S. Broughton / SBroughton
By Stephen BroughtonISBN: 9781847470799Published: 2007Pages: 274Key Themes: humour, suicidal thoughts, abuseDescriptionone man’s journey of discovery finding mental ill health as a gift pointing the way understanding dreams and suicidal thoughts meeting the man he should have been little dick surviving an upbringing by a narcisstic mother and a disinterested father, Big Dick. About the AuthorAuthor Stephen has been a trustee of his local MIND group for nearly 20 years and has had suicide as his Plan B for as long as he can remember. He presents ’Thought for the Day’ on BBC local radio, sings in a choir and runs marathons very slowly. Stephen is a Ssolicitor, often described by clients as ’not like a real solicitor’ which he takes as a great compliment. Most of his friends seem to be mad as well. Book ExtractWe all dream and we probably dream every night. But have you wondered why we only remember some of the dreams and the others are consigned to some cerebral recycle bin? And why we sometimes have the same dream over and over again. I have had, for so long as I have known, a dream where I suddenly discover that I have a house. A tiny derelict house with an over grown garden. Hidden away with no proper path to it. And when I look at the house I see that there’s so much work to be done to make it into a place to live that I know its beyond me and that makes me very sad. And there’s another dream where I’ve killed someone a long time ago and nobody but me knows and I’m afraid that someone will some day find out the terrible thing that I have done. And I wake up believing the dream is true not knowing how I can live with myself having done the terrible thing that I have done. So this book is about how I found out about the person I might have killed and how I first found and then set about rebuilding the house that was nothing but an empty shell with a gaping hole in the roof. And have you ever wondered why we have the memories of our childhood that we have? Sometimes trivial every day memories. Like a video running in our mind which never got erased by the other trivial every day memories that we record each day. I have always remembered as if it was yesterday, the day when a white van drew up outside our house and a man in a white coat got out. Our dog was a corgi we called Lightie. The man came into our living room. Lightie was behind the sofa and he picked her up in his arms and took her away. And I never knew why I remembered that so well. Many years later when I had gone past the age they call middle age I told my mother about that memory. She was amazed at what I said because she said I could only have been about 12 months at the time. I had just started to walk and the dog was getting old and no longer as reliable as it needed to be with a toddler around.
