Dream time

I woke this morning to a complicated dream, vaguely work flavoured, once again about being lost in some middle sized provincial town. I had also forgotten where I was supposed to be, rather than wandering about the town, looking for but failing to find a shop which could sell me a new battery for my telephone.

In the dream, forgetting that you cannot easily change the battery of telephones any more and failing to work out that my battery was probably OK anyway. The flooding that had overtaken those of my colleagues had not affected me.

I thought that I would be able to find out both where I was and where I was supposed to be from my telephone. The combination of Ordnance Survey and gmaps would do my business. So I sat on a handy bench and pulled my telephone out of my inside jacket pocket. A jacket being something, at least in my working day, that one wore most of the time.

What I pulled out was a rather unusual telephone, but the whole thing had been reduced to rather blurry shades of grey. The colour had gone out of it. Furthermore, it was not really a telephone at all, rather one of those encyclopediac pocket books that were popular more than a hundred years ago. Perhaps full of the sort of information you used to get in diaries, perhaps geared to some particular hobby or trade. I remember that I used to have one about carpentry and carpentry tools. FIL had a few of them too, some related to his time in the (mental) health business, some to his interest in the world in general, in nature in particular.

Platforms like eBay and Abebooks were most responsive on this topic, with sBay offering the blue image above, but eventually Google AI got going and gave me the story immediately above.

While for carpenters, he turned up the snap above, from Facebook. Not the book that I had had, but very much the right sort of thing.

Back with the dream, I eventually started to wake up, and as I woke up, the image of the book became much clearer, so much clearer that I started to work out that it was not my telephone after all. That the book and the telephone were different things.

Fully awake, my thoughts moved onto the totem poles from the short stretch of Pacific coastline which bridges Alaska and British Columbia, in particular the estuaries of the Skeena and Nass rivers. Totem poles which I had been reading about in the book at reference 2, amongst others.

These totem poles contain a lots of different things - but among them are a lot of creatures which are half beast, half man. Typically with the upper half more beast-like and the lower half more human-like. Creatures which figure in the myths of the people concerned, often in creation stories.

The Greeks did something of the same sort too. No doubt there are plenty of others around the world.

My present thought being that in dreaming, in a pre-literate world full of animals, some large and dangerous, perhaps these sorts of creatures were quite common, rather in the way in my very literate world, a book was conflated with a telephone. Perhaps brought to wooden or textile life by the shamans whose business it was to bring dreams to life in the real world. Who could give appropriate direction to the carpenters and to the weavers.

PS: regarding reference 3, calling the present poles totem poles is not quite right from an anthropological point of view, but the name has stuck. Too late to change it.

References

Reference 1: The Standard Encyclopedia - The World's Best Pocket Encyclopedia - J.M. Parrish - c1930.

Reference 2: Totem Poles of the Pacific North Coast – Edward Malin – 1986.

Reference 3: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/04/more-clans-and-marriages.html. Some more totems.