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What to mark
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Go back over a fortnight with a pencil and underline anything that turns up more than once, and do not think about it while you are doing it, since the thinking is what makes you argue with the page.
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Places repeat more than anything else, then people, then whatever you were holding, and the feeling repeats most of all though it is the thing least likely to be written down.
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Write the date beside each underline, because a repeat that comes every few months means something different from one that has turned up twice this week.
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Then leave it alone, since the page will do the work while you get on with your day.
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What not to do with it
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Do not look up each underlined thing in a dictionary of symbols, because your own repeats mean whatever they have meant across your own fortnight, and a list written for everybody will flatten that.
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Do not read it back every morning either, since a notebook you keep checking becomes homework, and the aim is a record you glance at when a month has passed.
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And if the notebook is making you anxious rather than curious, put it in a drawer for a while, because none of this is worth losing sleep over, which would rather defeat the point.
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✦ WRITE BACK
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Two things go into these notebooks, the story and the feeling, and only one of them still makes sense in a year, so tell me which you write.
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TELL ME WHICH ONE
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My landing is underlined now, with two dates beside it, and I am curious rather than worried about which page it turns up on next.
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| Sleep well, |
| Dream Signs |
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P.S. A reader wrote to say she keeps hers in the back of the same notebook she does the shopping list in, so her dreams and her potatoes are in one book. Tell me what repeats in yours. She says she has never confused the two, which is more than I can promise.
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