So, for some reason I woke up around 4 this morning with images of battles in Moria disturbing me, and keeping me from sleep. I have no idea what prompted this, as I last read the book over 10 years ago, and I only saw the film when it was on release at the cinema. Strange.
Of course, my subconscious being helpful, it decided that while I was awake and on the subject of disturbing images, it should go and work out what else it could find to associate with this theme. It remembered for me a story that someone told me about cave diving. Now, caving is dangerous, and diving is dangerous, so obviously it's logical to combine the two and compound the risks. Anyway, what I was once told was about someone on his first cave dive, squeezing his way through a passage where visibility was only a few inches, and coming face to face with a skull behind a visor. He'd bumped into (almost literally) a previous less-than-successful cave diver on the same route. Somehow this guy kept his nerve, and not only backed himself out safely, but also managed to recover the body. I don't know if he did it again, but the happy images put me off the idea of ever trying
Not content with that, it then decided to remember the stories behind a couple of untimely deaths related to people I know. I'm not going to share them here, partly because I suspect that I find them upsetting more because I know the people involved than because of the cause, but mostly because in each case having learned the story, I discovered that I would rather not know it. In one case this was after curiosity got the better of me and I didn't heed the advice of a friend who said "you don't want to know". He was right.
Fortunately I don't seem to associate much imagery with either, so my subconscious failed around this point and eventually I did get back to sleep.
