably being one of the companies funding the stream of climate denialism that’s now flooding the internet, not to mention the mainstream media.

He stared at me.

‘Oh no’, I said, smiling. ‘Are you …? Do you …?’

‘When scientists are disagreeing on a major issue, it’s time to step back and look at it objectively.’

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. He was, of all things, a Denier. To put it more politely, a climate sceptic.

Polite and urbane as we were both trying to be, we discussed it for a while longer, as I yawned exhaustedly. Secretly, though, I had, I hate to say, more or less dismissed him.

I know that that’s hopelessly judgemental, and judgementalism is one of my major faults. What I was judging was his seeming inability to judge his own sources of information. It’s not that he wasn’t reading up and investigating and finding out for himself – clearly he was. It’s just that, if he’d come to the conclusion that human-made climate change was a crock, he was clearly going to dodgy sources to get his information. It was this lack of discrimination about the quality of sources that made me question his – well, his ability to discriminate.

In my defence, I also sensed a determination to hold onto his views similar in strength to mine. There was no way I was going to argue him out of this position, even if I did have decades of peer-reviewed climate science on my side. My scientific knowledge is as tiny as the problem of climate change is grave.

I couldn’t help thinking it was the sort of dilemma that the comedy show Seinfeld would have dealt with if it had continued into the noughties. Picture Elaine entering Jerry’s apartment for the umpteenth time, looking decidedly dejected as he holds the door open for her.

‘How did your big date go?’ he asks in his offhand way.

‘It’s over.’

‘Over? But you’ve only just met him!’

‘He was a climate change sceptic.’

Despite this outcome, I still enjoyed Easter. It is after all the season of the blob, the festival of doing nothing, a time for the worship of sloth. In fact, Good Friday is the day of the year that it’s easier for me to slack off than any other day. It’s almost impossible to be productive on that day, but for me it seems downright sinful.

The air is so still. Everything’s come to a halt. The busy street I live on is quiet. Luckily I had prepared myself for this urge to languor. The evening before I’d been trawling around neighbouring suburbs at the Holy Thursday equivalent of peak hour (much less frenetic than usual) looking forlornly for a video store. The tiny corner one I usually go to, a five-minute drive from my place, had mysteriously closed, with a sad For Sale sign on the door. I hate that kind of change – when some tiny piece of your life disappears and you have to figure out how to replace it.

Blankness was calling, the world was closing in on itself, and I was going to need distraction. I finally figured out there was a video store even closer to me in the other direction, and when I finally made it there the place was buzzing with the uncultured young.

And what a depressing little place it was. Video stores are always a bit that way with their dirty white shelves and cheap nylon carpet and relentless fluoros. This place was particularly soul-destroying on an Easter Thursday because it had the most limited selection I’ve ever seen – a slew of cheap-and-nasty action movies and unfunny-looking rom coms that clearly never made it to the big screen, in Australia at least, their blarey, cartoonish visuals screaming out their lack of real content.

I managed to grab a couple of thrillers, my favourite genre, and after watching one on Friday afternoon I wept through the mushy but emotionally grown-up Young Victoria. How lucky Victoria was to find a lover she was nuts about, who also happened to be incredibly geopolitically convenient (he was the nephew of King Leopold of Belgium). Where was my Albert, or even my Albertina? Either would do.

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‘What light through yonder window breaks?’ On getting up and going to bed early

I’m a naughty stubborn contrarian from way back. It took a good fifteen years for me to get off caffeine even though it was giving me panic attacks and shocking blood sugar problems. Going against the demands and needs of my body has come ‘naturally’ to me for years, but I’ve tried hard to change and to start listening to myself.

For the last five years I’ve been living in a noise-afflicted house that has kept me in a constant state of sleep deprivation (note the victim mentality evident in the words ‘kept me’). I’ve tried every sort of ear plug on the market and sometimes even wear clunky headphones in bed if things get really bad.

The night noises that have assailed me at various times include a distressed dog who yelps frantically whenever its owner leaves it alone in the house (steps have been taken and now the yelps are confined to working hours), trams that whine and clatter full pelt down the hill until midnight and beyond, weekend hoons blasting up and down the busy street I live on, a constant low-frequency hum whose source I’ve never been able to identify, and European washing machines reaching an orgasmic frenzy of spinning before finally subsiding to an exhausted clunk.

Rather than getting used to these noises, in some ways I’ve grown more sensitive to them (the exception is routine traffic noise: at the level I can hear it with ear plugs on, it’s almost soothing).

Until recently, the neighbours with the dog ran their washing machine, dryers and so on up until 11-11.30 pm, and crashed and banged as they were getting ready for bed around that time. It got to the point where going to bed after them was preferable to lying in the dark awake and bathed in hot fury. But they’ve quietened down lately (the note I dropped into the letterbox about the dog – not the first time I’d complained – also contained a polite request to run appliances only between the hours of 10 am and 10 pm, and it seems to have worked!).

So finally, finally, I am obeying the rhythms of my body and going to bed when it wants me to, namely, before 10.45 pm (actually I think it wants me in bed by 9.30, but that’s a bit extreme).

My body clock is a ruthless disciplinarian who takes no prisoners when it comes to sleeping patterns. When I was going to bed between 11.30 and midnight, it would still wake me up at about 6, often earlier. But this was during the winter months. Now that the earth’s drawing closer to the sun, my sensitive biorhythms alert my hypothalamus to start rousing me at about 3 or 3.30 am, and I routinely wake up more or less fully at about 4.30 am. I’m alert, with cortisol coursing through my body, but also tired because I haven’t had enough sleep. I lie there moving in and out of a light, inadequate doze until about 7 am.

But I’m not really complaining. It’s impossible to explain how right it feels to be going to bed a bit earlier, even if I’m still sleep deprived. I have more energy, more life force. I’m more in tune with myself. I even notice the extra energy when I’m trotting off to bed. Even at the end of a busy day, I’m not dragging myself around exhaustedly the way I used to.

I’m working a bit more at the moment and struggling to get the practical things done that I’m so neurotic about. Last Saturday I got up early so as to be able to wash my car before the weekend queue had set in at the local car wash. By the time I got there it was already 8.45 am, but I’d never been at the car wash that early before, and I enjoyed the pale yellow sun glinting on the lights and the stainless steel as I scrubbed. The freshness of early morning was still in the air, the traffic was lighter, the air cleaner and cooler. It felt so right to be there at that time.

So now, with a bit less darkness available every night, I have to work up to going to bed earlier still. Bed time has been, since my transformation, anywhere between 10.30 pm and 10.45 pm. But it has to become even earlier still if I’m to beat the sun. I’m now aiming for 10 pm.

The sticking point is my beloved tele watching. To wind down at night, I like to have time enough to read but also time to watch a bit of tiv. It’s my link to the wider world, and it takes me out of my own head. It’s my treat at the end of a long day at the computer. I wouldn’t want to give it up completely, even if I could. But I’m going to have to cut down, and that’s a discipline I’ll struggle with.

Eating and dishes will also have to be disposed of earlier – no more Phillip Adams on the radio as my hands paddle around in soapy hot water.

It’s going to be tough but it will add a whole new dimension to my life. With more sleep I’ll be stronger and more present, there’ll be more of me. And the mornings will be mine, for writing, reading and working. Evenings will be shorter, but I’ll stop work earlier to wind down. And at night, when I slide into the waiting sheets, sleep, precious sleep, will claim me.

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A task unfinished: the tyranny of the recurring dream

In 1980, when I did what was then the HSC, the last year of schooling in Victoria, I got good marks. Not top marks, but enough to get into one of the most prestigious uni courses of the time – Arts Law at Melbourne University.

Even after all this time, the two words 'arts' and 'law' when used together summon up for me a magic that is indivisible. They evoke an arcane world of fun and study, of unknown but friendly young men and kind, dedicated tutors, a kind of playground of the mind. I did not see a clear future beyond the course and had no strong image of myself as a fully fledged lawyer. Rather, I believed I was entering an intellectual fun parlour, that everything from now on would be exciting in a way that would require little effort.

Not a small part of this was the prestige of Melbourne Uni and the fact that it was in an almost unknown part of town beguilingly far away, just beyond the city centre.

Unbelievably from this vantage point, university study was virtually free at the time in Australia, apart from a hefty student union fee that subsidised a hell of a lot of drinking and sport (I’m not against student unionism, but that’s another story).

If I was commencing a law course in 2009 and had earned a government-subsidised place (formally called HECS, now changed to Commonwealth Supported Place or CSP) the law course alone would cost me $8677 per year. If my marks were decent but not high enough for the CSP course, I would expect to pay more than $20,000 a year to complete a fee-paying law degree, although the Australian Government is phasing out full fee-paying courses for domestic students. (These figures are for the law course alone; my bill would have been slightly lower as an Arts Law student because I was studying fewer law subjects per year, as well as arts subjects.)

Anyways. The sheen took a while to wear off – Melbourne Uni and the bohemian and gelati mecca of nearby Lygon Street were like fairyland for a while – but in about six weeks disillusionment and social anxiety had well and truly set in.

I don’t want to rehearse my complete inability to cope with the lack of structure of uni life – in those days, there was a great deal of informal orientation from student clubs but nothing structured, no mentoring or buddy programs. All I need to say is that my planning skills were zilch; I was only ever motivated to study when the teachers and the subject matter grabbed me (which had miraculously happened in HSC but didn’t happen at uni in either Japanese or law, and even English was disappointing); I had severe undiagnosed social phobia resulting in emotional retardation and lack of social skills; I had an undiagnosed, garden-variety eating disorder; the fact that there were no fees made me incredibly blasé about the whole thing; and my parents had told me I could live at home but would be responsible for all my expenses. Any fool (except me) could see that the prognosis was not good.

To cut a long story short, I eventually dropped out of law, after barely scraping a pass in first year and failing both subjects in second. And, although I eventually managed a limp Arts degree, I crashed at Jap. In both Jap and law, I was defeated by the severe amount of study and the fact that the work in these areas was difficult and required thought and application – at school I’d mostly gotten away with doing well in subjects that came fairly easy to me.

But – and this is the crux of the issue – I had less nous than a baby ant when it came to actually doing anything about the pile-up of unstudied articles and case law, unlearned vocab and grammar. Once an amount of control had been lost, I did not even try to deal with it. I simply let go, and the balloon of university success bobbed away and became invisible. I did not, in any conscious way, stress about this. Actually dropping out of a subject before failure would have been an active acknowledgement of my dilemma that I was at the time incapable of.

I finally returned to study a decade or so later when I completed a Masters prelim part time at La Trobe University, and then a Masters degree in English at Melbourne Uni, supported by a scholarship. After that I did a diploma in publishing and editing at RMIT. Because I’d written a lot of poetry and attended poetry workshops over the years, I received quite a few credits in the RMIT course, so got the diploma without having completed the required number of subjects.

This is all necessary background for the topic of this entry – recurring dreams.

I’ve had different recurring dreams. When I finally found the twelve-step program that helped with my eating disorder, in my early thirties, I went through a period where I was constantly having birth trauma dreams. In these dreams I was in a confined, tube-like structure, horribly claustrophobic, struggling to move through it to the entrance. Sometimes this structure was a concrete pipe, sometimes a narrow tunnel in the earth. These dreams may have been the symptoms of a primal fear of being stuck in the birth canal. They eventually ceased, so perhaps I worked through this fear.

But in the last five years I’ve started having another kind of dream. In this dream, I have a huge amount of work to do, but have been incredibly forgetful and somehow missed at least a semester and sometimes nearly a year of work. In the dream I realise I have only weeks to cover an entire years’ work. There’s no getting out of the work: I must do it.

The funny thing is that, in the way these types of dreams relate to my life, the chronology of my study history has been reversed. The dreams were originally about the later RMIT course, and my guilt about having received credits for its completion (this guilt was misplaced, because as well as all the poetry experience, in 1985, not long after getting my original Arts degree, I’d done a few subjects in one of the first TAFE writing courses in Melbourne, and never bothered trying to get credits for these subjects).

In the RMIT-related recurring dream I would find myself in some kind of classroom situation (the settings often mixed up with old workplaces). I was hopelessly behind because I’d somehow forgotten that I was doing the course, and was finally turning up to class. A teacher who was a favourite in real life would be presiding over the dream class, adding to my guilt. I’d calculate with dismay just how much work I would need to do in the next few weeks, and then wake up with a delicious relief.

Eventually this version of the dream ceased. By the time this occurred the RMIT diploma had been hanging on my office wall for at least two years and I think it had finally entered my unconscious mind that the course was well and truly finished, credits or no credits.

But I’m now having a variant on this kind of dream. In this variant I’m a post-grad law student, and have been inexplicably absent from the course. In this dream I find myself with mountains of work to do and only weeks to do it in (it’s always assignments, not exam preparation, perhaps suggesting the editing work I do now).

The meanings of this variation of the original recurring dream seems obvious to me.

When I was dipping out on the law subjects more 25 years ago, I was blind to the practical implications, thought little about what my future would be, and didn’t lose sleep. In fact, I’ve always known I wasn’t suited to law. Even if I’d completed the degree, I probably would never have practised. For most of the years after that failure, my lack of suitability to a law career appeared to justify my dropping out.

But while I was slacking off, smugly thinking that the law students who studied were ‘sucks’, underneath the neurosis and my disillusionment with uni life I was probably feeling a perfectly healthy guilt at my laziness, a guilt that the other, stronger feelings were crowding out. Somewhere in an unknown part of myself I knew there was work to be done, and perhaps now these guilt feelings have gradually burrowed out of their hidey-hole and are coming to light.

But as we grow older we view our personal histories with ever more sophistication and understanding, and these dreams also have a cognitive element. Over the years I’ve met enough rich lawyers and law degree holders to come to understand that a law degree, even if never used to practice law, would have done me absolutely no harm and improved my wages in a variety of fields. My older self now understands that I was throwing away a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

The fact is, when I dropped out of law I had no burning desire to do anything else (except, interestingly, journalism – and a law degree would have got me a much better entry position). After three years of low-paid regional and suburban journalism, I ended up doing low-paid work in the community sector, where I watched well-paid social policy officers with law degrees write policy papers.

In fact, I’ve come to believe that the whole RMIT recurring dream was just a rehearsal for the main event – a dawning sense of the unfinished law course. Part of me knows there’s a course I haven’t tackled, a job waiting to be done. I wonder now whether I’ll ever stop having this dream, because I’ll never stop being affected by the lack of a law degree.

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