She dreamt of rats and coloured tokens

Last night I had the shittiest dream I have had in a long time. Well I say dream. It was definitely not a nice nocturnal experience though. I dreamt I found this rat that had been trapped in this weird geometric box, and to try and get out it had gnawed off one of its feet. When I finally managed to get it out of the box its entire back was a bleeding, raw sore and it looked as though another animal had tried to eat it. Then the flap of raw back skin came loose exposing the poor thing’s little rib cage. I knew I had to save its life and luckily I happened to have some powder that when mixed with water transformed into liquid skin. I knew that if I could apply some antiseptic to the wound and then mix this residual skin up and cake it onto the rat, it would live, but how could I grab the rat without having it bite me? Needless to say I awoke without finding a solution. I’m sure the rate was fine.

As I lay there in the dark, staring up at the ceiling, I started thinking about the game Connect Four as you often do at 3am when you can’t sleep. If I was playing the game on my own, who do I let win? Myself or…. Me? Now you might be thinking, well doesn’t it really just come down to red or yellow, but if you delve into it more deeply (and let’s face we all have time for that *sarcasm*) the answer actually reflects more of a weird conflict inside yourself. Is it a random act if you let red or yellow win? Do you just keep dropping in tokens until one colour gets lucky? Or do you have a plan and you want to try and trick yourself into letting red win? Or are you conflicted – first you want red to win, then maybe you switch to yellow? And there you have it, yet another case of things not being as straightforward as you would imagine.  It’s like my rat dream. Obviously the poor animal was in huge amount of pain and I should have put it out of its misery. In real life I probably would have made the decisions without trouble. But obviously some deeper part of me, the ‘other’ me – maybe the red token me, wanted to save the bloody thing so passionately that I was mixing up antiseptic and trying to activate weird skin growth serums to try and make it better. Nuts huh! Anyway – if you were playing Connect Four against yourself how would you play? Who would you let win? Red or yellow? Me or I?