Odd dream

Woke up to rather an odd dream this morning. Maybe it was the slug of late night whisky. Maybe Waitrose blended own brand is not the business after all.

The central element of the dream was trying to get back home from somewhere, perhaps from holiday, with rather a large amount of luggage, luggage which we seemed to be taking across country in a train of four DIY sledges; biggest at the back with me, smallest in front. The sledges seemed to move forward without any visible means of propulsion, although there was a tendency for the sledge behind to get jammed into the sledge in front, bringing the whole train to a shuddering halt.

We were getting on fairly well, and I was admiring how well the sledges were going, strung smartly out in front of us. Then the country got hilly, and the train crashed down a slope into a gully, smashing open the back sledge.

We abandon the sledges and our luggage and find ourselves on a long and tedious train journey.

Back home, upstairs, and much worrying about how we are going to recover our luggage. Will it have been looted in our absence? Will the weather have got to it? What about our second best desktop PC? But, somehow, my laptop and mobile phone had survived.

At some point a florid, full body episode of psoriasis. Thankfully, not taken from real life.

Completely fail to come up with any sensible solution to the luggage problem while asleep, although various relatively sensible options float to the surface as I am waking up.

Go downstairs to find our breakfast arrangements have been hijacked by a range of unwanted guests: family, friends and colleagues, from various eras. Two sorts of white wine have been poured out but something is very wrong with the arrangements for making tea. At which point I wake up.

It had been quite a detailed image of the breakfast room, but an image which I do not now recognise, beyond a few of the fixtures and fittings.

I associate now from the sledges to Scott and his comrades man-hauling their sledges to the South Pole in 1910-1912. Also to the large supply of bamboo canes he took to mark his outward journey. How big a bundle was it? A quick peek at the polar book shelf failed to reveal anything, but there is the thought that at a bamboo every five miles, a bundle of two hundred of them, which would have been manageable in the circumstances, would have got one a long way.

So that part of the dream probably came from my having looked at a map of Antarctica in my new-to-me atlas at some point yesterday (see reference 1). The last map before the gazetteer, with a weakness in the binding meaning that the atlas is apt to open there. A map which made Scott's journey look slightly longer than Amundsen's journey and I thought that Scott was sticking with what he knew, rather than with what might have been better. I had forgotten what a large proportion, around half, of the total distance was across the ice shelf, relatively easy terrain.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/05/bank-holiday.html.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Falcon_Scott.