Oh damn, still in this dream.

Thanks to a conversation with Fred I started to ponder on, of all things, Snoopy.

I was smoking a jazz cigarette outside the dining-room window and I 'loomed' at SWMBO from the darkness calling through the window "loom, loom."

Fred: What?
Me: I'm looming. You know,  like Snoopy in vulture mode.
SWMBO: Don't you mock Snoopy.
Self: Wouldn't dream of it.

As I wondered around to the back-door, for ingress into the family abode I pondered on Snoopy, and Snoopy's amazing interior life. In one of those interesting flashes that allegedly come with the smoking of the aforementioned jazz cigarettes, where time dilated; and in the short time it took to cover the distance from the dining-room window to the back door I recalled Snoopy's time as aviator, attorney, figure skater, and of course, most famously, Joe Cool.

And then I thought whether I would have ever had the instruction manual on daydreaming without Snoopy. When I was older, in my teens, I stumbled upon such greats as Walter Mitty, and Billy Liar, but by then the pattern had been set. I wonder what ever would have happened to the child that I was if my imagination had not been opened up to the difficulties, nay impossibilities of living someone else's life.

Sometimes Poor Mad Felix is like a darker-and-heavier-humoured Snoopy: but in this, as in so much, lightness is all.
 
I sometimes think that the only explanation for Felix's behaviour is that whatever filter or one-way-valve that enables most of the rest of the world to distinguish between the constructs of imagination and the sensory input that our bodies give us (or at least the meanings therein derived in our apperception of events) is broken or missing.

However, I shall not blame Snoopy for Felix. Nor will I blame Felix for Felix.

Dreaming, in the sense of idle fantasy, can be a wonderfully creative thing: it adds to the sum of the noosphere. However, know ye the dividing line between fact, sensory input, and personal act of creation: and if you don't train yourself to if you can. Sometimes, if we are lucky, we can learn to avoid the pitfalls of others and the weaknesses in ourselves. Sometimes we aren't lucky.

I want my child to be fortunate in as many ways as possible. But I know I'm not unusual a parent in thinking that for a first baby.