I normally spend just a couple of minutes writing Kevin’s Corner on Friday morning, but this week, I did it on Thursday morning.
That’s because the detail of your dreams dissolves very quickly. At some point in the night between Wednesday and Thursday, I dreamt of Richard Holmes.
It was a dinner scene. The room was big, the stone walls hung with tapestries. The wide table was made from a heavy timber - probably oak - and was L-shaped. I approached the table from inside the L. Everyone from Croud was seated, on either side of me, and the table was strewn with goblets brimming with Bordeaux.
Richard was sat on the far side of the table at its apex. I drew nearer, sat down, and launched into a joke about the commercial deal he must have struck with the wine supplier. Now here I’m a bit hazy, but I’m pretty sure my joke was about EBITDA.
You know, when you’re telling a joke, sometimes you say it in a way so that everyone knows it’s a joke. And people did begin to laugh, but then it dawned on us all that what I’d said - essentially an accountancy joke - arithmetically made no sense at all. And so actually nobody laughed, or said anything. And it was embarrassing.
Classically, dreams about anxiety and vulnerability involve appearing naked in front of a room of people. For me though, I quite often dream about being exposed as innumerate. It’s not quite the same though because being naked in front of a room of people is highly unlikely to happen; whereas I am actually pretty innumerate, and do quite often give myself away.
Dreams are constructed from symbols: the medieval setting, the audience of colleagues, the esteemed and admired member of our board, my exposure and anxiety. What was it all about?
I’m not completely sure, but maybe it was to do with this annotated picture, which I had posted in the BRM chat room the day before.
I won’t explain this right now, except to say that even by the evening the day I posted this, no-one had responded to it or even posted the crying with laughter emoji. Perhaps it hadn’t been as funny as I thought it was going to be.
Have a good weekend.