Idly browsing on Wikipedia, I found myself with an old favourite poem, John Donne's Meditation XVII, replete with delicious quotations and phrases. Skipped from there to Valediction: Forbidding Mourning with its rather, ahem, specific compasses metaphor.  Smiled, and browsed on.  A scant twenty minutes later, a link on another site altogether mentioned that Stephen Fry had a morning slot about language on Radio 4, and posted a listen again link.  I duly listened.  It was about metaphor.  Not really all that special as a programme, so I got on with other things.  While making a cup of tea, drifting from the living room I heard Mr. Fry's silken voice intoning,
If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th' other do.

And though it in the centre sit,
Yet, when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

Don't know where I'd be without such happy synchronicities.

I've been having quite vivid dreams lately, and remembering them quite clearly, due, I've no doubt, to sleeping with the window open at this time of year, and the streets of Romford being extra-specially noisy.  An interrupted sleep tends to be a dream-rich sleep, after all.
Last night was no exception. The subject matter however, mystified me.  Regular readers will know I have a tendency to emotional victimhood, bewailing ad nauseam my solitude and inability to acquire any sort of love life.  For a host of reasons, that's been my prevailing mood over the last few weeks, and in particular this long weekend; last night producing a sort of decision, if no actual solutions.  I went to bed with a mind more than usually full of wild and emotional thought, fully expecting some powerful dreams. I was not disappointed, but I did not dream of love, nor of its lack.
Instead I had two quite distinct and separate dreams, each in their own way dealing with creativity, and its abuse by those who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.  A thing about which I have strong feelings, certainly, but not something that's been much on my mind recently, so goodness knows where it came from.