I had a dream

Back in 1998 I was at university studying, among other things, philosophy. The philosophy department, perhaps aptly, was a dusty, rather antiquated place. At times it seemed to me like an old folk’s home for the terminally eccentric. Most of its long serving members were heading towards their dotage and were well advanced (it seemed to me) along the road to senility. One of these fellows was a charming but rather preoccupied chap named Geoffrey Madell, who was noted for his theories on the mind and personal identity, and also for his rather unfortunate tic. He would stride across the stage of the George Square Lecture Theatre expounding on some principle or other, every so often his shoulders propelled forwards by a violent involuntary thrust that made him look as though he was attempting the funky chicken. After a while my shoulders started mimicking his in sympathy and I had to keep my eyes shut during his lectures.

It was around this time that I had one of my favouritemost dreams ever. In the dream I gradually became aware that I was in the university library. Furthermore I was on a shelf in the philosophy section. Slowly it dawned on me that I was a book on shelf in the philosophy department of the library – a book that could somehow ’see’ through its (his? her?) spine into the aisle. After some time it further dawned on me that I was a copy of Mind and Materialism by Geoffrey Madell.

What happened next in the dream is hard to quantify, but it seemed to take place over a number of years – possibly decades. Time became compressed, and proceeded apace, but the awful thing was that no one ever took me down from the shelf and carried me to the desk to take home and read. No one even bothered to peruse my dust jacket. Over time I began to feel a deep existential despair, but I couldn’t turn to Jean Paul Sartre on the opposite shelf for some moral support. Instead I was condemned to stare out at the same view, perhaps for eternity. It was a deeply moving dream, and I woke from it with a kind of awe-ful empathy for all the unread books mouldering away on shelves all over the world.

I have still never read Mind and Materialism, although I see Geoffrey wrote a new book in 2002, so at least ‘I’ won’t be alone anymore.