I have been sleeping a little better. The dog still barks to be let out before 5am, and I am invariably awake before he wakes me, but I seem to be getting to bed and to sleep soon enough for this rhythm to be okay.

For the last six months or so, I have kept a journal and pen by my bedside, and any time I awaken from a dream, I scribble down a few key words. It has made a real difference to how much I remember. Added to that, with better sleep, I now wake with the sense that there is more dream to be recalled. Rather than just the final fragments before waking, I am beginning to feel a longer thread that I can pull myself back through, as though I really have been somewhere else for a while.

Last night I woke twice and wrote some notes each time. What struck me was the similarity between the dreams. Both involved packing, both involved student life, both carried a sense of pressure, but without stress.

In the dreams, I am packing, although not urgently, and much of what needs to be packed does not belong to me but to my son Ben, now a young adult. There are books and bikes and bits of technology to sort through. There is a sense of movement, that I will be going somewhere too, (perhaps even to ski, my nighttime scrawl suggests), and yet there is no rush, no panic, just an awareness that something is unfolding.

Later, in the dream I was having as I woke the second time, I am returning a hire car after what feels like a long journey. I am both younger Emma and present-day Emma at once. I have meetings waiting for me, and there is a low hum of stress. Somewhere in the background, a Saint’s Day is being celebrated.

Also in the dream, I am at home in Sergy, with all three of my children, now much younger. I am aware that I am too busy to attend to them properly, and a man beside me, who is both and neither Mike and Medjool, suggests we check on Julia, who is having a nap. We turn on the baby monitor, which had clearly been switched off, and listen to the sound of her gurgling and giggling, fully awake in her room. She never could settle enough to nap. Her presence is audible, but at a distance, and I am greatly relieved that someone else can keep an ear on her.

Then there is a moment in which Medjool is about to leave, for how long I do not know, and says he will leave his bike for Mike, who is coming back, or perhaps who has never been gone. There is no drama in it. Simply an offering, a making of space, so that life can continue.

Throughout it all, I am moving through different ages and stages at once, younger and older, student, mother to small children and grown ones, wife and partner to different men across time. The roles sit alongside each other. They make life busy and complex, but they do not overwhelm me. I feel steady, calm, even content, as though the work is not to choose between these lives but to hold them all fully.

I have no idea what I am packing for, and I am okay with not knowing. Not knowing has become the norm.