
For the first time in many months, I remember the dream I had last night. This is rather unusual for me.
My subconscious seems to have turned to cheap spy pulp for inspiration: I dreamt that I was at a conference somewhere, and that I bumped into a woman I knew at college back in the late 70s. I have barely thought of her in the intervening quarter century, in that way people just slip out of your consciousness when they are completely absent from your sphere of friends or acquaintances for long enough.
Anyway, in my dream, Inga was suitably aged - the years had served her well, but she was not still the 18 or 22 year-old I knew back then, but still dressed in jeans and tee shirt. Whatever she was up to at the conference in the dream, it was clearly something she was anxious not to be recognised for. My "hello" was met with a moment's recognition followed by feigned incomprehension, and a shadowy other person would then begin running interference whenever I tried to contact her.
Very strange. I wonder what my subconscious is, or has been up to?
I recall my first day at college as a spotty 18 year old, sitting in a lecture theatre as part of the induction process, looking across the sea of faces, and trying to work out who in that crowd was the exotic tall blonde Swede called Inga Rutenberg. I found out some hours later, that she was neither blonde nor Swedish, not particularly tall either. And she was from Coventry.
I last saw her in 1982 with her husband to be, at a mutual friend's wedding. Contact with all long since lost, I find myself wondering what became of the mysterious and exotically named Inga...