Spinning the subconscious

Tonight I had a dream that I was a train conductor.

Instead of that ticket-punching thingie I carried a drop spindle and a just-started ball of yarn. When the train moved, I spun, and when it stopped, I stopped. Then I'd wait and wind from my spindle to the ball of yarn. (From a practical standpoint ball-winding before finishing the cop on the spindle doesn't make much sense, but maybe on train journeys the spindle would get too heavy and full if I didn't wind off onto a ball every chance I'd get. Maybe it was some goofy company policy for yarn-spinning train conductors.)

Then I had one of those dream-flashes of suddenly knowing that in every great book I'd ever read, the main characters had all been spinning, and I could think back over all the instances I'd forgotten about where Jane Eyre or whichever character was spinning away and I'd just forgotten about it after finishing the book. Jane probably would spin, but only grey, and only from the plainest and least presumptive of wools, quietly.

At some point, not long before waking, I dreamed I was visiting friends who had small children and one of them begged me to teach him to spin. I asked him what kind of spindle I should show him on and he handed over a huge stuffed cat. We spent some time experimenting, just for the hell of it, and if nothing else I did manage to demonstrate to him that it's very hard indeed to spin yarn with a heavy plush animal that spun too slowly and with not the best balance. The yarn snapped, the cat fell, I woke up.

Not much else to report, unless I'm to rant about the fiber I'm dyeing and my ongoing search for the perfect toned-down light acid green. I'm afraid the recession-depression threw something of a distinctly phallic shaped wrench into my works for while there. Though I kept flailing, ever flailing, at my fibers and tools I have suffered an entirely unblogworthy malaise, from which I only now must attempt to be roused. Or whatever. I was bummed but I'm over it now, and hey, there's always yarn.