My first blog ever

Brent at Nostromo Books

The human brain is an interesting thing.

I had a dream last night. Or actually it was probably this morning as I remembered it as soon as I woke up (after hitting snooze for the 3rd time).

I dreamt that I was a ghost. Now there did follow a rather detailed description of this dream but I received some criticism for writing too much in this blog so I've cut out the details - people have such short attention spans these days.

Anyway it’s rather obvious to me why I had this dream. I read two short stories by Koji Suzuki, Japanese horror writer and author of ‘The Ring’ and ‘Dark Water’ before I went to bed. I hadn’t intended to read them but I’m staying in someone else’s apartment in Berlin and I didn’t feel like reading the few books I’d brought along (incidentally one’s on Jung) and most of her books are in German, French or Japanese and the only 3 English novels I could find are Catcher in the Rye (finally read it last year – it’s stupid but I always put off reading it due to the fact that John Lennon’s killer had a copy in his pocket), The Echo Makers by Richard Powers and Dark Water. I had just finished reading the Echo Makers last night, which is about a guy who suffers a brain injury and develops Capgras, which meant he made a reasonably good recovery except he didn’t believe his sister was his sister or his dog was his dog and started having paranoid delusions that there was a complex conspiracy against him and things were being hidden from him. The story takes part in Nebraska where a massive crane colony comes to roost on it’s annual migration and there’s a subplot about how development is threatening the vulnerable wetlands the Cranes are relying on. Overall not a bad book although not one of my favourites and I don’t know if I agree with the Guardian or the Times rave reviews but hey I’m no literary critic.

Anyway there was talk of how modern brain research seems to think that the brain is made up of a whole lot of different modules and it’s a miracle we have a sense of ‘I’ at all. The ‘I’ just appears to be some sort of consensus reached by all the different parts of the brain to fool us into thinking we actually have some control over what we are doing. Think about that next time you have trouble deciding what to wear or what to have for dinner – it’s a miracle we ever get anything done at all.

There was also talk of the reptilian brain and this morning it occurred to me that maybe my flying dreams are related to the fact that I’m descended from pterodactyls or something (I was flying in my ghost dream). Now that would be cool but probably not that likely – maybe a flying lemur then (mammalian brain?). This was the main thing I took from my dream. That plus a resolve to read something apart from Japanese horror stories before I go to sleep tonight.

I don't even believe in ghosts or at least won't until I see one myself. I had convinced myself by the time I was eleven that they didn't exist based on the fact that my father died in our house of cancer while I was away on school camp and never came back to see me to say goodbye. Even though I would lie awake at night for weeks afterwards waiting. Surely if there were such a thing as ghosts that's precisely the sort of situation when they would appear? I've also been a devout athiest since I was a child and used to skip bible class so a belief in an afterlife doesn't really fit in with my world view. I believe that this one life that we know we have is wondrous enough without having to believe in a better one afterwards (this is probably quite an arrogant thing to say because I have the luxury of being a middle class European with a reasonably good education living a good life in a peaceful country so apologies to people with not so great lives hoping for a better one afterwards - I could be wrong). However (based on my own beliefs), I'm quite happy to believe that when I die my body will decay and fertilise the soil and that will be that. I think I'd like an avocado or a feijoa tree planted on my grave - no headstone, just a tree and then people and birds and flying lemurs can come along and eat the fruit. That would be cool.

Speaking of flying and books and ghosts. A friend of mine stepped off the balcony of his apartment a few nights ago back in Auckland, except he didn’t fly – he crashed to the earth. He used to run a second hand bookstore where I would work one day a week and he would pay me in books. A gentle, kind and generous, although slightly eccentric person, he was always very supportive of all my creative endeavours, even the more ill advised ones. Last time I saw him was at a friend's dinner party about a couple of months ago and he seemed doped up on something and not very happy. I wished I'd talked to him more that night. He will be well missed - RIP Brent.