Series of nightmares; pesky dream-traps

When I'm really overtired, I often find myself falling into a series of intense dreams or nightmares as soon as I fall asleep. My uneducated guess (only semi-supported by a brief internet search) is that it may be more likely you'll fall almost immediately into REM (rapid eye movement) sleep when very tired. Interestingly, dropping straight into REM is typical in narcolepsy. Which I'm pretty sure I don't have. Normal sleep patterns involve 1-2 hrs of non-REM sleep before going into the first REM stage. And non-REM sleep is thought to involve little or no dreaming, or perhaps less intense and less narratively based dreaming. It's still a pretty mysterious field of study.

When I realise it is happening, I am desperate to wake up and break the cycle. Sometimes it's hard to break out. Most recently I got to the last dream in the series and it was me lying in bed trying to turn the bedside light on but I couldn't make it work. Of course this wasn't real and after a struggle - probably just a moment in real time - I woke up properly and turned on the light. At this point I generally feel both scared and annoyed, because I know I'm overtired, I've probably made the effort to go to bed early, and now I'm losing the chance to catch up on my sleep and am not willing to slip back into sleep too soon. 

I recently watched season 3 of the addictive Mr Mercedes. For the new season there was a different theme song, Series of Dreams by Bob Dylan.

Like pretty much anyone spending enough time listening to western popular music, I'm familiar with plenty of Bob Dylan songs. But I've never really paid serious attention or listened to his albums - though it always seemed like I would one day.

Because I'd been thinking about these nasty falling-asleep dream sequences, Series of Dreams immediately grabbed my attention. It was recorded in 1989 but didn't actually make the cut for that album, and came out a couple of years later on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3. 

The lyrics aren't about nightmares, necessarily, but the song does capture that trapped feeling, with lines like "nothing comes up to the top," and "there's no exit in any direction." And of course the whole feeling of moving from one dream to another, when perhaps you'd rather wake up or just move into restful dreamless sleep.

It was not just the lyrics: I also instantly loved and recognised the sound, and was not surprised to learn it was produced by Daniel Lanois, who also collaborated on one of my favourite albums, Wrecking Ball with Emmylou Harris. I remember when the Boss gave one of his later albums the same name. I couldn't quite understand why he felt ok with that. Doesn't he know that's Emmylou's masterpiece?! 

And all this talk of dreams reminds me of one of my favourite songs of 2021, Canyon by Charm of Finches. 

Not only do the lyrics talk explicitly about dreams, but in their 'Inside the Song' video Mabel and Ivy talk about how they mined their own dream journals for ideas. It's such a beautiful song.

 

Warrior shawl!

This is Beth's shawl from the 2019 Little Women movie. But we're calling it the Warrior Shawl! as those seem to be the vibes when she wears this way, like a sontag (or 'Danish tie shawl'). 

Sometimes a piece of knitwear from a film catches the eye of knitters, and one or more people will reverse engineer a pattern. In this case though, the woman who published the pattern (and donated the proceeds to a charity) is the person who actually knit it for the movie. 

We decided the best colours for my sister would be pretty much the same colours as the original. The main purple is a delicious merino and linen blend: Isager Yarn Merilin. The brown and yellow stripes are some of a large batch of 4ply tweed yarns (Rowan and similar) which I had found not long before, a wonderful op shop find.  

It was a delight to knit. I loved the yarn, especially the Merilin, and this was a good thing, as I ended up reknitting the whole thing after my icord edging came out way too tight, which you can see in the picture on the right above. It was one of those projects, where I sort of knew as I went along that it probably wasn't going to be ok, but just kept going and hoped it would block out enough. I should trust that instinct by now! 

It's actually not exactly the same as the one in the film. The skinny brown stripes are actually not as skinny as they should be (3 garter ridges instead of 2) as I missed the errata published for the pattern. But I think we can live with this. Just adds a little more length and warmth.

Colourful cowhide

A black-bordered blanket in stripes of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple and darker red; with variously sized black patches all over it; spread out on a bed. 

After I made a suprise blanket for my eldest nephew for his thirteenth birthday, I started to think that this could be something I do for each of the niblings at the same age. Growing up, we had a couple of key milestone birthdays when we were given certain things: a bike; a bedside clock radio. I just liked the idea.

There were two who were next in line (twins) and for various reasons I decided it would be best to consult rather than surprise this time. Mr almost-13 said he wasn't keen on a hand-knit and would rather have a weighted blanket/quilt instead. Easily done and has turned out to be very well loved. (I'm not ruling out making him one at a later date, but it was a relief not to have to make two adult-sized blankets by the same deadline.)

His sister was keen, however, and jumped eagerly into a design conversation. We discussed various options and settled on this mashup concept: "cow print" on a rainbow background. She does really love that cow hide look! I did basically know what she meant and we made some drawings. But I couldn't really visualise it or be sure it would work. I just had to knit and hope for the best.    

 

A white West Highland Terrier dog with floppy ears helps me photograph the blanket. 

See below, how some of the patches are raised and some are flat? That's because I didn't put enough black patches in at first. 

I knit it first with several intarsia patches. It wasn't too hard to just come up with random, organic shapes without a chart. But I should have done more drawing and planning before I started. I wasn't keen on the yarn-juggling that would be involved if I made more than one or two black splotches at a time. This meant I didn't do a lot of them overall. When I got toward the end and was able to look at it spread out, it was clear that the overall effect was not reading as "cow print" (even though, I guess, an actual cow could well have had only a few black patches) and was more like a rainbow ocean with a few scattered islands. 

A close up picture of blue and purple knitting fabric with some flat and some raised black patches.

I thought about embroidering more patches with duplicate stich, but when I tried it I didn't like how it looked (nor how long it took). I switched to applique, knitting a whole lot of random shaped patches in large and small sizes and just sewing them on.

On the wrong side, you can see the difference between the intarsia; a few small stranded patches I also threw in while doing the main knitting; and the later sewn-on patches. 

The other problem was that fabric knitted mostly or all in stocking stitch ('stockingette') will always very much want to curl at the edges. I knew this well of course, and had included as I knit the blanket a decent garter stitch border all the way around, but I also wasn't really convinced this would be sufficient, and it became obvious almost straight away that it was still going to curl. In the end I had to knit on an additional border in black, and then this really was enough to make it sit properly. It wasn't really planned but now I like how the double border looks.

 

  

Two images showing a garter stitch knitted border matching the colours of the blanket, and another garter stitch border beside it in black.  

After making a few blankets in recent years that *mostly* came out pretty quickly and *mostly* to deadlines, I had to admit this time that I hadn't started the project early enough to allow for all these extra tweaks and problem solving. Annoyingly it became the neverending project that always needed "just another week". In the end it was about six weeks late! Longer, really. than I would have thought it should take to make all together. I did make her a cushion (a repeat of this one) to give to her on her actual birthday. And she was perfectly patient waiting for the blanket. 

I think she was really happy with it in the end. I was too, which was a relief since I hadn't felt totally confident along the way about the design coming together.    

A black-bordered blanket in stripes of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple and darker red; with variously sized black patches all over it; spread out on a bed.