Meeting dream

A meeting dream last night, or perhaps, more precisely a non-meeting dream.

I had travelled a long way to go to this meeting, perhaps to Plymouth or somewhere like that. I had various colleagues with me. But I had failed to prepare for the meeting, I had failed to bring the papers and I had failed to bring my laptop, just my telephone. Telephone not up to recovering the papers.

Got into the meeting room and wondered what to do. After a bit, I went and had a chat with my opposite number from the home team, and explained my predicament. Why not just cancel the meeting so that we could all get on with something more productive? No, we will carry on with the meeting in the morning. No, it is not convenient to make you a copy of the papers. Perhaps he was quite glad to have this splendid opportunity to show me up.

The meeting disperses against the following morning. They had their papers and would be able to prepare. While I get lost, by myself, somewhere in this strange building. Not much idea of where I was supposed to be staying that night or how I was going to get there. This morning, I associate to Fareham, Titchfield and the Census Office at this point. Plus an entirely fictitious, cottage hotel thereabouts which I visit in my dreams from time to time.

And to cap it all, somewhere along the line, I had almost lost my telephone at a railway station, by leaving it in a jacket pocket, leaving the jacket hanging on a post at the end of the platform, while I had gone off for a while doing something else. All my colleagues knew that I had been careless about this too.

All of which prompts me to wonder about the extent to which dreams are descriptions of events rather than the events themselves. A top down reconstruction with the bottom, raw sensory layers missing. So one knows something about the person in the dream, one has an emotional response to that person, it is all very vivid, but one would be hard put to recreate the visual image, after the event.