Dream: I found myself in the sixth-form common room of an all-male school. Although I was an adult, I had only just completed my A-levels. The common room resembled an airport lounge more than the real space ever did, with a sense of transition and waiting for departure. I understood that this was the Royal Grammar School, Newcastle, where I studied from 1978 to 1980.
Unexpectedly, my older brother—who never attended RGS—was sitting there with complete ease, absorbed in reading a book or newspaper. He appeared as if he entirely belonged in this environment. I asked him what he was planning to do next. With calm certainty he told me he had stayed on for retakes and was now heading into an advanced technical field—something that sounded like “electro-planing,” or the fabrication of futuristic electro-plastics for subsonic aircraft and spacecraft. His clarity and assurance struck me. The work sounded modern, visionary and highly specialised—impressive, but not something I felt was “mine.”
The dream held a mood of poised transition: part school, part airport; part youth, part adulthood; a moment of departure toward the future.
Conclusion / Reflection
This dream returns me to a psychological threshold I last stood upon at seventeen: the moment before setting my adult course. By placing my brother—symbol of the “other path” or unchosen self—squarely inside my own RGS world, the dream fuses two developmental directions. His futuristic field of “electro-plastics for spacecraft” is a symbolic expression of future possibility, mastery, and long-term creative purpose.
What impressed me in the dream was not the technical field itself, but the quality with which he inhabited it: calm direction, certainty, and a sense of belonging to the future. The dream suggests that these qualities now need to be integrated into my own creative life. I am being reminded that the coming decade is another departure lounge—an opportunity to choose a long, sustained creative trajectory with confidence and clarity.
In essence, the dream signals a personal reintegration: the merging of the reflective, narrative RGS-self with the decisive, future-facing “engineer” within. It marks the beginning of a new phase in which my creative work is meant to be sustained, hybrid, technically crafted, and directed towards something that lasts—my own “long-haul aircraft.”
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