Starting from the Beginning...

In my life I have, apparently, already had a good 10,429 nights of sleep. If one presumes that I dreamed at least several times in pretty much most of them, but forgot them either on waking or over the intervening years, that definitely adds up to one hell a lot of wasted material already for this blog...

That said, there are a few dreams that have stuck with me from early childhood onwards, the very earliest from when I was about three being:

• Dreaming that I was in a Monster Munch advert (presumably based on this classic 1986 example)
• Dreaming that a massive tarantula was crawling up my leg and pulling one of its legs off, only to find a body full of purple Turkish delight like gunk and that the spider still kept slowly and surely hobbling seven-leggedly along my leg and up towards my face (this one, unsurprisingly, resulted in a deeply engrained, life-long arachnophobia).
• Dreaming that a scary monster cast a shadow across our hallway, presumably to pluck me and mine out of our beds and gruesomely consume us by dead of night.

Clearly anxiety dreams in the form of monsters and nasty creepie-crawlers characterised my infantile subconscious from the start then... :-))

Apart from one dream in which I gleefully pushed my little brother of the balcony when I was about seven, I don’t remember many dreams from my later childhood, though I do recall several recurrent dreams from my geeky, gawky, all-round traumatic teenage years, the key examples being:

• Pregnancy dreams, in which I either found myself inexplicably up the duff or already with a newborn babe in arms, leaving me both mystified as to how I’d somehow come into the family way despite my as then undoubted unsullied state. Then as now, I utterly hate babies in real life.
• Dreams in which I ate chocolate, biscuits, or pretty much anything on my then taboo list (which at the time pretty much constituted everything that wasn’t water or some kind of vegetable of which you used up the calories value in the chewing), and being desperately relieved when I woke up that I hadn’t in fact caved.
• Occasional flying dreams (sadly not had one of those in a loooooooooong time).
• One particularly vivid dream in which I saw the devil in goat-like horn-headed form ascending up Joel Hill towards my Year 10 classroom, and sensing a diabolic malevolence so intense that the paint actually started peeling from the walls (more than it was already peeling, that is – don’t think my bog-standard comp had updated its interior decor since about 1955...).
• Shagging Jerry Springer (eughhh – God knows where the old subconscious dredged that one up from).

Not many recollected dreams to show my from my first 10,000 or so nights on the earth, but still more than most I’d guess... More to come from recent years in my next entry anyhow!