What is going on in there?!

Sometimes I really worry about myself. Occasionally I doubt my own sanity - usually after a particularly strange dream. I have weird dreams quite often - most nights - and I remember bits and pieces of them. Perhaps it has something to do with not sleeping very well and waking up frequently during the night. These dreams often make me wonder what on earth is going on inside my head!

The other night, I had a dream that someone showed me a figurine, a kind of action figure, I guess, of a Cambridge Platonist. This person (not sure who they were) told me they bought it at a Disney Store, so I went looking. I'm not sure what city I was in. Sometimes it seemed like Sydney; other times, it seemed I was on holidays. At one point I was riding a bike. Well, I was trying to ride a bike, wobbling all over the road. I finally found the Disney Store, and it was MASSIVE! So, I'm wandering around, trying to find these Cambridge Platonist figurines, and the store is about to close, but I desperately want one, so I'm frantically looking at all the shelves... The store has at least three levels, and rows and rows of shelves. It's kind of like a maze - weaving in and out, trying to get past people, trying to find these figurines before the store closes, because I'm going back home and won't be able to find them at home for some reason, unless I use the internet... I'm not sure if I found them or not - can't quite remember where the dream ended.

Weird, huh? The Cambridge Platonists were a group of theologians and philosophers based at the University of Cambridge, mainly at Emmanuel College, around the time of the Civil War in England, in the mid-seventeenth century. Why anyone would make action figures of these guys, I have no idea. That said, if there were action figures of the Cambridge Platonists, I'd certainly be out looking for them! Although I think I'd be after an action figure of Descartes or Galileo first. I could buy an action figure of Albert Einstein, and I have been tempted, but have never got around to it.

So what does this dream mean? Perhaps I've been working too hard. I've spent most of the last fortnight on the Cambridge Platonists, and I spent awhile before that reading Ralph Cudworth's The True Intellectual System of the Universe, one of the major works to come out of the group. That was a pretty intense book - took me 6 days to get through it. He makes such fun of atheists though - it's quite amusing.

I think the bike bit may have been a reminder of cycling in France and all the bruises I got from bashed the pedals against my legs, crashing into barriers and falling off.

Hmm... I wonder if there would be much of a market for action figures of seventeenth-century theologians and natural philosophers? Maybe a series of the Boyle Lecturers - that would be cool! Perhaps I should throw in my PhD and go into toy making...

Or, maybe not.