Feeling much more in a mood to create at last, after the deadness that is programming. Those tools are useful, but the creating is if the key thing.
I awoke relatively early, due to workmen hammering outside, from a night of strange nightmares. I often wake up in the out-of-body place, what is called the astral plane, but is basically a dream version of the real world. I awake in my bed, barely able to move, struggle and switch on the light, write notes, but am barely able to move more than a few metres, then I re-awake, discovering that the place was a dream within a dream, the notes gone, the light off as it should be. It feels different from a dream, somehow more real, with more sense of physical presence. In last night's case, a hole in a wall leading to the neighbour's house formed some sort of portal, and moving through that into a tunnel realm cause me to enter this astral mode. I don't believe there is anything supernatural about it; it's third state of mind, waking, dreaming, astral, and definitely different from waking or dreaming (or hypnotic trance, which isn't a state at all). I would guess than more of the waking mind is active than normal, yet not enough to be awake. Sleep paralysis is certainly an essential part of this.
In the day I started by scanning some illustrations for Deb's new as-yet-secret book, then we took a first trip out in the car, a first, relatively normal, day out since March. The situation still feels strange, as though we are, as many are, in strange single-person bubbles. Unable to touch or be close. Images on television of normal times, or those in 'households', where people can get close, seem strange or worrying. I've been out so little, my physical strength has certainly suffered.
After that the first proofreading and changes to my book of short stories, The Intangible Man. This has been largely complete for six months or so, waiting for the end of Covid-19 lockown so that Deb and I could confer. The changes are now done, a second proof is ready to order.
