You have to be brave to write because all you have ever felt, experienced or studied can be drawn up into your consciousness whilst you write.A friend of mine who is a writer put it like this.
“It has taken me to places I’d rather not have gone to.”
However she said she manages to live through it.At the time I had only written mathematical works so I didn’t understand what she meant.But I have now had some experiences which give me a hint of what she was trying to say.If you’ve had many fearsome experiences then these feelings may come up when you loosen the grip  of consciousness.
However I have also found a spirit of laughter in me which is new.Step into the darkness without knowing.It’s only by going there that help may come.But the fear is that it won’t.You can’t get an insurance policy beforehand.
Are you stepping into a void or will there be something there?
Also in drawing or painting, it can take courage to draw what you perceive.I found that especially when drawing buildings and studying perspective.I’ll see if I can find a drawing to illustrate it.I have the feeling,
“No, No.It can’t be this steep a gradient.It’s too much”
And in being inside a building like Westminster Abbey or Durham Cathedral trying to assimilate the vision, the huge spaces and the power and size of the shapes can create awe or even terror.One can lose one’s sense of self entirely.But it can also be revivifying when one has returned.The fear is that one will not return.
Maybe it’s the same with relating to people as well?

Rosa awoke later than she liked to which indicates a control freak element in her personality.She had stayed at her desk till the sun was rising, writing her intriguing diary which she fantasised would rival Sylvia Plath’s.She got up gingerly and made herself a cup of tea in a china mug on a work surface in her lovely peach and teal kitchen
Passing water into a small bottle for the doctor to have analysed was a task even the most brilliant find hard.Rosa was not even the averagely brilliant amongst the brilliants of history like Plataho,Aristittle ,Simone de Boredwoy or Blazed Rascal not to mention St Coal.She grabbed her mobile as a dying man at his wife’s hand and rang the cab service. she used now she was unable to see properly or ride her bike.
Hello, she cried, it’s Rosa Benchez here.Can a driver pick up my urine sample and take it to the surgery for me.Thank you so much.
No problem, the manager told her and soon afterwards a young man with dangling earrings and showed him the sample hidden inside a Sainsbury’s shopping bag.He looked puzzled but agreed on payment of £259.89
She realised she had not eaten any breakfast so decided to have an early lunch instead.As she ate her toasted cheese and snake oil she fell into a daydream.She was with her online man friend walking through a huge field of her favourite flowers, cyclamen.They were walking along companionably without holding hands but together whilst also being apart which waa delightful.This was agreeable since she had never met this very charming man in the flesh.He was called XY Matrix although his parents had never studied algebra as far as historians can tell.Could it be a pseudonym?
Maybe he was being raised to be a mathematical prodigy but he became a writer and musician and managed to earn a good income and he had a beautiful detached house filled with antiques and ceramic lamps like Freud’ study.In fact , he had copied that from historical photos and descriptions and one day he planned to become a therapisr.
Rosie and Fox as she called him got on well and shared a liking for poetry and music.Sometimes he had sent her music as attachments on his emails.He seemed to love Wagner and Britten which is a curious combination to the British woman.He loved Britten’s Donne’s Sonnets sung by the stunning tenor Ian Bostridge.

After lunch, Rosa opened her laptop.She found an email from Fox.
You have been here and broken all my windows and my bath is ruined, he wrote.I am moving house to get away from you.And I am having plastic windows installed there,
Rosa was alarmed as it defied common sense.She did not know where his house was and it was in another country.So she emailed him back,
What is wrong , dear?You only said 2 days ago that my poetry and linguistic jokes had helped your sick friend when you went to visit him in the hospital.
Waiting anxiously for his answer, she sipped some coffee and looked at her friend Dolly walk by, dressed in a pink suede jacket and black linen culottes with unmatching red boots
.Where is Dolly going she wondered pensively, feeling like a cloud floating over Rydal Water in the winter not knowing which way the wind might blow it.
After two hours of utter silence, she decided to wait until the evening when she had put away the groceries and written a triolet or two.She was keen to do it before she lost the impetus and had to write a lecture,
The whole evening went by so she emailed him again.But again he did not reply.
The next morning she found a letter on the doormat.

1, Rancour Villas
Horror Lane
Terrortown
Undear Rosa

I thought you would be kind and gentle like your poetry but you haveave wounded me.You asked me what date my dental appointment was which was an invasion of my privacy.You told me you would not mind if your son was gay whereas to me it is a sin to indulge those sick appetites and you should not encourage him.You refused to send me a photo of yourself with nothing on except a pair of socks and a hat.I hate you now.I am deeply aggrieved that you have ruined my entire life

Signed XYM

XYZ McSez
A dental appointment? It’s not as if she had asked him if had a sexually transmitted disease or whether he really believed in Jesus as his Saviour.Nor had she asked him if he liked to smoke cigars in bed nor if he let Lassie his sheepdog sleep on the bed and cuddle with him.For all she knew, the dog might be his partner or even his wife

She emailed him as she felt anxious in case he was having a breakdown.He replied, saying she was not who he thought and he was finished with her forever
I wonder who he thought I was, she asked herself as she sat with tears in her eyes feeling concerned about what was really going on in his dear mind.Her cat Lucy ran up and sat on the arm of the chair gazing frenziedly at her owner and mother
Don’t worry Lucy.I am sure I will soon be ok.This must be a mistake.I think he has got paranoia which gets worse and then better

Rosa looked on Amazon and found a book called

BBC News image

http://www.vancouverobserver.com/blogs/betweenus/writer-urges-us-reclaim-our-sleep

At issue here is our inner life. In a chapter called “The Social Divide,” Duff describes the widening gap between sleep and waking consciousness. She briefly traces the history of the marginalization of not only our own subjective experience, but also the mythologies that once provided its context.

“I was most familiar with Greek mythology,” she explained. “[The Greeks] paid a lot of attention to sleep and dreams and how that material is worked in us. I was surprised to find out how my Eastern philosophical traditions had studied sleep. Three or four thousand years [later], we think we’ve just discovered it. But there’s so much folklore and cultural life passed down from generation to generation. Everything that mothers learn from their mothers to promote sleep [like] lullabies.

“With the Enlightenment we sort of erased our awareness. Darkness became aligned with [what] we were trying to rise above—emotions, feelings. We wanted rational control, and you can’t control sleep. Sleep is one of the ways we return to nature. By responding to alternating phases of light and darkness, we return to our natural cycles, and join with all of life.”

Sleep and health

It’s no news that regular sleep is important to our overall health. In her work as a counselor, Duff has found increasingly that a good night’s sleep is instrumental—even essential—to our emotional well-being. As part of her intake process, she routinely asks her clients how they are sleeping.

“Once they got more sleep,” she said, “their issues became more manageable. Even bipolar disorder and major depression are often preceded by six months of sleep problems.”

On the other hand, as she states in the book, the “effects of sleep disruption on mood, perception, and behavior are so strong” physicians sometimes misdiagnose patients as having psychiatric disorders when those patients “simply need better sleep.”

Along with diagnoses come medications. In a chapter on the commercialization of sleep, Duff notes: “The use of sleeping pills among adults between twenty and forty-five doubled between 2000 and 2004. In 2011, 60 million Americans filled prescriptions for sleep medications, up from 46 million in 2006.”

Statistics that I find deeply disturbing.

The problem is not so much the amount of sleep we get or how we get it, as it is our relationship with sleep.

“We want to commodify it,” said Duff. “[We want sleep to] help our days be better rather than offering its own vantage point. It’s about productivity. We keep going over the day’s events, but we process them with a different mind, much more associative, which works more by Gestalt. That’s why people will come up with solutions [when they’re asleep]. It’s non-conscious processing, which goes on when we’re awake as well. But we don’t pay attention to that either.”

Duff points out that the problem isn’t with science, but with “scientism”. She is glad that scientists are paying attention to sleep and making serious studies, but she worries about them “jumping on the bandwagon of making money—selling us machines and pills.”

She encourages us to take back our sleep, which she likens to a “n

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/sep/17/carol-ann-duffy-writes-bombsite-poem-about-trumps-uk-state-visit?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other