It's been high time for a music week. I didn't plan to mention again the bad dream I had last Tuesday, but I shall. When the alarm woke me, I was a helpless onlooker while a naked woman hunched herself up nearly in a foetal position on a table. She had a look of terror on her face I won't forget, and her breasts were squeezed between taut arms with her hands joined over her vagina trying to protect herself.
Poking out of her sex was the back end of an artillery shell. I can't recollect where she was, just that her body was surrounded by other shell-cases of varying size.
I don't know who was raping her in this vile way, I couldn't see. That image stuck with me for hours, colouring much of the day, one of the most horrible I can remember, along with the feeling I'd experienced a bit of what she was enduring.
It was afternoon before I shook myself out of it, which was a tremendous relief since I'd been scared that if I went to bed again the dream would come back and go on until the end. It wasn't what I'd call a nightmare until afterwards. Somehow I'd switched off my own revulsion and fear while it happened.
I wanted to stop it happening, that was all. I couldn't.
On Wednesday I told Olya, the florist with a shop downstairs, about it and added: "I think I know now why women hate guns so much."
That seemed to make sense to her and by then I felt that dream won't come back again.
Olya's not a florist for nothing.
She's a gorgeous woman who hates violence, a good friend to many people and has made that shop one of the nicest on the street. I must take her to a concert this year without the mistake I made last time, when I lent her a couple of records beforehand and she decided to decline because she didn't like them much.
That was a pity because you can't judge the singer on the strength of those two CDs, one her latest, the other made in the late 1980s, and during a superb concert Aimee Mann, as I said at the time, performed music from almost a whole career and she was such fun.
2006 has begun like a dream. It feels like one when you need pinching by your friends and can write, as I am, that during the previous year, all of my dreams came true.
They have. I've found the "mystery woman".
She's real, she's nearly been rushing me and on Monday, we're going to start living our dreams together. Not under the same roof, but together. I'm certain of it and will say little more of her for now.
She's not Olya but it's music like I hear in her shop.
Last night, I got some wonderful news from somebody else and shan't put that on the log either though it had me full of excitement and joy. When I gave that person my own news it was to be told: "It's like Fate."
I could almost hear the capital 'F'. My answer is I know nothing about fate and don't think I believe in it, but I know about faith, since it's why I've described 2005 as the best year of my life since 1989, when Marianne was born.
I want to put that knowledge here as well as with most of my friends and my family. There is no point in analysing it or looking for reasons. This entry starts with a bad dream and a few days later, someone sung me a song that reminded me of it again and when she did, I could almost feel how it must have been.
You have to have faith in something to get over experiences like that and since I've put my own faith in music, my life and relations with other people have become a whole lot easier. This has nothing to do with God.
I don't know any more about God than I did in July on learning it was nothing. What I found since, however, is that faith in anything is a quality you can share with certain other people who look after it for you when you lose it.
They don't have to believe the same as you do. Maybe no two people do believe exactly the same things for their own "truths". But if you're able to believe in yourself most of the time and in each of those other people nearly all of the time, you can keep an eye on their faith for them, they do the same for you and it's no burden to anyone.
I don't know how this works and see no need to try to find out.
If we know ourselves well enough, which doesn't take any thought though a lot of us do, we know when we're "losing it". I do when I'm very tired or stressed out, or both and can't be still and switch off my thoughts.
I've given up trying to brazen my way through times like that and pretend to be confident when it's not true. Some people say you "should", but there's no "ought" about it. So what do you do instead?
You tell someone you really trust, "I'm losing it." If you're lucky enough to have more than one of them, you can spread it around a little and ask: "Would you mind looking after my faith for me, please, until I get it back?"
You should also tell them to do the same with you. Unless you're a very good liar or actor, people who know you well enough can tell when you're losing it anyway, but they don't all say so any more than most of us might with them. If need be, we should let them.
The truism holds that "a burden shared is a burden halved" but there's more to it. We're just animals when we can "sniff out" insecurity, fear and despair in others. "Nobody likes a loser" is another cliché. Nobody does. Losers are very hard to live with and so are people who've decided they are.
Almost everybody wants to be trusted and worthy of it. We have to be very unwell not to be able to trust our own intuitions or anyone else once we get to know them. The first bit may be hard because intuitions, when we have them, don't always make any sense.
Acting on them can be an act of faith, then, but has anybody ever told you, "I acted on my intuitions and regret it now"? Nobody has me. I've heard the opposite often enough, which is a shame.
Last year, realising I don't know what love is any more didn't stop me oozing and gushing it at some people. I'm putting a stop to this from 2006 because wiser people don't feel any need to do so. They don't talk about it much.
Song-writers do, but that's different. Such people are among our shamans, our teachers, our griots and our story-tellers. I shall go on telling their stories when albums they make and the concerts they give are so often acts of faith.
Music has taught me these things, like the people who make it and those who live it. All I wish to say further about faith is that it works, what I've said. A few other people look after mine and me after theirs. Bad dreams can be hard to shake off but knowing this helps!
12:16:06 AM 
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