Kristen Sinclair

“ A world without memory is a world of the present. The past exists only in books, in documents .” -           Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams (1993) Dementia runs in my family on my dad’s side. We sometimes call it ‘doting’ where I’m from. I wouldn’t say this was the reason I began making scrapbooks and journals, but throughout my teenage years, it helped to justify my rather uncool hobby of documenting my life piece by piece. I imagined that one day I’d be a senile old lady able to sit back and read over my life story, significant and insignificant details sellotaped side by side. I’d no doubt forget and read it all over again with renewed amazement. I vomited on the first scrapbook I ever had sitting in the front seat of my mum’s car on the way to hospital. I can’t remember why we were going there exactly, because I was very young and it’s a vague memory. But I can remember what the book looked like, as soon after, I received an iden...

Edited by Birdy Francis The first dream I can remember having was a nightmare. I was confronted with a massively oversized skeletal spider, nearly half the size of my five year-old self, crawling slowly towards me in my bed. It was made entirely of bluish jagged bones and was eerily contorted as it crept along the duvet sheets. I woke up bolt upright in bed to my parents trying to quieten my screams. From then on, any bad dream I had was called a ‘jaggy spider’, and the term has stuck with me to this day. Whilst my life so far has been peppered with countless colourful and vivid dreams, with jaggy spiders few and far between, that specific one has made the most significant impression on me. I used to believe lots of strange things could prevent having a jaggy spider, like not eating cheese or Wagon Wheel biscuits before bed.   Much like I don’t know if there’s any truth in my remedies for bad dreams, scientists don’t know for certain why we dream either. There is a lot of ...