Dreams are very handy things. I often have a lot of them when I start thinking intensely about something.  Don’t ignore them, don’t try to interpret them, just see where they take you as if they are a kind of a taxi.

Here’s one of mine that helped me understand something about anger. I went into a Rediffusion shop in West Wickham, the town on the bottom edge of South London where I grew up. Miles Davis was inside. I won’t bore you with the details as they become increasingly surreal, but … if we think of this dream as a taxi I’ll tell you where it took me.

Miles Davis was a wonderful improviser. Most of how I think of therapy these days involves improvisation, so anything involving Miles that I notice makes me sit up and take notice.

In real life Rediffusion wasn’t a shop. As far as I remember it was a sign in a shop. Rediffusion was a company that redistributed television and radio signals over a wired relay system, but I only found that out thanks to Wikipedia a couple of days ago. Up until then it had just always been a cool word that had hung around from my past.

Thinking about the dream, along came my taxi. It took me to a a thought from all the years I worked as a group therapist, about how certain kinds of groups seemed to leave people feeling more peaceful. You’d start a group with a bad sense of a something uncontrollably aggressive going on and then, especially if the group had a range of genuine emotional moments, at the end there’d be a feeling of peace. It felt safe.

Rediffusion: if you want to feel less angry make more social connections into life with people who might laugh with you, or cry with you, or get scared with you, or whatever. Redistribute whatever you’ve seen or heard to a diffuse audience who won’t jump in and try to be part of your ‘anger-show’. A TV or radio show audience from the 1970s of my childhood just took things in. They didn’t dial back to the show casting a vote or anything like that.

You don’t want to be connected to people who will dial back to you and affect your anger-show: the scene of whatever has upset you. Some people relish doing the equivalent of pouring petrol on a fire and that won’t do you any good at all. They’ll keep your anger burning. You need to be seen and heard by people who keep coming back without wanting to rescue you or stir you up. They’ll have their own lives to pay attention to

You’ll feel safer when you are seen and heard. Life’s slings and arrows might then seem way off in the distance, their salvos failing to reach you.

Get social, but not with anyone with an axe to grind.