Getting over the 'flu, slowly

I have been off work for a week with 'flu.  I went back on Tuesday, and haven't exactly been enjoying it as I still feel mortally washed-out and rubbery-legged.  But I'm terribly behind on all my stuff, just as my job starts to get into the busy time of year.  So I am putting my head down and getting on with it.  By five pm today I felt as though my frontal lobes had been replaced with large pieces of carefully folded felt.  CLRDUGGG UGH UGH... >staggers across Kew Green in the dusk like a lonely zombie<

I crept home, made an easy supper, and have spent the evening listening to music and chatting to TC on the 'phone.  TC is stressed, and I don't think I was brain-equipped enough to be much help.  Last night I watched two ballet dvds both of which I've seen a dozen times before - Alina Cojocaru being divine in "Sleeping Beauty", Ed Watson being tormented and sexy in "Mayerling".  I hadn't the spirit even to watch a movie with dialogue - the need to disengage my brain is far too great for that.  The only other thing I do of an evening is muck about a bit on Tumblr, licking my lips over a bit of hunk-fetishisin' photo-bloggin' harmless sexist fun.  Very sad, you are becoming, Ims.

So tired...

Last night I had another of those weird dreams.  If the real-life people one dreamed about really did connect with one in those dreams, they'd be left feeling pretty freaked out of a morning, sometimes.  This one certainly startled me a bit, though it has since set me to thinking "This has the makings of a short story...".

I dreamed I was one of a crowd of people defending a tower house – like a Pictish castle or something in the Mani – from assault.  Jeremy Renner was among the attackers and he slung a stone at me with a slingshot, but bizarrely it looped right past me, quite slowly, and I managed to catch it.  I fell down in surprise and one of the other defenders thought I’d been hit and raised up a scream for vengeance.  I sat up to show him I was unhurt and looked over the parapet to mock at Mr Renner - you know the routine, “Nah-nah-nahnahnah, you can’t hit me with your shitty sling, California boy!” - but when he saw me looking down at him, alive and uninjured, he looked incredibly happy and relieved; and I realised he hadn’t ever intended to hurt me at all.

So what the hell does that mean? 

And what will I dream tonight, I wonder?!

A girl can dream...

I had another vivid dream last night.  I can only suppose that the damp, chilly weather and general wintry darkness and dimness have some kind of stimulating effect on the bit of the brain that initiates dreaming - the hypothalamus, is it?  This one started odd (i.e. normal for a dream), turned very nasty indeed for a bit, and then, as if to compensate, went completely overboard on the happy ending. 

I was crossing Kew Bridge on my way home, and I looked down and  saw someone in a bobble hat riding my bicycle along the mud banks beside the Thames, heading in the direction of the railway bridge.  In the dreaming world, my bike normally lived on a clothes-horse in the foyer of the block of flats I live in (in the waking world it has a different home!) & I hadn't lent it to anyone.  So I ran in pursuit, down the steps onto the river bank.  But by the time I got there the tide had come in, and I found myself falling, as if sucked inexorably, into the river.

People drown in the Thames every year; it's not a good river to fall into, and I'm not a particularly strong swimmer.  Clearly my subconscious knows this.  I thrashed and yelled and struggled, and went under, and was carried away upriver, shrieking my head off each time I surfaced and holding my breath desperately each time I went underwater.  I shot the bridge and was heading out into the middle of the main channel.  It was dark and cold, and I went under again and thought "I'm going to bloody drown, what a farce". I shut my eyes and accepted it, since there wasn't anything else to do.

Suddenly a pair of very strong arms grabbed me and pulled at me; and I grabbed back and held on.  The rushing din in my ears stopped and a voice said to me "You can stop holding your breath now, you're out of the water."  So I opened my eyes and found I had been dragged from the river, and imminent death, onto the banks of Brentford Eyot, by the Crush Of The Moment.  Good man. 

Since I was soaking wet and muddy, and had swallowed a fair amount of the Thames, which I was frantically trying to spit out, I was about as unappealing as a plump middle-aged woman can be.  Nonetheless my Hero smiled at me - swoon! - and then he said "I'm Aaron, by the way."  I gobbed up some more filthy water and replied "No you're not, you're an actor, don't quote your own lines at me."  Then I woke up, with my pulse thundering, though whether from the near-drowning bit of the dream or the >swoon!< part I can't say. Either way, I couldn't get back to sleep again.

Luckily at work today I have been doing filing and data entry.  Both of which can be done when tired. 

My grandmother always insisted that bad dreams are caused by indigestion. I have no idea of this is true, but I certainly did eat too much yesterday, so maybe in this case it was.  But today was a fast day - I've been very happy so far with the five-two diet, and have just switched back on to it after the Christmas break.  So I'm typing this in the large part of my lunch hour left after eating three rice cakes and a satsuma.  Supper is due to be salad; and then I will have a peaceful evening typing up some more "Gold Hawk" (I'm partway through revising chapter three now) and get an early night.  Hopefully, one in which my dreams will not involve near-drowning.

Until New Year's Eve, then...

It seems the nutjobs were indeed wrong, since the world did not end at 11.35am today.  However, today is the last time I’ll have guaranteed access to the internet until December 31^st.  So, the continuation of history notwithstanding, this is probably my sign-off for 2012. 

If the world does end today, just a little later than predicted, it’s going out on a high of sorts for me.  The sun is shining, the temperature is above zero, I saw a jogger dressed as Father Christmas this morning (complete with heart-rate monitor), the trees on Brentford Eyot are gleaming in their winter bark colours of red-gold and olive- green, there’s a lovely dog running about on the Green, I have coffee and nougat and sesame biscuits in the office, I’ve revised and typed up to the end of chapter two of “Gold Hawk” and am happy with it so far, and I have the next nine days off work.  And last night I met TCI and G for a pre-Christmas beer-and-nachos at the Prince’s Head in Richmond, and a cute chap a couple of tables away kept making eyes at me.  Think a balding Jason Isaacs crossed with a balding Liev Schreiber; i.e. seriously attractive, despite the follicular issues (the nachos at the Prince’s Head are excellent, too, but that's not my photo, just one I swiped off the internet.  Our Nachos had lots more cheese, plus lashings of guacamole and sour cream, and the beers should be Fuller's Organic Honeydew, not whatever that is [looks like a Guinness and a pint of orange squash, actually]).

Got home, a little tipsy and very cheerful, packed my bags for Christmas, discovered I had not posted K’s present – boll*cks! – put it to take to the post office in my lunch break today, and actually got myself to bed at a reasonable hour.  I then dreamed I was hiking in the snow in the Cairngorms with a certain JL Renner.  When we stopped for lunch he made hot chocolate over a campfire for me.  Good man! 

That makes three really delightful hunk-dreams in the last few days; I am now married to William Houston, RDJ drives my removal van, and Mr Renner makes me hot choc.  It seems my subconscious is on a high of sorts as well.

Solstice Greetings, Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year to you!

The curate's ball gown/opera/ dream

Well, I had a very mixed day yesterday.  

I’d booked a day of annual leave, thinking it’s nice to have a midweek day off before Christmas to do any final bits of shopping and so on.  Also I had a ticket for “Robert le Diable” and that started at 6pm, so I was going to have to ask to leave work early at the least.  Since in the event I’d done all my Christmas shopping, I had a lazy morning and then went to the V&A to have a mooch and see the “Ball gowns” show (which closes in early Jan).  

It was a very odd show – the first half (mostly from the 50s and 60s, with a few more modern classics) was about 80% terrific, and the second half (contemporary designers’ red-carpet gowns) was about 80% terrible.  If it had been selected with the express purpose of demonstrating that the contemporary applied arts are just as desperate as the contemporary fine arts to be innovative at any and all cost, even if it means being crap, it couldn’t have made its point better (& I think it was meant to have demonstrated how damned hip and wonderful they are!).

 

And as for the opera; well, I actually left at the interval – only the second time in my life I’ve ever done that.  It STANK.  The music itself was uninspiring (alternately hammy-rumbly and sugary-tinkly), and the production was irredeemably bad.  It was “ironic”, and so heavy-handedly so as to be just plain embarrassing.  I’ve seldom seen anything so unrelentingly cheesy in my life.  

At least if one went to Disneyland the cheesiness would be sincere; this was all eye-rollingly superior.  I swear it was more self-consciously knowing than a Carry-on film, and without the redeeming silly humour.  It sucked.  My heart ached for the poor cast, who were bravely doing their best, with rubbish to sing and a director with his brain up his arse.  

You will gather I hated it.

I then went home, feeling rather cross, and got on with some typing, and the laptop got hiccoughs and wouldn’t save.  In the end I left it running, with its little error message saying something along the lines of “I can’t do this, why are you asking me to do this?” and went to bed.  I arranged a large book propped open to mask the light from the screen, and tried to ignore the constant chuntering-computer sound, but of course I couldn’t sleep with it purring away a few feet from me.  I got up at 1am and checked, and it was still jammed, and I thought “sod you, then” and switched it off at the wall...  So will probably go home tonight to an injured complaint of “you switched me off in a bad way, you’re a mean missy”.  I don’t know if the stuff I had typed (about two thousand words) will have been saved or not.  There’s supposed to be an automatic back-up-save every ten minutes, so in theory I shouldn’t have lost too much (cross fingers).  Poor old laptop, I think I do have to accept that it’s nearing the end of its useful life.  

At any rate, by the time I had relaxed enough to actually get to sleep after all that, I had less than six hours before my alarm went off.  I think I was still pretty stressed about the laptop, since I then had a really weird dream.  It was a glorious summer day, and my mum’s friend Ninetoes and Robert Downey Jnr. were helping me to move house.  I had bought a lovely big house with a garden, and as house-move-help goes, Ninetoes and RD Jnr. made a pretty great team (at least once she had stopped making eyes at him), so things weren’t all bad by any means.  The downsides were RD Jnr. insisting on playing just one song, over and over, on the stereo in the pantechnicon (I have nothing against Duffy, but “Beggin’ you for mercy” has fairly repetitive lyrics when you hear it just once, let alone six times in a row) and the bizarre house-warming gift I had been given from work; a urine-driven coffee-maker. 

My subconscious goes to some very strange places at night.  As new green energy concepts go, I think wee-power will take some beating.

Dreams

I had two very odd dreams last night.  As always, they leave me wondering what the heck my subconscious is playing at.

Dream 1: My former boss from when I first started at Kew has got a new job - as Director of Tourism for Bury St Edmunds.  Now, I doubt very much if Bury St Edmunds has a Director of Tourism in the waking world, but in the dreamworld it does, and it's Helen.  I don't think she was too enthusiastic about it, though, as the main thing she was doing was sending everyone she knew on facebook a steady series of chivvying messages about how important it was that we all visit Bury St Edmunds ASAP.

I've never been there, have no particular desire to go there, and have no idea where this sprung from.

Dream 2: I am married to William Houston.  Now, as a ginger fetishist and a fan of intense actors generally, I do know where this one came from!  But it strikes me as odd to dream about being married to a long-standing minor crush of mine when I am deep, deep in the throes of a major crush on someone else.  Incidentally, the married dream-me was very happy, though as I distinctly remember calling my handsome ginger hubby a "daft bugger" at one point I guess my subconscious doesn't think marriage would make me any less charmless than I am as a singleton...  Oh well.

Oh well, indeed.  At least a girl can dream, eh?!

And meanwhile the freezing cold weather has improved marginally today - the temperature has actually gone above zero this afternoon, for the first time since Monday morning, and the 4-days-thick frost on Kew Green has all thawed, at least for now.  Robins are singing bravely in the raw, damp air when I go out. 

Weird dreams

I very seldom have full-on nightmares of the world-coming-to-an-end, monster-eating-my-leg variety.  But in the last few days I’ve had two absolutely miserable dreams; dreams that left me practically shaking with relief when I woke and realised they weren’t true.

The first was late last week; I dreamed I had to move house again, and I had just three days to do it in.  I had arranged to get all my belongings into storage and was frantically packing; but of course with only three days leeway I was so busy packing that I’d had no time to look for somewhere else to move to.  So I was about to decamp into a local hotel, at the truly painful cost of £120 per night, room only (meaning I would have spent more than my usual month’s rent in just five days).  No-one I spoke to saw anything wrong or odd about my situation, so that as well as being frantic with worry I was also constantly being struck by the fact that I must be a deeply pathetic person to get myself so worked up about minor matters like this.

The second bad dream was last night.  I was going on holiday and had arrived at the airport; there were 2 hours to go to my flight and I was standing at the queue to check-in when I suddenly realised I had left all my baggage at home.  So there I was in Gatwick, desperately trying to think whether there was any way, using the rather stupid selection of shops one finds in an airport, that I could buy myself a whole holiday wardrobe, plus toiletries, books, binoculars, sketchbook, camera, contact lenses and a replacement pair of specs, plus a bag to put them in, before the check-in closed, and still have a bit of spending money left for things like food while I was away.  To add to my state of nerves, my mother then turned up, having decided very sweetly to come and see me off; and she could not understand why I was so upset, or why I felt I had any kind of a problem.  So, again, I had the additional stress of thinking “What is wrong with me, that I am upset by this, when here’s Mum telling me it’s a really trivial matter?”

Talk about deep-seated insecurities!  When I have dreams like this I end up thinking I’d rather not remember them at all.  Not like the one a few months ago when I dreamed I was recently and happily married and busy renovating a house by a lake with my husband.  Now that was lovely!

I don’t know why I’m having such miserable, insecure dreams.  I didn’t think I was particularly miserable or insecure at the moment, indeed rather the opposite.  But the human mind is a mysterious thing, god wot.  Maybe being contented, busy and in good spirits is making my subconscious mind panic. 

I am contented.  Yes, I could have more in my life (a publishing deal, my own home, a garden, a gift-wrapped Jeremy Renner [preferably in my bed], etc etc) but my family are all in good health, I’m happy in my job, I’m comfortable where I live, I have friends, I can afford a holiday each year - plus  a few concerts, theatre tickets etc - my bladder is behaving itself again; and I have my writing, which has driven me mad and worn me out this summer but has also been a well-spring of joy and fulfillment like little else I’ve known.  So I am contented and I have a lot to be grateful for.  Blessed be!

Strange dream

I had a very odd dream last night.  I had gone back to my old junior school (=kindergarten, for anyone in the US) to talk to all the kids, because I was a terribly succesful and inspirational former pupil.  I was signing autographs and writing personal messages of encouragement for all these terrific, bright, sparky children, and they were telling me how brilliant it was to meet me and what an inspiring person I was. 

It was absolutely, completely and utterly bl**dy surreal.

It was also rather awesome, though, if I'm honest.  I've never had that feeling of inspiring anyone and had no idea how it felt.  It felt good. 

Any ideas what the flipping heck it means, though? 

The odd dreams strike again...

One of my favourite books when I was a child was called “The Complete Book of Fortune". It was a huge compendium of fortune-telling methods, oracular games, popular superstitions and sayings, descriptions of amulets and their supposed powers, and so forth; all the myriad ways that we have tried to see the future, encourage good fortune and escape disaster, over the course of human history. Some of it (“Napoleon’s Book of Fate”, the Mystical Art of Phrenology and Physiognomy) is seriously daffy; on the other hand, I’ve found the chapter on how to analyse someone’s character from their handwriting very useful on occasion, and the results impressively accurate.

A whole section of the popular superstitions chapter concerns superstitions associated with weddings, including “How to divine the future with wedding cake”. When given a slice of wedding cake by the bride, you are meant to eat all bar one last crumb, wrap that crumb in soft fabric, and place it under your pillow when you go to bed that night. Then take a careful note of your dreams and interpret them in the usual way (ie with some confusion), as they will tell your fortune in love and marriage.

So of course, when I got given a slice of W’s incredibly rich wedding cake yesterday I had to save a crumb, didn’t I? I mean, come on – a dyed-in-the-wool old singleton like me - I’ve got to know my fortune in love and marriage!

Guess what - I dreamed I was having coffee with several Kew colleagues, funnily enough including Marinated Artichoke Man. Clearly my subconscious hasn’t completely got over that earlier dream yet. This was all very mundane, though; just a bunch of people chatting in one of the Kew restaurants. It was so normal and un-dreamlike I was quite surprised when I realised partway into the conversation that it was a dream.

Then the dream took me to a marvellous antiques shop specialising in Edwardian cookery equipment. I was looking round very thoroughly and taking notes, as I was preparing my Wedding List. Yes, it seems my subconscious wants to spend married life not just in the kitchen, but in a kitchen without electric mod-cons!

So there you are; a tribute to the power of suggestion. I tell myself I’m going to dream about my future in love and marriage, and I then dream about something that might actually happen in the future (=coffee in the Orangery) and then about something I might actually do if I were getting married (=buying kitchen equipment). At least Mr Marinated Artichokes featured, which is some consolation.

Subconscious mind, you’re hopeless.

Dreams odd and dreams odder

I dreamed last night that I was given a whole bunch of bicycle safety reflective dangly things. It seems too obvious, to say “This must be a dream about cycle safety…” so I guess it is about safety or caution or risk-taking in some other context. I’m still struggling to sort out what lay behind my dream on Friday night, which was a good deal weirder; it involved bondage (not of me, luckily) and marinated artichoke hearts, and someone I have never thought of in, um, that sort of context… The guy in question is a nice, courteous, friendly bloke of about my own age who is a mine of information about hothouse plants, and he’s perfectly presentable, but I’ve never looked at him going by and thought “Phwoar!”. I’m a bit baffled to have dreamed about him. Oddly enough, this morning he sent me a cheerful email with a beautiful picture of a sacred lotus attached. Spooky…

To add insult to injury (in a manner of speaking), I have been unable to shake the memory of this dream all weekend. Even during "Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg"; through six and a half glorious hours of Wagner in the sweltering gallery of the Royal Albert Hall, even as I listened in awe and delight to Bryn Terfel and Christopher Purves being utterly, utterly wonderful, there in the back of my mind was this image of the, ahem, marinated artichoke scenario.

Am I in lust with X without ever having noticing it? Can the subconscious hanker after someone without the conscious mind realising? Did my brain pick this chap to symbolise something else? If so, what? And why bondage? – bondage is pretty extreme, even the, ahem ahem hem, clearly consensual bondage in the aforementioned dream.

I don’t need to wonder about the artichokes. I love artichokes. They’re one of my very favourite foods. If I were into kinky activities involving food I’d be a lot more likely to use marinated artichokes than chocolate body paint, which is sugary disgusting stuff…

Oh, this is all too much for me. I’m going to make a nice cup of green tea and get back to the chaos that is registering Community Groups…

It's still early morning to my befuddled brain...

There are times when nothing will do but a strong black coffee. It's nearly mid-day, but I slept appallingly (no idea why) and I still feel three-quarters asleep. Tea just won't hit the spot. Sometimes you've got to have a hit of solid, onyx-coloured caffeine-heavy black coffee.

When I did get to sleep, I had a really weird dream. My mother, my stepmum and I were travelling by Space Shuttle to Southampton - for my wedding. My third wedding; in the dream-world I have been married and divorced twice. First husband's name was apparently Julian, and second husband's name was Carl. This is crazy. Julian and Carl? I have never known anyone by either of those names.

Irritatingly, I don't remember the name of Number Three, the husband-to-be! And I woke up just as I was walking into the wedding venue, so all I saw of him was his back. Bah humbug. He was not very tall - my own height at most, indeed to be frank probably a little shorter than me; he had light brown hair and perhaps unsurprisingly he was wearing a smart dark suit. Description ring any bells with anyone?!!

If I had just dreamed of getting married, I wouldn't be bugged by it; it's a bit of a cliché dream for a single woman, true, but hardly difficult to interpret. If I had just dreamed of going up in a Space Shuttle, that wouldn't bother me too much either - we were weightless at the top of our trajectory, a wonderful sensation, and it strikes me as a great metaphor for the experience of a brief total freedom from the world.

It's dreaming I've been married before - twice before - I just don't "get" that at all. What on earth can that be a metaphor for? I can even visualise them, these two ex-husbands of mine! - Julian is fair, sweet-faced and rather wet-looking, Carl is tall, dark and capable, curly-haired and rather handsome. Who or what do Julian and Carl represent?

Ah, bitter chill it was (not)...

Last night was St Agnes Eve. I forgot to put herbs in my shoes. Nonetheless, I dreamed.

I dreamed I was having my first physiotherapy session, post-cast-removal, and it was going well, and the physiotherapist was pleased and I was incredibly happy. My wrist was regaining flexibility with each stretch, and my hand was regaining grip and precision control. Then I dreamed that I was walking beside a large lake with a certain ballet dancer and two of the characters from "Firefly"; we were having a nice, funny, intelligent conversation, and it was raining. I have to put the latter down to old-fashioned wishful thinking (and a bad attack of Crushia saltator); the earlier part I'll hope and pray was indeed the foretelling dream St Agnes is meant to give. I want my hand back.

Technical hitches and dream hopes

I'm trying to find a way to get pictures of my drawings onto this blog - without having to buy a pile of expensive new kit, that is (!!). So far, no luck. The friend who used to have one of those Blackberry glorified-phones has got rid of it, and I don't seem to be able to text 'phone pictures to anyone else who has the technology to convert them into jpegs and email them to me.

I refuse to buy a home computer plus scanner plus digital camera, just to play with. Rrrah! I have better things to do with my money, seriously.

So in the meantime, you'll have to be satisfied with my gushing descriptions of my own work, which is pretty surreal.

I had another great drawing session last night, once again working from my "re:Rite" sketchbook; assisted by a couple of U2 albums. I drew violinists and viola players this time, about eight of them layered one over the other. When you draw something, you look at it with an attention to details that is different from everyday looking; I've now noticed that the concert master, who revels in the glorious name of Zsolt-Tihamér Visontay, looks in profile as if he could be related to the sexy vampire in "Twilight". I wonder if anyone has ever pointed that out to him?

Maybe I am going to have to bite the bullet and get a digital camera, just for this. Nobody blogs about doing art work and then fails to provide illustrations... Ah well.

On a more cheerful note, I had a wonderful dream a few nights ago. I was on a walking tour in Greece, and had been taken by boat to an Aegean island where I climbed a magnificent limestone gorge full of garrigue and singing birds, up into a mountainous hinterland. Suddenly I found a small village hidden away in the mountains. A little boy was charming the wild birds and animals; he called his parents and they made me welcome and gave me cakes and raki to celebrate my birthday, which was the same day as their son's. They put me up for the night in a little guest room with a view across the fields to the village church, and gave me the key to their home, saying I could come back any time I wanted to stay with them. Compared to my last two memorable dreams (one of which was about a certain Maestro and was, ahem, sexy, and the other of which involved finding a frog in my handbag), this was a pretty good dream-world place to wake up from. Every image in the dream was joyful and life-full, and offered hope and love and welcome. Admittedly I could say as much of the sexy dream, but lusting after married men does not make me feel good about myself, whereas this left me feeling a benediction had been passed upon me as I slept.

And a couple of cool dreams...

Someone just told me they dreamed last night that they had garlic growing out of their arm. I like that - I could eat myself all day (sorry, that sounds really kinky). My dream last night was less edible, or edible in a different way (hmm, shading towards the kinky again here). I was an officer in the Metropolitan Police and had been assigned to the Royal Protection Squad; I was looking after Princess Anne's grandchildren. They were lovely, luckily. But they were being pursued by a terrorist who could take the form of a lion - so I was sent lion hunting with Zachary Quinto. I am not into blood sports, so I will interpret this as being about the need to recover my inner power. With Zachary Quinto.

I love dreams.

I also love the day-dream/long-term-plan type of dream. The novels, published and selling, being read and enjoyed. The art works, framed and exhibited, selling and being enjoyed. The house and garden, my own, instead of rented and falling to bits because the landlord has no money for renovations. The Café and Vegetarian Bistro with attached bookshop, small press, gallery and artists' studios, set in a small botanical garden on the island of Thassos (on the east coast between Alikí and Paradeissos, to be precise). My Favourite Baritone giving a private recital at my wedding, to someone talented, interesting, intelligent, articulate, presentable, solvent, and of course crackers about me. And singing "Oh, Du, mein Holder Abendstern" forty years later at my funeral... Slight problem with this last, in that Favourite Baritone is six years older than me, so he will be a very old gentleman indeed if I get another forty-odd years after the wedding to the as-yet-hypothetical, hopefully wonderful (even maybe hothothot) future partner.

Ah, but still - a girl can dream.

A bad dream can mess up your day...

I had a very odd dream last night, one that has left me vaguely shaken-up and ill-at-ease all day. I dreamed I had to go to a meeting with all of the team from the first floor office I work in, plus one other person who works at Kew, with whom I used to share a flat and who was at the time a very good friend - up until about two years ago when we had a huge bust-up, as a result of which he has cut me dead ever since. In the dream, I was dreading having to spend a couple of hours in his company but was trusting that we’d be civil to one another and hoping we’d be able to sit far enough apart not to have a problem. Incidentally, if we were to have to go to a meeting together, this is exactly how I would feel.

However, when I arrived at the meeting room it was to find everyone else had turned up early, including my former flat-mate, and I was the last to get there. I tried to slip in quietly but he crept round behind me and suddenly grabbed me from the back, catching me round the waist with his left hand and very firmly by the elbow with his right, and to my disbelief having thus trapped me he then leaned over my shoulder from behind and kissed me on the cheek as one might a good friend. He said – to me, but loudly enough that everyone else would hear too – “It’s okay, I’ve explained to them about everything.” I thought, what the heck has he been saying? One of my closest colleagues then said to me cheerfully “So, Imogen, are you going to apologise?” - and I woke up shaking with shock and anger.

Dreams are the brain trying to sort things out, shake them up and look at them from a different angle, right? They don’t mean directly what they show, right? I certainly hope not, in this particular case. I made very full amends, nearly two years ago, for the relatively minor fault that ended this friendship. The idea that I could be considered still to owe anyone an apology for anything about this made me so angry that I woke up outright. But in that case, always assuming I am not merely being horrendously self-deluding about the whole topic (which is always possible), what the heck was this dream telling me?

Imagine that someone you once loved and trusted appears to have told a group of people you work closely with and see every day a version of past events that makes you out to be a Bad Guy. You have always seen yourself as essentially more sinned-against than sinner with regard to this particular issue, and you believe you did everything you could to make amends. You have always felt your conscience was clear. Being confronted by a group of familiar people all convinced of the opposite is both painful and angering, and leaves you feeling helpless and manipulated.

If someone told me this dream as one they had had, and filled me in on the background, I’d suggest they tried to move laterally from the central image. I think I need to remember that – the central image is, to coin a phrase, doing my head in. Perhaps something has left me feeling vulnerable, feeling that I am about to be wrong-footed, and, too, feeling guilty when I know I’ve done nothing to merit it. I know what it’s like to feel guilty when I have merited it (= ghastly), so I know the difference. And the fact I was grabbed from behind could be significant. It’s hard to think of a more unpleasant way for someone to catch hold of you. The unanticipated kiss was upsetting, too; a friendly buss on the cheek, something one would normally welcome, something I once would have been happy to receive from this person, transformed into something that made me feel bad about myself and completely unsure of what was going on.

Yes, yes, this blogger-therapy thing is working! Of course, the dream is so obvious once I think about it; it’s all about vulnerability and feeling vulnerable. The only problem is, why?

Bizarre things, brains. Can’t live with them, can’t live without.

On which idiotic platitudinous note I’ll go home and pack for WOMAD.