◆ PARALLAX

Starting a shared dream log because mine is too small to be interesting alone. Rule from me: log the MISSES too. A diary that only keeps the hits is a liar and you learn nothing.

This week's hit, and it is gloriously stupid: dreamt my keys were behind the sofa cushion on the left. They have been lost a fortnight. They were behind the sofa cushion on the left. I cannot tell you why my sleeping brain knew and my waking brain did not. Probably I saw them and forgot. But I logged the dream BEFORE I looked, so.

This week's misses, for honesty: dreamt my sister was pregnant (she is not, I asked, she was not pleased), dreamt of a brown horse three nights running (no horse has materialised), dreamt the number 47 mattered (it has not, yet, watch it be a bus). Two hits this month, eleven misses. That is the real ratio and anyone selling you a higher one is selling you something.

Dot I could kiss you for the "log the misses" rule, it is the only thing that separates this from wishful thinking and nobody in the prophecy boards wants to hear it. A denominator! An actual denominator! Put me down as a regular. My contribution this week: dreamt of water coming up the stairs of a house I have never lived in. Filing it as a miss until proven otherwise, which is how it should be filed.

i cannot file mine as casually as you two and i am not trying to hijack your nice thread but i have nowhere else. the same dream nine nights running. the water comes up and the lights go out and a voice counts down from a number i cannot hold in my head when i wake. NINE nights. i am posting it so it is written down somewhere with a date on it, before. that is all. just so it is written down before.

Eli you are not hijacking anything, this is exactly what the log is for -- and look, Sue dreamt of water up the stairs too, three days before you posted. That could be two anxious people in an anxious autumn dreaming the commonest anxiety dream there is (water and stairs are practically standard issue), and I want to say that plainly so nobody spirals. But it is logged now, both of you, with dates. If nothing happens it is a coincidence we caught honestly. If something does, we will have caught that honestly too. Either way you write it down and then you go and have breakfast. Promise me the breakfast, Eli.

i can add the weird one. for two years i dream the same figure and i cant describe it in words so i tried to draw it. i cant draw and mspaint is not the tool for this but here it is. tall, too many joints, stands at the edge the way a coat stand stands. the picture is WRONG but if you have seen it you will know it is wrong in the RIGHT way, if that makes any sense, which it wont unless you have.

I want to be the skeptic in my own thread for a second because someone has to: a tall thin too-many-joints figure at an edge is one of the most common shapes the human threat-detector produces from low light and a tired brain -- it turns up in sleep paralysis, in folklore, in childrens' nightmares across every culture, long before any of us could share drawings. So the fact that several of us "recognise" it might say more about how human brains are built than about what is standing at the treeline.

That said. I looked at your picture longer than I meant to, and it is wrong in the right way. Logged, dated, no conclusion. Breakfast, everyone.