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T C Lethbridge – The Power of the Pendulum

November 1968. Saw large wheel with many spokes and apparently the dark underside of the vehicle to which it belonged. There was no colour. Although the wheel looked like a carriage wheel, it stood on one of a pair of light railway tracks.

I heard a voice say '. . . should the train push'. I felt that they ought to put a chock under the wheel.  In the afternoon I was reading the Sunday papers. On a page in the Observer was a large photograph of a man on an ancient boneshaker bicycle riding in a town street against a background of pavement and pillared portico. His feet, right over the axle of the big front wheel, had to drive the thing along by main force. One could see at once, comparing these two sketches, that this was the origin of my wheel dream of about twelve hours earlier. Here we find a most interesting sequence of errors and, by a great piece of luck, I think we can see why they happened.

My ordinary mind waking up appeared to hear'. . . should the train push'. From this it assumed that it was looking at an old-fashioned train and even thought that something must be done to stop the train pushing. Since it was a train, it displaced the edge of the pavement and the shadows of the wheels and turned these into railway tracks. As only a fraction of the photograph was visible, the man's legs and parts of his body and coat were interpreted as the underside of a railway carriage.

The curious diagonal bracing of the bicycle's wheel was turned into the radial spokes of a normal wheel and so the waking memory registered and remembered the underside of a railway carriage. Some other part of my mind (or somebody else's mind) had observed the difficulty the rider was having in turning the wheel with his feet and remarked something like:

'It would be a strain to push.' It is completely rational if you can spot the clue.