Any Dream Will Do?

I had the enormous pleasure last week of attending Messy Church with my god-children (a cue for a forest of posts about family and attitudes of the Church and the World to the same, but Charlotte has done a much better one) last week.

The theme was Joseph, and the activities included making a bubble picture and sticking on a drawing of your dreams.

I didn't do one myself, partly because I was there to "supervise" 7 year old A and 9 year old E (A needs very little supervision and E could run the place, but that's the rules) and partly because I was ashamed of my dreams. Most of the children were a bit embarrassed about their dreams too. "It's too weird" said one, and "it's silly" another. But they were persuaded that their dreams were no weirder than Joseph's and his friends' so they drew giant apples or snails eating their feet and stuck them on to the pink and blue clouds that they had made by blowing into a mixture of paint and washing up liquid, and then left my eldest god-daughter to clear up when they went on to the next activity. I went on to the next activity too, but this did inspire me to think of my dreams.

Lately they have ALL been about NHS computer systems. I've dreamed of filing documents, and furniture, and god-children. I've dreamed of coding illnesses and meals and paintings and cats. I've woken up relieved that I didn't have to find the best way to connect a computer to a hairdryer, and disappointed that I hadn't found the solution to reporting on the flu campaign. None of this is surprising. We've had a new computer system installed at work and it has been a huge learning curve for us all. No need to call Sigmund Freud for an analysis. On the other hand I'm not the only person who's ever dreamed about NHS computer systems and despite what the natural critics of the project would have us believe, the dreams were dreamed for idealistic AND evidence based reasons and have brought good as well as frustration