'City life and lessons' PRACTICE ARTICLE EXTRACT

I 'grew up' in the rolling red bricks of England. The busy streets were never a place i was allowed to play unless it was either snowing, where no cars dared to venture, or a sweltering hot afternoon where all the sensible individuals had retreated into the cool shade of their homes. Not me. I much preferred making myself dizzy by swinging around the washing line pole until the sheer heat of the metal burned my hands and left me with 'boyish' blisters- an ever occurring phrase that regularly swung round the washing pole of my life for the good part of eleven years. Of course when you're this age, hardly anything is boring and everything that is supposed to make no sense, never matters. Because when you're this age what would you worry about more; The fact that the economy is crumbling or whether you could fit in seeing three of your friends all in one day?

The day we moved from the terrace house in the busy streets of Bristol to a quiet home on the outskirts of North Somerset, I had just turned eight. My little sister was a new born and my younger brother was around five. He cried horrendously when we left the house for the last time. Forever the attention seeker he would cry at anything-not so much anymore but he always finds a way to get some kind of attention nevertheless. I, however bragged to my friends about the "huge" new house we were moving into and how the garden was "one-hundred feet with a swing and loads of trees". Moving to the countryside wasn't a big deal for me at this time. I wasn't a bored child, I was simply unoccupied from time to time. Before i could fully imagine the endless possibility of the city and what it beholds in its grey hands, from the people i would meet in my teenage years to all the situations I would face later on, the countryside was open and an endless opportunity. My dad and I had a patch of garden that we tended to sporadically. A muddy patch of ground, set aside from my parents' adult garden and all just for me and dad. I have no recollection of tending to my muddy patch I was ever so proud of. It probably survived through a stroke of Somerset luck or, more likely, the unseen hand of my dad.

When i reached the ever so tender age of fifteen, my teenage years piled on fast and thick. I was still only a young adult but the need to escape the countryside was growing. By the time I had reached sixteen (almost reaching seventeen) and had left school I was gagging to escape the green grasp of the country. My mind was begging me to leave the quiet, the uneventful blanket of rolling hills and grazing cattle that seemed to be suffocating me. I chose a college that was as far away as acceptable and back in the bustling city that held me so tenderly as a child. Here is where i encountered my very first taste of life as a whole. With this new found freedom I learnt more lessons than I could count on my two hands. All the people encountered, all the relationships, all the dates, all the places I visited, taught me something. They allowed me to grasp reality faster than I believe i would've staying in the comfort of my parents' humble abode. Which brings me onto my first lesson that was an essential part of my development as a person: "If your dreams are bigger than the town you live in, you've got to get out of there" (-Brian Fallon)

The beginning of college for me was overwhelming. I struggled intensely with the work load that my previous teachers had not prepared me for prior to starting. I tried my very hardest to juggle both my social life as well as my education, this, I just about managed with but only by the tightest schedule I've ever encountered. Looking back on it now I made such rash decisions about what came first, which was almost always my social life. Regrettably, this left me with a reputation as someone who didn't always hand in the perfect essay homework, that arrived late because I'd stayed up late the night before and as the one who always left things to the last minute. However, don't get me wrong, I always tried my hardest in class and in the time I'd freed up for study. My teachers never saw the hardest I ever worked because I was never one to raise my hand in class. But i listened intently to every single detail that was ever written, spoken or discussed. I picked up on all the little improvements that were needed to achieve the highest grades and I made sure that i never fell behind in class work. But homework has always been my pitfall. Unfortunately, this is what you're judged on.  At the end of my two years, a personal statement was required to each of your subject teachers. I remember very clearly what i wrote to all my AS and A-level teachers. Lesson number two, a statement that quoted Tiger Woods and one that I'd been trying to get across to them throughout the entirety of my stay; "I'm trying as hard as I can, and sometimes things don't go your way and that's the way things go."

THE STUFF OF DREAMS (FIRST DRAFT)

Dreams are a series of images, emotions, ideas and perceptions that occur involuntarily in the unconscious mind during sleep. The purpose and content of dreaming has never been definitively understood, though they have been a subject of psychological and scientific speculation, as well as a subject of philosophical and religious interest at the time of discovery and discussion of dreams and dreaming throughout history. They have been described as ‘the royal road to the unconscious by Sigmund Freud, a doctor in the nineteen hundreds. This may not be an occurring fact when you wake from a dream that involves you participating in sporting events, stark naked with your ex-lover. However, the interpretations of these kinds of dreams are a specialist interest for psychoanalysts who believe that all dreams have a hidden meaning. Some may say that your previous partner being over exposed with you means that you can see right through them and their intentions. It may also foretell an illicit love affair or some scandalous activity. But, this is not scientifically proven. Dream analysis is only a personal interpretation based on gathered facts and statistics of a wide audience. Everyone’s dreams are individual to their own mind and it’s how you interpret them that matters. You may never think about the dream again.

If dreams are the ‘Royal Road to the Unconscious’ then the route that we’re taking when we dream may be the deadliest highway of horrendous twists and turns leaving us heavily sweating and struggling to breathe. Or, they may be mysterious, bewildering and more often then you may assume: eye opening.

The history of dreaming dates back to the BC era, when ancient Greeks and The Egyptians were the leading force in teaching and education of subjects that nobody had explored before. The Egyptians analysed the main meaning behind dreams and the Greeks interpreted these theories into their own culture. Aristotle famously wrote: “A person awakes from sleep when digestion is complete”. - This is evidently not true, however many of us wake from sleep or dreaming when the worst possible scenario is about to occur. Psychoanalysts believe this is an unconscious decision made by our brain or our ‘Super Ego’ to stop us damaging our other unconscious processes. In other words; our brain stops us from dreaming any further if the mental images we’re creating would do damage to us emotionally or physically.

Despite the possibility of our mind emotionally damaging us through the form of mental images, some people enjoy dreaming so much that they participate in taking an extremely potent, illegal hallucinogenic drug called Dimethyltryptamine (Dime-Thigh-l-tripe-tamine). This drug is an isolated and synthetic form of the similar chemical formed in our brains when we dream. It allows the individual to continue dreaming throughout the day without their brain waking up with unconscious decision.

 Personally, the thought of dreaming more than the norm is not something I would like to actively participate in. I’ve had more than my fair share of obscure and temporarily mentally damaging dreams to last me an entire life time. Dreams are often passed off as a simple one night occurrence. Never to be seen again unless the wandering, sluggish mind accidently bumps into its old friend on a cold lonely night- the reoccurring dream, and what do you need more on a cold lonely night than to relive terrible memories that you swore you’d never revisit… But, one of the best ways to fully appreciate the strange fluidity of this unconscious state of mind is to remember the beautiful rarity of this hallucinogenic cinema of imagery that parades around your thoughts throughout the night. Picking up on things that your eyes had seen in the daytime but had passed off as something that needn’t be stored in the already crowded brain.  When you wake from a dream it’s easy to forget the unnatural bombardment of thoughts that travel through your head. Forgetting how easy it is for your brain to turn a park bench into a fully-fledged sleigh as you ride through the night in a land you’ve never been before. Dreaming truly is the land of the bizarre.