Today after I finished my headspace meditation I wandered off to look around the site. There was a creative writing prompt. Ooh… the guide suggested you feel a flame of creativity inside you but I imagined that flame as a lighthouse.

Why? No idea.

And then – instead of meditating- I started thinking about lighthouses and imagery in fiction. A quick scan of dream dictionaries suggests that dreaming of a lighthouse means: a spiritual development; to overcome trials and rough seas; guidance in difficult times; warnings about wrong directions; truth and thanks to Freud, penises. [Seriously, that man saw them everywhere.]

But it seemed kind of apt to me. The lighthouse light passes across a space regularly but it isn’t stationary; it’s off or on and constantly moving. Maybe it’s a better image of my ADHD mind. [Mind helpfully supplies an image of a cartoon lighthouse darting all over the place rather than sweeping around in a cycle. Thanks, brain.]

I can’t be creative all the time. It does come in a cycle, and on dark days, the light goes out.

And then I started to think about lighthouses in fiction. The first that came to mind was Virginia Woolf’s ‘To the Lighthouse’. Wikipedia quotes the theme as ‘attempting to understand people in the act of looking’. Helen Garner mentioned it in Monkeygrip. It was in Susanna Moore’s ‘In the Cut’. When I go searching in my kindle, I have a copy of Woolf’s book so I add it to my ‘currently reading’ tag along with 39 others. Scattered mind, indeed.

My therapist suggested I get a figurine to represent my creative mind as a trigger thing; see it and write. I adore Funko dolls but they are disappointingly bereft of creative reps. Bob Ross does NOT work for me. I tweeted funko and suggested they make a Jane Austen one. But for the moment, after some rifling around in drawers, I have a small figurine of a lighthouse.