I’m not going to bore you with the details of it, but walking up the stairs and back to my desk just now, I remembered that last night I had a dream, the upshot of which was that I made a commitment not only to myself, but to a strange David Brent type person, that I would write a symphony. According to this David Brent type person (and I promise this is the only detail with which I will regale you), anyone who is anyone has written one by the time they’re forty.
In my dream, I seemed to believe not only that I should add ‘write a symphony’ to my list of things to do, but that I had the skills to follow through.
Goodness.
adelaide from adelaide 
Could it be possible that your subconscious was giving you advice about the structure of something you’re writing? Stranger things have happened. I just Googled it for you:
‘A symphony consists of four movements:
1. Sonata Form
2. Slow and lyrical (theme & variation, rondo, or ternary)
3. Minuet (ternary or scherzo)
4. Allegro (same key as first movement)’
I was thinking all day about your suggestion, thinking, ‘it makes sense, but no, it’s only got three parts’, then I looked at the ms again, and it should definitely be four. And what it is missing is the minuet which, oddly enough, was often my favourite part back in the day when I still sometimes sat at my piano.
That sounds like the plots of a Dudley Moore movie I saw when I was a kid about a composer needing to write somethng massive by a huge birthday and there were people dressed as leprechauns somewhere… google?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062625/
It’s called “30 is a dangerous age, Cynthia”
so nothing like it at all really…
There needs to be a new level of disappointment available to the English language which describes the feeling of internal destruction that occurs just as you wake up from a dream in which you have been dragged up on-stage to fill in lead guitar for Metallica because their regular guy is sick and they tell you to just hold it and strum the strings like this and all of a sudden you’re a guitar god and then you wake up and go shit.
Another thing that I’m twenty years too late to do, then.