The Sixth Work

Last night I dreamed I was transferring a small boy, a toddler, from its pushchair to a couch. It wasn't my child. I was taking care of him for somebody else.

The child could speak almost as well as an adult, for some reason.

As I put the child on the couch, he said: "I want the sixth work".

"What's the sixth work?", I asked.

"The Lord of the Rings", he replied.

I handed him the book, which was conveniently nearby. At that moment his mother came in and I woke up.

I've been mulling over this dream, and dreams in general. Why did the child call The Lord of the Rings "the sixth work?". What was my subconscious getting at...if anything? It's not the kind of thing toddlers do in real life.

Why didn't the child just ask for the book by its name? Why did my dreaming mind introduce a complication here, an apparently pointless mystery? Does the subconcious mind seek to reproduce to texture of real life, in which so much of what we experience is mysterious or at least unexplained?

I checked Tolkien's bibliography (once I was back in the waking world). The sixth book that Tolkien published (including both fiction and non-fiction) is The Two Towers, so it doesn't really fit.

Is The Lord of the Rings sixth in some other order of works, by authors other than Tolkien?

Or was it just gobbledygook? Probably.

Dreams are fascinating. Sometimes dreams have a lasting influence on me. I don't believe there's anything supernatural or paranormal going on, but I do believe that some dreams give a profound insight into one's own soul. I don't think this was one of them, but it's still curious.

Postcript: It occurred to me after writing this that it shares a similarity with my recurring dream of the fifth mall. In this dream I am back in the old Ballymun shopping centre, which had a cruciform shape with four covered rows of shops radiating from a central square. They were labelled the North Mall, the West Mall, etc. I found this usage fascinating as a child because I had never encountered the word "mall" before, and I don't think I encountered it till well into adulthood. (Of course, we say "shopping centre" rather than "shopping mall" in Ireland.)

As I mention in the post, in my dream the fifth mall is a much less busy mall, almost unvisited, and with far fewer outlets. It has a strange atmosphere; somewhat forgotten, even somewhat unreal. Its spatial relation to the other "malls" is never very clear, but it's not part of the cruciform.

And that reminds me of another recurring dream I've had, although I get the impression this is a more recent recurring dream. It's the early hours of the morning and I discover a small cinema which is still open (it's open all night) and which is a long way from anything else. I'm surprised to find it open, but I'm somehow aware that there might be another cinema-- even smaller and even more remote-- some distance away. I never go there in my dream, though I want to, and I'm never entirely sure it exists.

Bonkers, right?