Here is this morning’s dream had before 8 AM.

The scene starts with me approaching Guingamp hospital from the downhill side into the old “severe” style hospital building. I go up the hill and into a main entrance lobby. The slightly brutalist view gives way to an old style hospital corridor with brick-red sealed painted floors. The nursing staff wear starchy white linen skirts with little nursing hats. I am being admitted into the eye surgery ward.

The nurses doing the admissions are speaking to me in English. Using baby English and short sentences. I say, “on peut parler français”. But they ignore me and carry on trying English. The nurse sits me on the side of an old style hospital bed with a white painted metal frame. She shows me an image of me with my left eye held open with various clamps like in “A Clockwork Orange”. The image focusses on my left eye only which is enlarged in comparison to my right eye. She shows how they might cut the eye with a scalpel to improve the quality and depth of my “seeing”. She says that they are going to focus on my “seeing” in my left eye. Someone comes in and taps her on the shoulder. They are ready for me up in the ward.

Together with a porter she wheels the bed along the corridor and through a nurse’s station into a ward. The ward is packed with people in beds. The beds are very close and she wheels me up next to the back wall of the ward. The people of the ward are of mixed ages and social status, around a dozen. They are all glad to see me and relax because I am now there.

Sat at a small desk is a senior female doctor in a lab coat and with dark hair. Surprisingly she is talking home counties English and I can imagine her with a G&T at Henley.  She is not very happy being there and talks to her team only in English. I ask her how long she has been here. Too long is her reply.  A nurse says to me that the time for my operation approaches and they need to fit electrodes to me to monitor my heart. She turns her back to get the electrodes. I get off the bed and stand on small box, now naked apart from my black boxer shorts. I can clearly see the recent scar from my operation. All the other incisions I have had are also highlighted. I stand there bare chested with my hairy chest exposed. I say that they may need to shave me. They attach electrodes and I stand there on the box with my arms pointing downwards in a pose made famous by the Abu Garib torture victim. The view zooms out and all that can be seen is a semi naked me with electrodes attached all over my chest and body arms open, my palms turned out and arms pointing downwards.

I am then lying back on the bed and a male nurse inserts an oxygen tube into my nostrils. He says that they are going to introduce some Ketamine vapour into the flow in order to relax me for the operation which is soon. I comment that I am already relaxed.

I am now walking with Kate Bush in the hospital grounds. I am dressed in my boxers and a very loose fitting open hospital gown. She is wearing her grey hakama pants and top from the “Running up That Hill” video. She asks me with more of a lisp than usual what I make of it all. I say that it is metaphorical and that the left eye is all about feeling and seeing. That it is no bad thing for me to develop some more feeling and perhaps compassion. I have a penchant for the austere, the vast and the cosmic. She says that yes it is a metaphor and that the dreaming to which she pertains is all about feeling and snow. She says that sometimes it is good to have THE feeling. She asks me how I feel about having the clamps and the surgery. I say that it is a metaphor and that the “seeing” can be a mixed blessing. I say that my left eye has always been metaphorically enlarged. She, a dreamer, has always known this about me.

The dream ends.