It’s that time when I’ve been having more vivid dreams every night.

For the last week or so, I’ve been sleeping deeply (thanks to my new Fitbit where I can monitor my sleep scores). Usually when I dream vividly, it’s because I’m going through something in my life that is making me question or doubt something in it.

Last time I dreamed such dreams was around the time I left my last job with a tech company.

I had left it with uncertainty of my future.

An uncertainty as to whether I was ever to return to the tech or learning and development field. There was a deep and unexpressed part of me where I thought I had made the decision I was never to return to that corporate and business world.

I never wanted to teach/preach/design/develop anyone’s or any company’s communities or training programs, if they weren’t invested in changing themselves first.

It was a world that was not for me anymore.

With the increase use of technology, avatars and automation, and uberisation of business models, work had morphed to something dehumanised and left me feeling a tad “empty”.

So what was I going to do instead?

I left work and the crazy dreams started as my brain offloaded all the imagery, sounds, colours, music, quotes, I had picked up through the years to crash together into nonsensical stories I dreamed every night.

Last night, once again, they were as vivid as ever.

In my dream, I had helped remove sticky paper from a cat’s claws (the same sticky paper I used the day before to set moth traps in my woollen cupboard).

I dreamed of a couple of family members who were using my hotel (one of the pubs I grew up in) as their own free training rooms for their business and I told them that I was going to sell the pub so they’d better find someone else to pull the wool over their eyes. The hotel’s floors were so decrepit and in need of repair, that I worried if I sat down on a chair or bed, that it would fall deep below the earth. I remember walking on the split timber pieces around the edges of each room so that I didn’t fall down the cracks.

I sneaked into my brother’s room to rouse him awake and divulge that he must keep this a secret as half the money from the sale of the pub will go to him and under no circumstances to trust the other family members.

I also dreamt of the Queens Guards with their tall furry hats running around to the doors of the Navy Gunroom at HMAS Cerberus (Midshipman and Sub-Lieutenants accomodation block) and storming in wanting to know where the Mess Dinner was being held. Instead, I pointed them out to the Senior Sailors Mess to a large square mahogany table where they scrambled to sit down on top of each other making a raucous noises while I bolted to where the real mess dinner was starting in another part of the building.

Inside the Gunroom, it’s hallways are all dark wood panelling, glass doors and polished brass with oil paintings of naval battle scenes. The rooms are painted white and bunks (beds) have the counterpanes on them. (It’s a place I regularly visit in my dreams).

I’m there in jeans and teeshirt and barefoot. Then, the guests arrive. Young women in beautiful evening long dresses ready for the ball. Then, the young men arrive but they’re not in mess dress! Men with mullet hair styles, uneven ties, sloppily dressed making noises and teasing the women. They annoy me.

I’m looking at this scene, I’m barefoot and wondering if I should say something to these obnoxious young men. They irritate me with their rudeness to the women who stay silent until a young woman in her late 20s, dressed impeccably in gold and silver, saunters in the room and addresses them all with confidence and grace and tells them off in a way that I’m proud. The young men in this dream are all sloppy, loud, obnoxious, arrogant, petulant whether they are Queens Guards or not.

I believe the reason why I was dreaming them like this came about because I had recently watched Belle Du Jour on SBS On Demand where the Marcel character – the young man with his gold teeth, wearing a black long jacket and sporting a cane stick, grated on my nerves. He represented everything that repels me and obviously he came out in my dreams. (I had never seen the movie before nor knew anything of it. It was advertised so it was either that or watching the footy. I think I should have watched the latter as there were some WTF moments in the movie that disturbed me).

However, I’ve been dreaming a lot recently and I think it’s because I’ve got big questions hurtling through my mind. The question of “what’s next” for me.

I’m lucky to have many choices and I now have time to do what I want and when I want. The French classes, golf, ukulele, knitting and crochet are activities now taking my time and where I’m advancing my skills. However there’s a part of me that wants to write more – express myself creatively. Not only write about my own life but get my imagination on paper (so to speak) in short story format.

For too long, I’ve been writing of my own perspectives, reflections and thoughts. I think it’s time to reinvent myself not to someone who has “retired” but someone else. Writer? Perhaps. Can I be a writer? How do I start? Where do I start?

These are initial pondering for now. One in which started when I walked into the Antiquarian Book Store on Bourke Street and an overwhelming desire came over me that I had to reinvent myself and that writing had to be part of that.