“I dreamed I fell in a river,” I said nonchalantly.
No laugh came. She just reminded me that we’d listened to an audiobook where somebody fell in a river, just before we went to sleep.
My dream was different though. In it, I’d rented a boat that had run out of petrol, and had decided to paddle back to the bank using my phone as a makeshift oar. Logic (in case you were wondering) doesn’t have the same rules in dreams. In the panic of paddling, the phone slipped out of my wet hands and I watched it slide forever under the waves and out of sight, at which point, I somehow fell in after it.
“Sounds to me,” said Sammy wryly, “Like you’re too attached to your phone…”
“Alright Sigmund!” I cried, turning my voice up an octave, “What did you dream about, being featured in Psychoanalysis Monthly?”
That at least got a chuckle, but as with every sliver of humour I seem to come up with, it was gilded with the truth. I’m no doubt too attached to my phone. I think Sigmund over there, might be absolutely right.
I’m treading old ground. Screen Free Saturdays didn’t work when I needed to arrange things with friends and family. I read The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, just like everyone else, and the challenge was good, but so hard to put into action. Then I listened to Johann Hari’s excellent Stolen Focus and felt as hopeless about it as he said I would. Did I do anything about the addiction in my pocket? Nothing lasting.
Now here again, my dreams and my wife coincide to tell me the same thing again - not that I should chuck my phone into the Thames, but more that I should slowly let go of its attention-grabbing antics, and try to let it work for me, instead of the other way around. Perhaps that’s foolish - the talk of slaves who think they’re masters, or, let’s face it, addicts who can ‘quit at any time’.
What I really need a phone for is to send and receive messages, to be a satnav, a handy oven timer when my wife has already asked Siri to ‘set a timer for x minutes’, an alarm clock, and, surprisingly, a phone. Everything else can get in the sea. Or the river. Whatever. The trouble is there are other devices that can easily do those things aren’t there? Like, a satnav, an oven timer, an alarm clock, and, yes, even a landline. So when I really boil it down, what a phone gives me is speed and convenience, and that is honestly it. The contract is that in return you make yourself immediately available to the rest of the world by default. It’s messed up, really.
No wonder I fell in the river.
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