A VIOLINIST SLEEPS

I have been playing the violin since I was three years old. I attended my first violin class in the womb, and I gave my first concert when I was four. As I lay on the sofa after my recent operation, my sister pointed out that I was due a sabbatical. People have asked me whether I am worried that I might forget how to play, while I’m in plaster, through lack of practice. Well, I don’t want to tempt fate, but the way I see it, I’m as likely to forget how to count, or how to speak English. The violin, I have to assume, is hard-wired into my brain. And my brain has been up to some tricks, during this injury.

If you will excuse the indulgence, I’d like to tell you about my dreams. The only other time I have been so thoroughly separated from my instrument is when I have been on holiday. When I am on holiday I do not dream about my violin. At least for a week. After about 10 days, the violin starts to appear in my dreams. No matter how nice a holiday I am having, once I start dreaming about it, I start to miss the violin. I long to play it, to hear it, to feel it. 

But now, during this break-of-breaks, the longest time away from the instrument in 3 decades, what do I find? I think, perhaps, my brain has done something extraordinary. After the accident, right from the first night, I dreamt about the violin. Every single night for a whole week, I dreamt I was performing - sometimes without and sometimes with the plaster cast! Then for a few nights the violin would just appear - abstract, and not necessarily in my hands. And since then? Nothing - the dreams stopped completely.

And so, when my friends and colleagues ask, ‘Isn’t it awful for you? So frustrating not to be able to play?’ Well my answer is, it’s not great, but it’s not like you imagine. I’m not fretting over the closed violin case. At some level, I have accepted that I am not a violinist at the moment - for two months or so. Just as my body knows and accepts instinctively that my left arm is not available for use - I do not find myself reaching out to do things with my left hand when I’m not concentrating - so my mind does not reach for the violin, not even in my dreams. That first week, I sweated out the fever of violin-playing as I slept. At a level of which I am only dimly aware, something else struggled with the shock of not playing for me - my subconscious seemed to confront my temporary but prolonged separation from my instrument. It has put the violin away somewhere, somewhere it won’t trouble me - for now.