This morning, on my Mac, I accidentally opened the Weather widget sitting on my desktop - something I never do. It usually shows the weather in my hometown; this morning, it decided I was more interested in Oslo (-8°C, by the way).

Then while taking my time to browse new blogs, I ended up on a blog post all about the Norwegian Capital.

I was there in summer 2024, so I could recognise the places in the photos.. but the mention of the Munch Museum made me recall last night’s dream.

I know no one wants to hear descriptions of someone else’s dreams, but please humour me for a minute: I dreamt I took a train ride to visit some friends, and after two and a half hours I was at their new place. While there, at some point I realised I could see the Munch museum. They were in Oslo!
I thought - still in my dream: how nice, they must have opened a high-speed train line to Norway.

I joke that the Universe is trying to tell me something, but I wondered what could have triggered such a dream.
And I noticed a lot of Norwegian references in my last two weeks:

  • in my last Weekly Visions I referenced Munch’s The Scream (of which I saw several versions in Oslo); I also mentioned Finnish people slipping on ice, and while writing that I recalled that my tour guide on the Oslo city tour mentioned how in winter they wear spiked shoes to walk around (are these the hobnail boots John Lennon sings about in Happiness is a Warm Gun?)
  • in my next Weekly Visions (spoiler alert) there are several connections with Norway, and a mention of Haruki Murakami (which reminded me of the first book of his I read, Norwegian Wood - isn’t it good?1)
  • I have been testing the Vivaldi web browser, which is developed in Norway and Iceland
    I feel like I think about Norway much more frequently than I do about the Roman Empire2. I’m really a bad Italian citizen.

I enjoyed a lot my few summer days in Oslo. I don’t think I can envision moving there, but I think I would go there often if it really were a two-hour train ride away.

  1. I think I might dream about The Beatles next (have you seen the first pictures of the cast from Sam Mendes’ four-film ’event’? Trying to capture the only angle from which they vaguely resemble their real-life counterparts, a bit like that first picture from Bohemian Rhapsody). ↩︎

  2. Although, I did think about the Roman Empire twice in the last two weeks: once when I looked at the column in Paris’ Place Vendôme - which in fact depicts Napoleon dressed in Roman attire, and then when someone mentioned Asterix’ Armorica region, and I wanted to check where it actually was. ↩︎