The lost car

A dream about losing my car in a car park last night, set somewhere in or around Parliament Square.

In descending order of prominence there were three strands to the plot. First the lost car; second a lost cable for my laptop; and, third trying to write up a proper report on my laptop, a report with proper section headings and with paragraph numbers, from some rather untidy notes, notes which had made in something like what Rymans describe as a 'Oxford Black n Red A4 Notebook 192 Pages Casebound Hardback Ruled'. A variety of notebook which was popular in the middle half of my working life. I don't think that ours were black then, but I do have a black one now.

The lost cable was a particular yellow cable, about two metres long, actually used to connect my laptop directly to my BT router when I want a really good connection, but in my dream something to do with security. This part of the dream also involved, in a peripheral way, a person I actually used to work with. Something which does not happen in my dreams very often.

While the car, our actual car complete with most of its registration number, was lost in a place called 'New Palace Yard' in my dream, but which was nothing like the actual yard. Rather a rambling collection of interconnected spaces, some gardens, some informal car parks and some just open space. Probably cobbled. A bit like an Inn of Court or an Oxbridge college. Informal car parks, but there was control. There were a few chaps in black uniforms - but not officious, rather very casual and relaxed.

The thought was that the missing cable might be in the car, which had been parked in said New Palace Yard, across the road from where I was working. I had already been back to the car, so I knew that it was there and roughly where it was. But going back to look for the cable, I couldn't find it. The rambling collection seemed to get bigger and bigger. Quite a lot of the space was now taken up with some kind of outdoor market or car boot sale.

Round and round, but I couldn't find the car anywhere. I was starting to get very confused about where I had left it. Everything seemed to be different.

Eventually, it suddenly popped into my mind that perhaps the car had been stolen.

Waking up, I tried to remember this dream. Remembering the story from psychologists that every act of remembering is really an act of construction, perhaps reconstruction. Which is indeed how it now seemed.

I then went on to trying to remember the layout of the kitchen in the house where I spent most of my childhood. And this was even more construction like, perhaps Lego like, with my remembering successive bits and slotting them into place, sometimes getting it right first time, sometimes not. A process which took some minutes. A process perhaps helped along by the fact that the kitchen had been designed, it was an organised space, involving a fair amount of joinery which had been made up on the spot, not just a blank space containing an assortment of white goods and flatpacks.

PS: the snap above is New Palace Yard according to Street View. A place which I have been past many times - but I have never been inside.

References

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Palace_Yard.