Friday 11th May

We all have dreams and I suppose we all have “dreams”, though why they are described using the same word I have no idea, they are as different as chalk and cheese.  Dreams are those thing you swim through in your sleep, but have no real control of; those sometimes pleasant, sometimes incredibly annoying and occasionally terrifying but usually intensely real situations and experiences which your mind in its crazy filing system throws up for your delectation during the sleeping hours.  So often I wake in a positive sweat and almost shudder to release myself from their grip.  They often leave me feeling so tired too, as if I have run a marathon instead of peacefully resting my brain for eight hours.  It may well be that my dreams, which seem on waking to have been pursuing me all night have only happened as I surfaced from a much longer and blank nothingness, but the white stretches of nothingness I cannot remember, the turbulent indigo of my dreams are throbbing away in my brain as I rub the sleep out of my eyes and try to shake myself awake.

“Dreams” are really daydreams; those fond imaginings of what might be, or in my case more likely what might have been, those ambitions, love affairs, extra abilities, success and fame that might be achieved if only…

And pleasant as they may be, and of course going on in one’s head, they are hardly involuntary and do not recur with the same intensity as nightly dreams do. I always find it amusing on these reality television shows, from ‘X factor’ to ‘Masterchef’ that the contestants/deluded fools always claim that to win whatever contest they have stupidly entered has been their lifetime ‘dream’.  Poor cretins – have they really spent years thinking about and imagining themselves sitting in Alan Sugar’s boardroom or being berated by Simon Cowell in front of millions.  It reminds me of one of my recurring dreams I had mostly as a child but occasionally as an adult of being exposed naked in my back garden with the head-scarved neighbours all looking over the fence and laughing at my all too obvious inadequacy.

Dream on.