Writer's Block: Tossing and Turning

[Error: unknown template qotd]Recently I dreamt (on two separate occasions -- but basically the same dream reprised -- that I'd murdered somebody and stupidly used this as the basis for a piece of published fiction, and in consequence was terrified of getting caught. (Normal people have nightmares about being pursued by mad axe-murderers: apparent my nightmare is that I might be the murderer...)

I tried keeping a dream-diary once. This demonstrated two things: first, that I dream every night (so far as I remember), often several times, and secondly that my past crops up a lot more in my dreams than I normally realise. My dreams are frequently of a remorselessly everyday nature rather than excursions into fantasy realms -- even the nightmares which constitute a high proportion of them -- which means that it is sometimes quite hard to be absolutely certain whether I actually did something dreadful or merely dreamed that I did.

CD bit-rot

Tried to listen to some of my CD albums this afternoon (having got tired of turning over records) and discovered that at least three of my albums have contracted some form of CD bit-rot which makes it all but impossible to play them -- and quite impossible to enjoy listening to them even where they will play with frequent jumps and blurps. This includes my precious and probably irreplaceable original French recording of Les Misérables.

Not at all amused, especially as the LPs from the 1950s still play back perfectly. It's not a question of surface damage or, so far as I can tell, of dirt: they have simply dissolved somewhere beneath the surface and no longer contain usable data. Thus the legacy of the throwaway culture of the 1980s (perhaps I should think twice before trying to buy the soundtrack to The Artist on CD; and I'm certainly not going to buy it as a download).