a strange dream

I read recently that many people in the UK have been experiencing dreams that are far more vivid than usual. A lot of these dreams are being interpreted as manifestations of increased anxiety—not surprising, given the current circumstances in the country, with no end in sight. I’ve always had vivid dreams, often bizarre, but I don’t think that they could ever be seen as reflecting an underlying mood of anxiety.

For example, a frequent motif in my dreams is exploration, an activity that occupies a large proportion of my leisure time. In my dreams, I often discover connections between places that don’t exist in reality, which I interpret as wishful thinking, because it’s often the case that a bike ride would be improved if such a connection actually existed.

There is also evidence that some of my dreams are triggered by events of the previous day. For example, one evening recently, I watched Havoc in Heaven, a feature-length animated film produced by the Shanghai Animation Studio in 1964 that chronicles the exploits of Sun Wukong, the self-styled ‘Great Sage, Equal of Heaven’, otherwise known as the Monkey King. That night, I dreamed that I was the Monkey King!

However, this story is about a dream I had the night before last, and before I continue, I should offer a description of one of my favourite cycling testpieces: ‘swiss roll’, which is the climax of an alleyway/path connecting the witch’s house and Kwu Tung South Road. Incidentally, the name that I’ve given to this difficult obstacle derives from the fact that the approach passes through a low-rise private housing estate in which all the streets are named after cities in Switzerland.

The following image shows Paula at the start of ‘swiss roll’:

It’s steep from the start, so you need to be in bottom gear from the start.

The gradient does appear to ease off in the middle though:

However, it would be a serious error to soft-pedal here, because the hardest part is yet to come:

The section shown in the previous two images involves a fight to hold a straight(ish) line as you run out of momentum.

And my dream? As you can see, there is a flight of steps on the left of the ramp, which I assume is for pedestrians. The ramp is unlikely to be for cyclists—unless they get off and push—but is probably there for people pushing barrows. Although I rarely see people here, in my dream I encountered a pedestrian who decided to walk up the ramp rather than the steps, getting in my way in the process. This had never happened in reality.

And this is the strange part. Paula and I were out cycling yesterday, and because we’d been touring around the area west of the expressway and east of the mountains, we took in ‘swiss roll’ on our way back, as we always do in such circumstances. As the top part of the ramp came into sharper focus, I saw a woman who was casually walking up it near the top. My bike doesn’t have the loudest bell I could find for no reason, although I seldom use it aggressively. However, this was no time for niceties. Needs must when the Devil drives. She got the message and scrambled up and out of my way pretty quickly. I hope that this doesn’t become a regular occurrence, but it does seem odd that I’d dreamed about such a scenario just the night before. Perhaps I should pay more attention to my dreams and go into prophecy.