in which I let fall the windows of my mine eyes; sleeping and waking

The Shakespeare was my friend's idea in the first place. Boredom was setting in; I'd fallen asleep three times trying to listen to Nigel Slater reading Toast.

She was right: I needed something a bit more dynamic than just being read to, and some first-class voices seemed just the thing. I had described to her the Audiobook I downloaded last night, thinking it might be fun to practice how well I knew the Odes: Realms of Gold. Ah, but it was poems and letters (I love Keats' letters, as it goes, in the Oxford complete edition from I think 1950, in red cloth) with narration. So instead of congratulating oneself on one's ability to follow the middle bits from the Nightingale ("I knew that!") one has to listen to: "Those were difficult years for the Keats children, who had to learn to fend for themselves following the deaths of their parents. Then George announced his intention to sail for America, leaving Tom and John to look after Fanny. When Tom was diagnosed with consumption, a common disease in those days, no one knew that John too would die of the same..." with background music from the Romantic Period.

She suggested something funny. A Midsummer Night's Dream. As You Like It. Excellent advice! I do love Twelfth Night.

So Ms Mug here goes back on the web and looks for the Best One. Won't even look at anything abridged (oddly, considering it's Shakespeare, they call it "Dramatised"). Looks for pukka cast lists and favours Caedmon audio. Plays the clips. Goes for the two with the liveliest clips. (I did leave, reluctantly, the Gielgud, as it was A Winter's Tale, but I now can't think why I did that. It seemed depressing at the time.)

So what did I choose? The Tempest. And Othello. (It's all a bit pointless. What I really, really, really want is to be happily ensconced in reading MacNeice, in preparation for the brilliant paper I want to write, and indeed am delighted to have a commission, an invitation, to write, about Autumn Journal, one of the seminal poems of the 20th century. I do need to do the reading. I need to take notes: the poem is 50 pages long. I am, or was, excited about rereading Autumn Journal in London, in the autumn, but it will soon, at this rate, be more like a winter's tale.)

So, lying on the couch with my eyes closed and the disembodied Othello on my laptop with no faces to help me keep it straight, while Little Miss B watched reality TV with earphones (what a life), I fell asleep, perchance to dream - and woke with a start just half an hour ago from a really nasty, frightening, horrible nightmare. It was HORRIBLE. The iBook was busily playing the scene between Anna Massey and Celia Johnson where they're sweetly chatting to one another about how much they love and honour their husbands etc, singing little songs while they brush each other's hair and get ready for bed. And we know what happens then. The little song was the worst part of the nightmare. In the dream I actually bit someone trying to get it to stop.

My eyes are really sore - more sore today, probably because I'm sitting here doing this. And the picture above is not quite as frightening as my dream.