Dilemmas Dilemmas....

Have to start by saying that I am distinctly annoyed with myself today for not having written down my dreams as soon as I woke up this morning as I usually do, as I remember having quite a few interesting ones last night, which apart from the one below I now for the life of me can't recall... Must exercise better discipline in future!

That said, at least the single one I did remember for once actually varied this time from my usual formulaic mum / dad / brother / school theme (just writing this blog has now made me rather self-consciously aware of the recurrently retrospective nature of my subconscious), in that it actually for once a) looked forward and not back and b) finally featured my real-life other half - hitherto conspicuous only by his absence from the vast majority of my nocturnal recollections so far...

Could my boyfriend's notable nocturnal absenteeism to date be due to my feeling so secure in the relationship that my normally turbulent subconscious does not actually need to thrash out any un-worked through emotions where he's concerned in my sleep, I wonder? (Which is more than I can say for the rest of my family, apparently.) Or does David occupy so much of my waking thought that my nocturnal mind is - quite frankly - simply sick of the subject? Or is my subconscious just so determinedly past-orientated that it has little to no place left over in order to contemplate my future?? On the other hand maybe, with boyfriend living in one country and me in another, it is simply a case of "out of sight out of (subliminal) mind"... In fact, over the course of this (admittedly still rather short-lived) blog, I think I've dreamed more about fantasy boyfriend Robert Pattinson than I have done my real-life one (and even two of those occurred when he was actually sleeping next to me...).

Breaking the mold last night, however, I dreamt David was accompanying me as I embarked on a second Year Abroad - this time in France (as opposed to my initial real-life one in Germany), an obvious reflection of my recent ummings and ahhings as to whether to one day do a Masters on the Continent or not. In the dream David was basically just escorting me as I arrived in a très joli, typically gaullic, medieval little town - just the type of place the Europhile in me absolutely adores. Together we moved into my pre-arranged digs (to my joy I found I was occupying the whole attic floor of a pretty, wood-beamed old house) and we started to unpack my things (including - notably - a collection of battered but most beloved antique books, which to my knowledge don't actually exist in real-life). Needless to say, at this point I was seriously excited about embarking on a new stage of my life and making the most of all la belle vie en France had to offer, but at the same time this sense of heady euphoria was still tinged with a very real sadness that David once again was only just helping me in setting up there, and would have to go back to the UK again for work within the next few days. The one small consolation in this respect lay in knowing that geographically speaking I was now that bit closer to him than I had been in Prague, so flights would at least be cheaper / shorter and the Eurostar readily on hand for getting him over to me more frequently at weekends than had previously been the case.

No sooner had he actually left though then the initial excitement suddenly faded, as all at once I felt myself lonely and adrift in the gaping attic of an unfamiliar house in a strange land, which now David had gone home no longer seemed to hold such anticipated promise and vibrance. To counteract the resultant depression, I first tried to draw comfort from my treasured collection of old books, only for the pages to start falling out in chunks from each and every tomb, forcing me to hurriedly put them back for their own protection (probably some obscure symbolism at play here). Soon after that my mood then took yet another drastic turn for the worse, as to my sheer and absolute horror I found out that the whole attic apartment was not in fact meant for me alone, but that the living room and kitchen also doubled up as a café for hoards of pontificating French studenty types in the day / evening, leaving me only my little bedroom and tiny en suite as a wholly inadequate refuge from both people (there being no lock on my dream bedroom door) and their resultant noise (my absolute pet hate in shared accommodation - in fact I still retain one selfish bastard cunt of an inconsiderate med student on my non-negotiable death list as a result of his incessant musical torment over my first year of university). Unsurprisingly enough, in my waking life I live blissfully alone in my quiet and cosy, mercifully people-free (apart from David on occasion) little studio - my own personal sanctuary from the madness that lies beyond the threshold...

So to cut a long story short, I don't really need Sigmund Freud here to tell me that all of the above is clearly just a noctural regurgitation of my long-standing waking dilemma as to my future country of abode... By no means is it an easy thing to be torn between a man you love residing in a country you hate, or a life without him in a continent you've loved since childhood and planned to build a life (and not just a four year hiatus). No surprise then that the emotions of the dream ran the whole same gauntlet (euphoria, bittersweetness, sadness, conflict, fear) as I experience on a pretty much daily basis in real life - ending as usual in the same old inertia and ambivalence as to what to do for the best... For now though it's just a case of taking things as they come and seeing where life takes us, which when it comes down to it is no more and no less than any of us can really ever do I guess - and in many ways I should really consider myself privileged that I'm even in the position (great boyfriend, amazing life abroad etc) to be presented with such a choice in the first place...

To wind up all this inner turmoil (waking and sleeping!) for now though, all I can say is that at this current moment I'm planning nothing more than to just enjoy a sunny Prague 2010 (and beyond...) for as long as I can, and the more of it spent with David visiting the better!!! :-)))

Shrek meets Subconscious...

A bit of a psychedelic one last night...

Basically, I randomly found myself living in a kind of animated Shrek-style fairy tale universe, where I unfortunately enough resided in squalor and misery in a tumbledown old house in the middle of a graveyard with my cruel drunkard of a father and indifferent older brother. Back in happier times, there had also been a mother who I both still dimly remembered and sorely missed, but she'd mysteriously disappeared off the scene a few years back and none of us knew what had become of her since.

One night, however, whilst completing yet another Cinderella-style hard day's toil, I happened to spot some strange glimmering in the corner of the graveyard, which I went over to investigate. As I moved towards the light, suddenly an illuminated UFO (classic discus shape) sprang out of the shadows, with none other than my own fairy tale mum (of Spanish appearance and clad in gypsy headscarf) sitting at its open entrance! I tearfully called out to her and she back to me, but by this time the UFO had already sped higher into the sky, pausing only briefly for my mother and I to get one last look at each other before flying off into the distant realms of space... Understandably shaken by this unexpected encounter, I nevertheless still found it distinctly comforting in that I now knew my mum was at least alive, and for some reason also sensed that the inhabitants of the UFO were a benign rather than a malevolent (though undeniably equally as captive) force. On the other hand though, my long-lost mother had now been shown to be more out of reach than ever, utterly at the mercy of alien entities, and presumably lodged on some far-off planet out in the distant corners of space - in short virtually impossible to ever track down again...

And so time passed, as it does in dreams, only for me to awake one day to find that the extra-terrestrials had taken my brother too, much to my obvious disappointment and dismay - not because in this case I'd liked my characteristically cold and distant older sibling particularly, but because he'd presumably been taken off to the same planet as my mother to be reunited with her, while I on the other hand had to stay down in my unhappy existence on earth with my arsehole of an alcoholic father. Luckily for me though, in the end I didn't have more than six months to wait until the spaceship finally returned to pick me up as well, whisking me off to a moon-like planet, which in the event turned out to be some kind of holistic / therapeutic retreat type place, to which the aliens (never seen in the flesh, but as I earlier suspected, not just benign but actually downright benevolent) brought humans who they deemed to be in emotional need. As it turned out, my mum had all the time been suffering from both depression and domestic abuse at the hands of my cruel father (I'd been too young to pick up on it back then), and so the aliens had brought her here to rebuild her battered self-esteem by means of sewing, planting vegetables and taking part in other wholesome, group-based therapeutic activities - that one time I'd spotted her in the UFO actually turned out to have been just one of many unseen escorted earth visits she'd made so that she could observe her children growing up from afar (for reasons unexplained, the aliens believed that only when she was truly recovered could we all be reunited).

In the meantime, however, the aliens had unfortunately been making significantly less psychological headway with my strong-willed older brother, who as it turned out had only been taken earlier as he was in greater emotional need (from which the aforementioned coldness and indifference of course first originated). Rather than responding to the alien's good-hearted, softly-softly therapeutical approach, however, my brother had instead proceeded to run rampage on the unassuming planet, setting up his own miniature empire in one far-out crater populated by meerkats and a few unfortunate enslaved humans, who he'd forced to dress up in medieval attire and act as his own personal royal court. Deciding enough was enough now that the rest of his family were resident on the planet, the aliens (still mysteriously unseen) accompanied me and my mum to the crest of the crater, where in German (wrongly, as I worked out once awake) I valiantly proclaimed the crater and court free of my brother's evil dominion. To our initial disappointment, however, at first there was no discernible reaction to be seen among either the crater's meerkat or human inhabitants, but luckily then after just a few minutes (to both my surprise and - needless to say - utter joy) bottle after bottle of white wine started spouting one by one from the crater's tubular entrance, which apparently in itself symbolized the ultimate power and pull of the family over the petty power struggles of its individual members... Humbled, my brother finally emerged from the crater last, initially reluctant, but in the end overwhelmed by the sheer joy at the three of us all being finally reunited (lots of tears and hugs all round), with the heady euphoria of reunion finally breaking through his hard exterior emotional defenses and ending his misguided power hunger for good.

So to cut a long story short, estranged family members are emotionally reunited, mother overcomes depression by means of holistic healing without the use of conscious-altering prescription drugs, wayward son is brought back into line by virtue of strong family love and support, deadbeat dad's not in the picture but no-one seems to mind - quite the modern-day happy ending it seems, but applicable to my own personal family life how...?!?!?!?!?

Someone psychoanalyze me please!!!!!!!!!

Noooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!

Nightmare of nightmares - last night I dreamed fantasy love-of-my-life, Robert Pattinson, by some sheer miraculous act of God, actually climbed into bed with me, but to my horror I found I was wearing my comfie bedtime granny pants and tights!!!!! Utter mortification!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Come Dine with Me - Episode 3

For some strange reason, Channel 4 culinary reality TV show 'Come Dine with Me' truly seems to have permeated my sub-conscious of late, with this the third dream based on this highly entertaining, dining-based series in as many weeks...

Is this a reflection of my underlying competitiveness / unconscious cravings for fame and attention? An indication that I should vary my (admittedly rather mundane pasta-for-one / wine based) diet more? Or have I just been watching that one Sunday afternoon omnibus session too many recently?!?!? Either way, as with both my earlier dreams on the subject (see episodes 1 and 2), again this episode had a corresponding socio-cultural twist, following on from the previous religion / sexuality / family based themes this time with education - or more specifically, my own.

In yet another dream flashback, in this episode I basically found myself back in my Home Economics kitchen at my old school, with my old HE teacher (not the obese one who furtively took bites out of all the food we'd cooked after the lesson - the other one) dividing the class up into teams to each serve as joint competitors in a new episode of 'Come Dine with Me'. However, in this case there would also be a variation from the standard 'Come Dine' format (in which the host partakes in the meal they have prepared) in that each of our teams' efforts would be judged by an independent panel - one table of 15 judges per team (which as a team we actually had to wait on as well as cook for) - and the highest scoring table would win the night.

Initially my main concern was not to be put in a team with a certain real-life snide little bitch with whom I actually did share my year 10 and 11 HE class (see entry on recurrent dreams), but once this transpired not to be the case, my worries quickly moved on to keeping order within the team (how to divide responsibilities between cooking / waiting etc etc), coming up with an appropriate menu (quickly decided on as crispy spring rolls followed by Thai curry and sticky rice), and the sheer logistics of cooking and serving 15 people at once, when the most I think I've ever cooked for at one time in my real life has been about 8 (and then of course I wasn't being competitively judged). Unfortunately, however, things were quick to unravel for my team, as we soon realised we didn't have any coconut cream for the curry, none of us knew how to make spring rolls, and we had no time to shop for essential ingredients / research alternative recipes etc.

In the end, I actually decided the sheer and utter pressure of it all easily outweighed both the kudos of being on television and the (increasingly remote) chance of winning a share of the thousand pounds prize, so simply walked out of the competition, leaving my former classmates (none of whom I felt even the slightest guilt whatsoever towards for leaving in the lurch) to haphazardly muddle on in my absence. Instead, I decided I much preferred cooking in my usual convivial, unpressurized surroundings of a small group of friends in my own cosy flat, so went out an bought loads of new ingredients (including, I believe, fresh gnocchi, prosciutto ham, and several expensive bottles of lovely Robert's wine) to rustle up a feast for my Prague girlfriends. Sadly for me though, for some reason I rather thoughtlessly only sent out an invite just hours before I actually wanted to host my dinner, so at such short notice no-one was able to make it, and I ended up having to polish off my duly delicious concoctions and much of the wine all by myself instead... :-((

Am not sure what any of the above means from a psycho-analytical angle, but whatever the deep psychological ramifications of this continued reoccurence of night-time reality TV, I for one am definitely hoping for a next nocturnal weekly installment... :-))

Fucked Up Feet

Another strange one last night...

Basically, I dreamt I was walking round some scenic lake with my brother and my mum, when I felt some discomfort in my shoe, which turned out to be caused by a small piece of metal lodged in my foot. Assuming it was just some random speck of something that had worked itself into my shoe, I bent down to gently tug it out, only to find that it was actually just the tip of a big thick inch-long nail that had somehow lodged itself unnoticed in my foot. Grimacing, I tried to carefully remove the nail, only for this to then cause a sudden massive rectangular hole to open up across my foot, from my ankle joint to the start of my toes. Rather disgustingly, I could see right down to the bottom of the hole, where a load of blood and other gunk were slushing around at the bottom.

Unfortunately, my brother (a doctor in real life) claimed not to be specialised in feet, but tried to call round some of his medic friends for advise, while in the meantime I started panicking about germs and dirt getting into the hole and searching round in vain for some appropriate covering to the wound. In desperation I then asked my brother to take me to A&E, but he said that would be full of drunks (a true enough affliction of the NHS on Friday and Saturday nights...) and suggested the three of us instead catch the bus to the local hospital. By this point I was seriously starting to freak out, as (again according to my brother) the hole was preventing proper bloodflow to my foot, which would soon cause it to wither up permanently and possibly be amputated if we couldn't get medical attention soon.

Not a particularly enviable situation already one might think, but actually at this point things took yet another drastic turn for the worse, as my mum as suddenly as inexplicably turned all ashen-faced and zombified, and without saying a word to either of us, simply got off the bus and started walking away... With just seconds till the bus doors closed, I found myself suddenly torn betwen getting urgently needed medical treatment for my foot or getting to my mum, so was forced to make the split-second decision to quickly jump off and hobble vainly along after her, with one lame foot dragging limply behind me, as all the while my insensible mother slowly and surely drew ever more out of reach...

And then I woke up, really wanting my mum... :-((

Snippets II

Dreams from just last night alone...

• Inadvertently killing my oversized pet angel fish by forgetting to put it into water when I cleaned the tank (twice), then realising that four hamsters and a parrot had also met untimely ends on mine and David's watch. Not looking particularly promising for Smudge and Fudge (real-life future kittens / child substitutes) then...
• Being in an episode of Eastenders with Janine and Pat, getting into the evitable soap bitch fight and accidentally stabbing Pat in the stomach in the struggle, then ringing 999 to report Pat being mortally wounded and Janine also starting to vomit up blood and sludge due to a prior heart condition. Unfortunately forgot to leave an address for the ambulance to go to, then kept getting cut off when trying to call back (a recurrent theme with 999 calls in my dreams, for some reason...).
• My stepsister joining some weird Asian sun-worshipping cult in Hampshire and having to go in and retrieve her with my mum and Alan, with me taking great delight in mocking all the deluded, beardy-weirdie, cult member, loony types along the way... :-))
• One of my colleagues not knowing who Bob Marley was, and me in utter incredulity singing 'No Woman No Cry' and 'Buffalo Soldier' in a vain attempt to jog their memory.
• My favourite piece of grafitti art being grafittied over at the Tesnov underpass, and then the next day to my disappointment finding that it was...

And that's all for now...

Dream Come Dine With Me - Episode 2

Finally a follow up to the first episode of my personal dream series of 'Come Dine With Me', with contemporary issues yet again playing as big a role as the actual food featured in the show...

While last week's episode was themed around the "big" issues of race, religion and sexuality, this one on the other hand was more focused on the family and the interpersonal relationships between its individual members.

Host one, for example, held a traditional wedding feast, which while scoring highly on the ambience, lost out on food points due to the menu's typically Czech predominance of meat and dumplings at every single bloody course (classic real-life example). Couple number two, rather unfortunately, had just lost their son, so the theme was rather depressingly funereal, with everyone required to dress in black and conversation not exactly flowing as a result... My own event, however, was divorce based, which basically meant having to host a dinner at my Dad's old house, where I used to live in convivial disarray with him and my little brother. To my horror (but not exactly surprise) though on this occasion, I discovered that no-one had done the shopping, most of the food in the fridge had gone mouldy, and all we had in the cupboards was dried pasta and a jar of curry-flavoured Chicken Tonight. Then my mum (who'd left the family home in real life as in dream) randomly decided to come back to us after all, and I hugged her tightly and cried hot, undignified tears of sheer and utter relief (apparently forgetting, at least temporarily, about impending dinner party disaster...).

So all in all not quite such a riotous event as dream number one (in which I at least got a bloody curry), but oh well - let's see what episode three will bring... ;-))

I Love You Robert Pattinson!!!

Oddly enough considering my other half is currently volcano-bound at my side, I've now officially had two adulterous dreams concerning my other, as yet fantasy boyfriend (the divine, sublime, gorgeous, beautiful Robert Pattinson - naturally) in as many days...

Oh joy of joys, in this last dream I noticed him sitting looking disarmingly gorgeous at the bar in the same hotel I was staying in at the time, and approached him (justifiably nervous considering his god-like perfection and my by comparison decidedly hum-drum looks), only to hit it off and soon find myself introduced to his band of (almost but not quite as) hot, buff, James Dean look-a-like, older brothers. Well, to cut a long story short, my friends hooked up with his brothers etc, with myself miraculously landing the star prize - much to my own delight and amazement, obviously.

Things took a turn for the bizarre, however, when among the brothers, their girlfriends, and their merry band of inevitable teenage groupies, a strange fad of dying one's face green à la Shrek for some reason inexplicably took hold. Unfortunately, as dying one's skin a whiter shade of pale centuries ago led to incurable mercury poisoning, so too did dying one's skin green via a coloured form of crystal meth lead to permanently stained skin and social leprosy outside of a select group of fellow Shrek-faces. But if RPatz was doing it, I was obviously going to do it too, same as when he asked me to stop taking the Pill two days after meeting so we could have a baby together - despite my own personal reservations as to this rather premature turn of events.

After that it all got a bit convoluted, with my brother somehow also getting in on the action (he's not at all gay in real life, but the Pattinson pack's seductive charms apparently drew even him in), my step-brother getting engaged to one of the groupies and having a wedding cake in the shape of his face, and my mum quite vocally disapproving of any of the above at all...

But I don't care as I LOVE ROBERT PATTINSON, even if it does mean unwanted pregnancies and dying my face green!!!!!!!!!

Snippets

Alas, I don't remember all my weird and wonderful dreams in their entirety, but often just vague snippets of them, for example...

• My granddad (probably the most unlikely person in the world to ever do this) organising a Halloween party on my behalf for all my friends, family and colleagues, and everyone thinking I was really cool as result.
• At said party eating both a Praha Bakeshop croissant and a big lasagne, afterwards feeling duly guilt-stricken, before then realising to my utter joy and relief that it was a dream, so going on to attack the massive slabs of lemon cheesecake also on the table with conscience clear.
• Finding random clips from childhood on Youtube and sharing them on Facebook with Dad and Dan.
• Collecting a visiting Daniel and girlfriend from Prague airport, only to find my muppet of a brother had totally forgotten what hotel he was staying at here.
• Having someone bump into me from behind and doing a judo throw on them in self-defence, only to find out I'd winded a poor little 12 year old boy and made him cry (oh the guilt...).
• Visiting a haunted cinema with my Mum, which unleashed a virus '28 Days Later' style that first manifested itself with crippling depression, then made people evil and demented - to my horror and despair starting with my poor old Mum...
• Walking down a Facebook path with (non-demented) Mum, meeting old friends on the way and discussing what to have for dinner (cauliflower cheese was in the end decided upon).
• Going to Alton Towers with Dad and Dan and my Dad kicking off at a family abusing their kids (this actually did once nearly happen in real life at Disneyland, Florida...).
• Playing Jason Donovan in 'Joseph & the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat' and being thrown in a pit by the 11 brothers, where some weird insect like creatures invited me to eat them in order to stay alive.
• Forgetting (yet again!!) to do my final year at university, cracking under the stain, and climbing out of the window of my Halls of Residence in order to avoid doing my exams.
• Being a cattle rancher in the American Mid-West and having my herd of cows chase me into the farmhouse and try to ram their way into the bathroom, and having to shoot each of them in the head to save myself.
• Buying broccoli cup-a-soup at Albert (not sure why this one...).

That's all for now - more to come in the next week or two am sure... :-))

Yet Another Trip Down Memory Lane...

Yet another recurrent dream last night about my old house last night, in which I arrived home late at night, only to disturb some teenage burglar who ran out of the door as I opened it without actually taking anything or myself having the chance to see his face. Shaken up, I rung my Dad at his new wife’s place (where he has been living the last ten odd years since the house in question was sold up), but he didn't want to come round, so in the end I was relieved to have David come over and help me finally calm down and feel safe again instead.

Given that this was the house where many events of the infamous “Black Decade” in my life played out, and which I was ultimately happy to leave to embark on my own independent adult life, unencumbered by traumatizing familial drama, it’s long been a source of consternation for me that I should keep returning to the place in my dreams today – usually in a state of ambivalence or mild surprise, but always with a sense of persistent déjà vu... Looking up “old house dreams” on the internet I found the following:

To see your childhood home, your hometown, or a home that you previously lived in … reflects aspects of yourself that were prominent or developed during the time you lived in that home. You may experience some feelings or unfinished expression of emotions that are now being triggered by a waking situation.

To see an old house in your dream may symbolize your need to update your mode of thinking. This points to issues that probably are resurfacing in your current life, and need to be looked at, analyzed, and healed so you can move forward and not look back. If you find yourself repeating the same old tired mistakes, or dealing with the same old tired fears, chances are you will have this dream.

Well, that certainly all makes sense, but as I mentioned in this earlier post, expunging the past from one’s mind without spending hundreds or thousands on therapy is no easy feat, though admittedly I have often considered hypnotism as a quickie alternative route to putting the past to rest… Until then though, I guess I will just carry on using good old Great British emotional repression as a means to deal with my dysfunctional past – at least it's bloody free!!

Ok, THAT was weird...

Am feeling a little sheepish this morning, having just found out that I apparently attacked my visiting other half in a state of semi-sleep last night... Naturally the "attack" was fairly girly and pathetic, occuring when David woke me up by climbing over me on the way back from getting some apple juice. For reasons unknown, I started screaming and hitting feebly out, apple juice went flying, and a poor shocked David (who apparently I didn't even recognise) was left to calm me down and try to make me realise it was indeed him and not some random attacker who'd penetrated my abode with nefarious intent. Needless to say, I don't remember a single thing about the whole bizarre episode...

That said, perhaps I was just justifiably annoyed he'd interrupted my quite frankly sublime dream about Robert Pattinson (who I love with a passion as burning as it is unacknowledged / unrequited). Basically I dreamt I was in 'Twilight' as Bella, and we'd found a way to turn him back from vampire to human 'Daybreakers' style by having him stab himself in the heart with a crystal blade and drinking his own spilt blood at the same time. Needless to say, at first I was absolutely overjoyed to finally be able to consummate our as yet chaste relationship (as a vampire he feared in the heat of the moment he'd lose control and accidentally bite / crush me to death), marry him and have his beautiful beautiful babies, but unfortunately as it turned out, as a human he didn't like me as much, as the scent of my blood no longer held such addictive hold over him, while from my point of view he wasn't as good-looking in his newly acquired non-vampiric state either (watching 'Remember Me' with fellow vamp-addict Kate has proven this hypothesis to be completely utterly false in real life, however.).

So all in all, sorry David for my nocturnal violence / infidelty - I do still love you really, promise!! ;-))

Confused

What a funny old day we had yesterday. Disaster recovery exercises, volcanic ash, historic televised election debates, and David (boyfriend not Cameron) flying over from UK to Prague (by the absolute skin of his teeth!) to visit me too... :-))

No surprise then that this professional, political and logistical chaos was reflected in my personal dream world last night, as I dreamt I put multiple key aspects of my own life to the public vote via the internet. Key issues at stake in this case included:

• Should I do a Masters?
• If so, in what subject (Law, HR, MBA)?
• UK or Prague in the long run?

Odd really, considering my current plans are very definitely to stay in my current job as long as possible (which I like and consider myself bloody lucky to have in the midst of a global economic recession), but haven't ruled out a Masters one day - just haven't a clue what in, and these days don't think I could ever muster up any of the old intellectual discipline that got me through Cambridge first time round...

Anyway going back to the present, last night I also dreamt that both David and I overslept till 5.30pm, thereby missing out on a planned fun-filled day of Praha Bakeshop / cinema / Zanzibar / Artisan etc and being quite disproportionately distraught about the fact, especially as due to the onset of volcanic ash he had to fly home on the Sunday rather than the Tuesday after all.

Luckily for me, in real life he is well and truly grounded here with me for the foreseeable future - so keep on erupting Mr Volcano, for the time being I really don't mind... ;-)))

Back to Skool...

Oh the joy of going to sleep these days – I never know what new material for this blog I am subconsciously going to come up with by the next morning… :-))))))

Last night, for example, I dreamt that my parents packed me off to Eton to repeat the education I so badly fucked up first time round. It might sound odd that someone whose lowest ever exam grade was an A (only though sheer hard slog I should add, not natural intelligence!!), who was appointed Scholar of the College at King’s (thereby giving me the right to have a duel on King’s College Bridge and graze my horse on university land), who even somehow managed to pull off a First at Cambridge (albeit a sympathy one of just 0.65% above the percentile) would doubt the value of their academic career, but the truth is that six odd years on since graduation and I am still plagued by my naïve folly as a starry-eyed teenager in having chosen to study the humanities rather than something more directly career-orientated instead. While on paper the grades might look impressive, in practice eight years of study between GCSE and graduation have pretty much left me with not much more than an intricate (if, professionally speaking, fairly redundant) knowledge of the European dictators, a smattering of German, and even dodgier French – it’s not like I know anything of any subjects even remotely practical like, oh I don’t know, say Law, Economics, IT, Engineering, Design, Maths, Medicine etc etc. Admittedly this educational deficiency hasn’t prevented me from rising (marginally) up the corporate ranks at home and abroad since graduation, though in truth this is largely down to my innate (oh ok then, utterly anal retentive) organizational abilities, articulacy, and a healthy dose of common sense as much as anything – am still waiting for someone to point out that I don’t actually really know anything…

Anyway, the irony of the dream in this case is that in real life I did actually attend Eton for a time, at a summer school aimed to groom promising students for Oxbridge applications / interviews. I like to think that I got to sleep in Prince William’s (then still gorgeous and also in attendance during term time) own room, but in reality I probably just got to bed down on some ancient mattress imbued with centuries’ worth of schoolboy wank / squishy remnants of public school bum-rape. Unlike in real life though, this time in the dream I was no longer dazzled by all the gilded spires, ancient archways and hallowed halls characteristic of such “pomp and circumstance” elite historical institutions, but basically just said “fuck this” and went off to do a Masters in something actually useful in a (perhaps less aesthetically pleasing but infinitely more beneficial in the long-run) vocational establishment instead.

On the opposite end of the social / geographical spectrum, the same night I also dreamt that I was holed up in some bog-standard northern comprehensive with Sophie from ‘Coronation Street’, under siege by an enraged Ryan, who was trying to burn down the school in revenge for Sophie having caused the break-up between him and that other blonde non-lesbian one. A dream that lends itself less to obvious interpretation perhaps, but then again given the predominance of moronic arsonist drones roaming round Oop North, maybe this was just a reflection of modern-day Broken British reality – that or a sign of my own personal overexposure to the soaps / the online Daily Mail I guess… :-))))))

Another Baby Dream…

Ok, now I am officially disturbed.

Three baby dreams in as many weeks is definitely enough to have me perturbed to say the least, especially considering my real-life deep-seated antipathy towards all snot-nosed little brats under the age of 21 (oh alright then, 25).

And yet, last night I dreamt I was on the tram in Prague, and a mother got out leaving her baby in a pram on board. At a bit of a loss as to what to do, I took the kid (a baby girl about 1 year old) home and gave her some Milka chocolate while I considered how to best return her to the bosom of her (admittedly somewhat negligent to leave her on a tram in the first place) family. Unfortunately I didn’t know any of the telephone numbers for the local Czech police / Public Transport / Lost Property Offices etc, so in the end decided to wait until I saw some appeals on Czech news (which in real life I would never watch, let alone understand) for the return of the missing infant and call in then, in the meantime looking after the kid myself. In the event the baby (who, for want of a better name, I temporarily christened “Heather”) turned out of be a true bundle of cuddly, well-behaved loveliness, who never cried, smiled and laughed at all my attempts to entertain her, mercifully never took a shit, and – despite her tender years – even spoke in bursts of English every now and then too. All it took was 48 odd hours in my care for me to become well and truly attached, only then to randomly bump into her (conveniently also English-speaking) mum outside my flat while taking the baby out for a stroll. Of course it was only the right thing to do to hand the baby (whose real name, I found out, was – unsurprisingly – little Klarko) back to her rightful owner, but to my own surprise actually found myself terribly sad to do so, and that my life suddenly felt empty and meaningless in a way I hadn’t even been aware of before…

Before going straight secretly off the Pill in a reckless bid at real-life motherhood, however, I decided to do a bit of internet research on the subject first to see if I could come up with any alternative explanations for my sudden and uncharacteristic burst of maternity-based dreams. Below follows a selection of online interpretations of baby-related dreams:

Dreaming of babies can mean you could benefit from paying more attention to your own needs, or are taking on too much responsibility. Also it could show the vulnerable part of yourself that has to be protected, or perhaps you are inwardly nurturing some new ideas or feelings.

Dreaming of a baby in your dream means innocence, warmth and new beginnings. Alternatively, it represents your unfulfilled goals and a sense of lacking in your life, or is indicative of a vulnerable part of yourself that is deprived of attention and needs nurturing. Dreams about babies may also symbolize your helplessness and your fears of letting others become aware of your own vulnerabilities.

Baby Dreams = A new event, happening, beginning for the subject of the dream. Wish fulfillment. Fills one's sense of lacking or incompleteness.

My own personal interpretation is that the babies in each of my recent dreams represent a feeling of completeness, which corresponds to a persistent nagging feeling in my waking life that something is missing at the moment in my life – definitely not a baby (in real life I am no more broody than I was before), but more a broader sense of direction, permanence and security, which are all unsurprisingly hard to foster when one is living a single life abroad (the alienation and disorientation of which is a notable feature of the dream as well).

Don’t get me wrong - I absolutely love my Prague life and don’t regret a thing in moving out here, but four years on and in all honesty it’s not all living the expat dream these days either, especially not when you have a boyfriend inconveniently located in another country, family all a thousand odd miles away, and friends who seem to arrive then promptly leave again with depressing regularity... I don’t want a baby and all going to plan hopefully never will, but it would be nice to feel that someone out here was truly on my side and that I didn’t always have to stand so firmly on my own two feet in a foreign land – basically to feel that sense of “completeness” which at the moment I only ever get for an hour or two’s Skype chat at the end of the day, and the odd weekend now and then when the other half comes out to visit.

So in short, baby = David….????????????????????????????

Dreaming within a Dream

Last night I dreamt I was back in World War 2 on a military submarine, not as a naval officer, but as a teenage member of the wives and children quota also on board (not sure about the military Health & Safety logic of that one...). Needless to say, being a teenager stuck in an enclosed space, I soon started getting up to mischief with the other kids on board, with five of us recklessly heading out AWOL on the submarine dingies to live it up sailing the seven seas, fighting off great white sharks with our dingy oars, somehow managing to even squeeze in a trip to George at Asda, and at the same time inadvertently straying into enemy German territory and having to be retrieved at great risk to our host submarine. On being returned to our sub, we were all naturally prepared to get our wrists slapped, only to find out from my very pissed-off mum that (even as juvenile, non-members of the armed forces) we were due to go before a military tribunal the next day, with execution a probable consequence of our treasonable actions in accidentally entering enemy waters – a punishment which didn’t quite fit the crime I thought... Naturally I was shocked and panic-stricken, but still somehow drew strange comfort and reassurance from the fact that lasagne was on the submarine menu for that evening, so at the very least I would have a decent last meal.

As it happened, the next day my real-life American ex-marine big boss was overseeing the tribunal, and was all in favour of execution by firing squad for all of us, but was overruled my the other military judges on the grounds that we were all still minors and hadn’t acted with deliberate treasonable intent. Instead, we were all sentenced to community service for the remainder of the war, with myself being packed off back to dry land to serve in a private old people’s home. In fact this turned out to be an absolute cushy little number, as I got plush free accommodation (with TV in room) and three meals a day plus regular pay to basically just sit around and watch ‘Countdown’ with the elderly residents, and occasionally help one of them to the loo etc. Soon after though the war ended when we nuked Germany, and I woke up – or so I thought – at my lovely Auntie Anne’s house in the idyllic English countryside, which I had apparently been visiting at the time of the whole submarine debacle dream...

I started writing down my dream as per usual before I forgot it, but kept losing my notes and getting distracted by my mum going on about making a family day trip to Blackpool the next day. Given that Blackpool is a nasty, has-been, chav-infested shithole with a sewer for a sea, I naturally wasn’t particularly enamoured by this idea and wanted to stay with my wonderful Auntie Anne instead, but apparently wasn’t permitted to bow out. Luckily though, the next day I overslept till 5pm (much to my own amazement), waking to find that in the end only my mum and her new husband Rolf Harris had bothered with Blackpool after all, and all my relatives on my mum’s side, my brother and his fiancé, and even a few of my old mates (specifically Charlie, Heather and Hayley) were all assembling at my Auntie Anne’s (beloved matriarch of the family) house for a traditional family gathering instead, and my Auntie Anne was making one of her famous Sunday roasts with all the trimmings – oh joy!!!!!!

And then I woke up for real, completely disorientated as to where I was and what time of day it was, and rather disappointed that I had missed out the roast after all...

No Rest for the Wicked...

Well, with one shift ending 10pm yesterday, and the next starting at 7am today, it’s hardly surprising that my scant sleeping hours in between should end up being populated by mainly work related dreams…

For some reason, however, in this case work intersected with school, with my boss as my old A-level history teacher, my colleagues as fellow classmates, and myself still living at my old house (that old chestnut again…) with my highly disorganised dad and brother, whose innate inability to get up and out on time in the mornings usually resulting in us getting dropped off late in the mornings and me getting unfairly bollocked for it. Not a lot happened beyond that really, apart from my boss pushing me to also become a history teacher, ordering a latte from downstairs which annoyingly turned out to have a load of cake / biscuity mush in the bottom, and finding out that Gareth from ‘The Office’ now headed up our Finance Department and for reasons unexplained wanted to get me fired / expelled.

Dream took a turn for the bizarre when I suddenly found a load of these little motherfuckers slithering round my socks and screamed blue bloody murder until my brother “The Doctor” got them out again.

And that’s about it really.

A Night in the Life of a Chronic Dreamer…

Well, if I ever thought blogging about my dreams would automatically lead to a natural diminishment in ongoing material, I was definitely worrying needlessly if last night is anything to go by… In the space of just 11 short hours, somehow my manic subconscious managed to come up with all of the below – and those are just the ones I actively remember…

Dreaming that John Alford of 1990s Grange Hill / London’s Burning fame took part in a reality TV show to land him a “real” job now that his acting career has long since dived. I actually ended up getting annoyed that (presumably whoring themselves out to reality TV) Sainsburies actually fast-tracked him as “management material”, when in fact he is really just a has-been child actor who fucked up his career by dealing coke to a journalist and was too dim to get any proper qualifications via his elite Grange Hill private tuition (I know this because in a fit of nostalgia I recently watched this on Youtube, and he definitely wasn’t the sharpest knife in the box even back then – ah bless little Zammo though).

Dreaming that a red pool of dark blood starting seeping through the bathroom wall of the house I was renting on holiday in Africa with my brother, while outside new waves of blood were streaming by so frequently that we actually had to jump between them to stop getting our feet all bloodied. We later found out that the rivers of blood resulted from massacres between two warring African tribes (the Bwana and the Tutsis), who were mutually macheting each other to death down river. Daniel and I as the only mzungus on the ground were dispatched to reestablish order, which involved failed attempts at inter-tribal mitigation and flying on mattresses dispatching food parcels over the newly thrown up refugee camps on either side. Eventually we were flown out by the British government, both traumatized by the scenes of human barbarity and sheer depravity we had witnessed and utterly despairing about the current state of much of sub-Saharan Africa. Imperialistic you say? 1994 Rwandan genocide demonstrates otherwise, me thinks.

Dreaming that I watched an episode of eighties classic cartoon, My Little Pony, in which one little pony is happily living by herself in a little house on the moon, with only couple of mute punctuation marks with legs (which, apparently, also reside on the moon) for company, but is persuaded to go back down and live in My Little Pony land by some other interfering little ponies who don’t think it’s healthy to live such an isolated existence. Put up in a room in the mansion of one of the other do-gooder pony’s benevolent fathers (do the dads get called My Big Stallions I wonder…??), despite her best efforts the moon little pony just can’t seem to integrate into normal equine society – she just isn’t able to socialize normally or perform simple day-to-day transactions like going shopping or ordering food, gets freaked out by scary public transport systems and busy roads, and inadvertently frustrates the very busy-body ponies who brought her down there in the first place by failing to conform to their condescending expectations of how an individual should behave and what constitutes an appropriate lifestyle choice. In the end it’s agreed that she should go back to her solitary life on the moon, only to find that her lunar-located house has been re-leased in her absence, and she has to agree to a monthly rent hike in order to move back in.

And some quickie recollections:

Driving a car remotely via internet, but having the internet crash on me, in turn causing a (luckily comparatively minor) car crash.
Getting an unexpected parcel delivered full of lots of original Garfield comics and toy jelly monsters, and being pretty jolly pleased about it.
Having my little flat being bombasted by tennis ball sized hailstones.
Hearing my doorbell ring and finding a big scary 6 foot Czech Frankenstein type lady at the door, and screaming.

No wonder I always find it so bloody difficult to get up in the morning with eventful nights like these!!!

Spooky Shit...

Did you know I’m a dream psychic? Unfortunately though only ever on a 24 hour basis, and only ever predicting very trivial events, rather than anything useful like knowing the lottery numbers in advance or preventing 9/11. For example:

At university I dreamt I was appointed Travel Editor of our student newspaper, and the next day I was.
A couple of months back I dreamt I bumped into mentally disturbed former colleague on Prague public transportation, and the next day I did - twice.
And most notably of all, on 22nd March 2010, I woke up and asked my other half if we’d seen on the news the previous evening that Jade Goody had died. He said no, but when we checked the news later that same morning – the poor dappy cow had only gone and carked it.

So if I dream you suddenly happen to snuff it one of these days, don’t worry – I promise not to tell you about it until at least 24 hours have passed… ;-)))

The Scariest Dream of All

WARNING: David do not read!!!!!!!!!!!!! Or if you do, please don’t take it too seriously! ;-))

Any of you blog followers (are there actually any???) who know me well will know that I am completely and utterly cynical towards the matrimonial state and truly despise all children, who I don’t even consider worthy of the status as “human being” until at least the age of 21.

So can someone please tell me the hell why I’ve recently been dreaming repeatedly of weddings (and yes, by that I do mean my own) and mothering children who I actually… do rather quite like – WTF?????? I suppose the wedding ones can be at least partially explained by my recent attendance of my step-brother’s big day, but the baby ones on the other hand are not only inexplicable, but certainly a most unwelcome intrusion into my waking hours!! That said, I did have one dream recently where rather than rearing human babies, I actually found my calling in opening a puppy and kitten farm instead, where I spent my working days just playing with cute baby Labradors and Persian Blues – far more up my street than changing shitty nappies and cleaning up sick, that’s for sure!!

Time to start watching some of good old Miss Jo “It’s Not Ass-ep-tikle” Frost, ‘Brat Camp’ and re-reading my favourite devil child literature ‘We Need to Talk About Kevin’ (highly recommended, btw) to remind myself on what am definitely not missing by actively choosing not to reproduce!!

Nightmares...

Following on from my last upbeat entry, sadly Sarah’s fantastical dream world is not all fun-filled ‘Come Dine with Me’ episodes and getting knocked up by 50 Cent. An overactive psyche is like a bad drug-induced trip – all’s fine while you’re getting high, finding hidden meanings within your exhaled smoke formations, and giggling, but when the subconscious turns nasty on you, that’s then you suddenly find yourself trapped in a hideous, psychedelic, traumatising, inexorable, nightmarish experience from which you physically can’t escape. Which probably explains why the one time I smoked any really strong weed in Cambodia, I ended up hiding under my duvet, rocking back and forth in a state of paranoid frenzy that some sleaze who’d been hitting on me earlier in the evening was going to come back and rape, murder and possibly dismember me in my bed that night. From now on am sticking with excessive amounts of red wine to alter my consciousness, thank you very much.

For example, a few weeks back I had an absolutely horrific dream, which basically started out with me, my Dad, my brother, and for reasons inexplicable also my colleague Max, all on some kind of outdoor retreat in the forest. Presumably to collect wood for a campfire or something, Max was cutting branches off trees with a chainsaw, but accidentally turned around too quickly one way and sliced my brother in the abdomen, then in jumping back from my brother also managed to get my Dad in the neck. Luckily my Dad’s head stayed on if he held it in place, but my brother (who in real life is actually a doctor) was left with a great gaping gap in his side pouring blood and plopping out the odd vital internal organ or two…

We vainly tried to stem the blood as we waited for the ambulance to arrive, which seeing as we were in the middle of the forest, took an absolute eternity, and then when it did turn up could only fit me and my brother, leaving my Dad (still grievously injured with half his head hanging off) waiting in anguish for the next one. And then on top of that, after driving us down from the forest and into town, the bastards then forcibly dropped us off at some dive of a greasy-spoon, saying they had reached the limits of their designated healthcare district, and that another ambulance would be along shortly to take us the rest of the way to hospital. In the meantime, my poor brother had turned pale, unconscious, and with bits of himself falling out all over the place, till eventually all that remained of him is one meagre slice of tomato and the limp fabric of his face, which having slipped off his skull now resembled some cheap rubber Halloween mask. When eventually the second ambulance turned up, thanks to good old NHS cutbacks, it turned out to be a kebab van filling in out-of-hours, with a stretcher in the back crammed in next to the old dead man’s leg...

All credit to the British healthcare system though, once at the hospital, they did stitch my brother back up again from his paltry tomato-based remains, and a day or two later he was back to true Daniel form, gorging on cheese sandwiches, despite my concerned warnings that he would split his stitches that way… So a happy ending all round one might think, except that a day or two later we (my brother, his fiancé and I) were escorted by ambulance car over to the hospital where my Dad was now being treated for his chainsaw-related neck injuries. Unfortunately, for some reason, instead of keeping their eyes on the road, the two irate ambulance drivers kept turning round to hurl abuse and flip the bird to the three of us sitting in the back, despite our desperate pleas for them to both calm down and turn their attention back to the road... Inevitably, full head-on collision with another vehicle soon ensued, with lucky me getting to watch the whole thing in graphic slow motion from some disembodied viewpoint in front of our car… Eyes bulged, faces hit windscreen, throats were cut by shattering glass, bodies were propelled violently forwards, my brother’s stitches all burst from the impact, and all sorts of other gruesome consequences all slowly and surely played out before my very eyes… and then I mercifully woke up, unsurprisingly perhaps in a state of sheer and absolute terror.

Moral of the story – Max, next time be more careful with the damn chainsaw!!!

Dream 'Come Dine with Me'

Another true classic last night... :-)))

To my great joy, I dreamt I was on episode one of interfaith / sexuality ‘Come Dine with Me’ with the same Muslim women as on this (but fatter) as the first host, along with a male gay couple, a young black guy, the obligatory gobby Northern Lass, and myself presumably meant to represent the militant atheist (aka voice of reason) of the group. Host cooked up a fantastic curry (though with weird cheese cracker vol-au-vent things on the side and no bloody alcohol) and all things considered things went comparatively well for the first show, with me politely refraining from expressing my Sarkozy-leaning views on the burkha, and the gay couple reining in their campness and tippy-toeing around the awkward subject of sexuality so as not to cause “offense” to the religious among the group. Unfortunately the black guy stormed off mid-show when in a socio-demographical debate on the subject of inner-city knife crime (admittedly rather polemic dinner party discussion material, especially for a first meeting) I used the what I know to be the politically correct term “black” in reference to the ratio of black-to-white teenagers stabbed in the last few years.

Am not quite sure if the above shows me in a politically correct or incorrect, but just in case I failed to sufficiently “embrace diversity”, I’d just like to balance it out with a quote by the late great Douglas Adams on the subject:

Religion has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever. That's an idea we're so familiar with, whether we subscribe to it or not, that it's kind of odd to think what it actually means, because really what it means is 'Here is an idea or a notion that you're not allowed to say anything bad about; you're just not. Why not? Because you're not! If somebody votes for a party that you don't agree with, you're free to argue about it as much as you like; everybody will have an argument but nobody feels aggrieved by it. If somebody thinks taxes should go up or down you are free to have an argument about it, but on the other hand if somebody says 'I mustn't move a light switch on a Saturday', you say, “Fine, I respect that”.

Oh what a complicated world we all live in these days, but in these controversial, overly sensitive times where one can't even bloody sneeze for being termed racist, one's thing for sure - can’t wait to dream episode 2!!!

Some Recent Classics... :-))

A random selection of recent memorable dreams:

• Being kidnapped by a millionaire Arab sheik who was collecting beautiful wives from all over the world and having to live in luxury in a corner of his palace, dress up in gorgeous Bollywood style attire, and have fun socialising with all his other kidnapped wives at communal meals each day. No wonder I was a bit gutted when the guy later decided all these women in his house were just too much hassle, and had a competition for the most beautiful one he’d then go on to keep (Jennifer Aniston won).
• Meeting Dizzee Rascal for dinner via expats.cz and getting invited to stand at the front of his gig later that evening, pulling, and then the next day running into my colleague Misa (a fellow fan) who was all like OMFG Sarah how did you manage to hook up with Dizzee, and I was like, yeah, check me, scored with the Rascal... :-)) (Neither of us speak like airhead, celeb-obsessed teenagers in real life, btw.)
• Unexpectedly going out for dinner and cocktails with the Sex in the City girls, but feeling horribly embarrassed as hadn't known to get all dressed up accordingly...
• Johnny Vaughan asking me to join the Breakfast Show to replace Lisa Snowdon. Apart from the early starts, that surely must be one of the best jobs in the world…
• Finding myself a pre-fame 50 Cent's baby mama and going on the run with him to Brno...
• Having to write an English Lit (which I never studied) university exam on supposed Czech classic 'The Good Soldier Svejk' (which I never read), but getting disqualified for writing my conclusion on toilet paper and had to beg the course tutor to turn a blind eye...
• Having to read a book reminiscent of both 'Catcher in the Rye' and Max Frisch's 'Andorra', and write an essay on it for my boss. Unfortunately the book only exists in my head and was something to do with alienation and discrimination experienced by foreigners within the Czech Republic.
• Finding that the database I manage at work was a white kite, which needed testing by flying from the top of a high hill, and one day experienced functionality so uncharacteristically high that the force nearly pulled me from my feet... In real life you’d have trouble getting the damn thing to stay in the air…
• Discovering “Princess Diaries” style that I had actually been fathered by the King of the Fairies and was going to get to rule over the alternate universe of the fairy folk and get wings. Quite miffed when woke up that wasn’t the case.
• The Sorting Hat putting me in Slytherin, and somehow not being in the least bit surprised.
• Serving as Barack Obama’s designated mistress for the EMEA region (well, Michelle can’t travel everywhere with him, can she… ;-)) ). Haven’t been able to look at him in the same light since...

Oh if only real life was so interesting...

Recurrent Dreams....

While my overactive subconscious is in the habit of frequently throwing out some truly epic gems of originality (more of these to come in future entries :-)) ), at the same time it often also regurgitates the old, mainly anxiety based, classics with depressing regularity… Of these, the most common recurrent dreams are:

• Tsunamis – possibly related to narrowly missing the 2006 one when I was backpacking across South-East Asia in my early twenties. All I know is each time I have this dream, it is always with a sense of dreary resignation that after all my previous dreams about this happening, this time a tsunami is finally coming in reality and there is no sense in running from it, as it will soon engulf us all anyway…
• Past Nemeses – involving either one girl at school who was always a snidey bitch to me, who I always pleasingly seek out and punch in the face (hah!!), or former evil / sociopathic colleague who seeks to destroy me with her characteristic piercing death stare…
• School – lately I’ve been dreaming of high school reunions, at which I surprise everyone by the fact that I am now a sophisticated, confident, urbane woman (ahem) with enviable life in one of Europe’s most beautiful capitals, as opposed to the swotty, self-righteous, calorie-counting, woefully attired geek I was back then, and all the popular girls of the Class of 2000 now want to be my friend…
• My Old House – a place I was ultimately glad to leave given all the regrettable family crap that went on within those walls, but which nevertheless keeps creeping back unbidden into my dreams… Don’t need a psychoanalyst to tell me I have “issues” from the past here I should probably deal with, but hey, good old British emotional repression has served me pretty well up till now, and either way definitely works out cheaper than years of introspective self-indulgence in therapy at any rate!
• Little Brother – at the moment am dreaming frequently of having to somehow protect my cherubic little brother as a child from some unknown danger. Given that he is a 6ft 3in, karate brown-belt, fully-fledged anaesthetist with house / fiancé these days, am not sure where this one is coming from...
• Mum – these are the absolute worst. Either I dream her cancer of ten odd years ago has returned, or she is ill in some other form and I can’t do anything to help or prevent it… Too awful a prospect to even want to think / write about.
• Exams – usually in the form of suddenly remembering that I forgot to go back and do my final year at university after my Year Abroad, and realising with horror that I no longer remember anything about Kafka or Dostoevsky, forgot all my Russian, and can’t remember where I put all my university study notes…
• Irrevocable Mistakes – i.e. lapsing back into smoking, accidentally cheating on my other half, being late, getting bollocked at work, missing flights, or putting something accidently on Facebook or sending in an email that really shouldn’t have done etc – either way always a dream I am insanely relieved to wake up from…
• Aeroplanes Crashing – not one I’ve had in a while, but in the run-up to my move to Prague I used to dream I saw an aeroplane crashing from our UK office on the third floor. As the date of my move moved ever closer, so too would the plane crash ever nearer to our building, until the week before I actually flew out, the crash site was so near that the explosion blew out the windows and we all had to be evacuated…
• Moving – recently I keep dreaming that I’ve found a fantastic new flat in Prague that I get all excited about and move into, only to slowly realise that my old one was much better / cheaper / closer to work and I’ve forgotten to find someone to take over the lease and I’m now paying rent for two flats simultaneously…
• Hamsters – this one is a fairly new addition to the recurrent crop, and invariably involves lots of adorably cute little baby hamsters running all about the place and me desperately trying to scoop them up and put them in a cage before they get squished underfoot, but they all keep on climbing out again. According to the Dream Dictionary site, hamsters are a sign of undeveloped emotions, which I of course take great offense to – my emotions are perfectly well developed, stupid judgemental website!
• The Devil – for a confirmed atheist, I do seem to have an uncanny fear of the devil (or at least some overwhelming force of inexplicable evil), and sometimes have those nightmares where you think you are awake in your bed and some malevolent force is preventing you from moving / breathing etc.
• Fat – dreaming I have reverted to my previous teenage incarnation of chubby Sarah, and have to lose it all over again…
• Teeth – not the normal teeth dropping out, but having my extremely expensive / excruciatingly painful to install bridge work come loose, leaving me as a peg-toothed, gappy-gob on one side of my mouth…
• Vomitting – apart from spiders, my other extreme real-life phobia or worse (don’t read if your squeamish) – coughing up shit…

Which pretty much exhausts the list of recurrent dreams – looking back clearly all reflections of my deeply angst-ridden, vengeance-seeking, history-beholden psyche… Hmmm, perhaps that therapy might just be called for after all!! ;-))))))))

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!

Meet Me and my Subconscious...

Hello. My name is Sarah and I have a warped subconscious.

Looking back I think I have always been a vivid dreamer, and can even remember dreams going back to my very early childhood; however, in the last year or two, for reasons unfathomable, my nocturnal life has gone into very real overdrive...

For this reason I've decided to now document my dreams in the hope of drawing at least some logical sense of what until now has been a series of disjointed, bizarre, frightening, recurrent, and occasionally epic / lucid subconscious encounters. Hopefully some more psycho-analytical types out there will be able to apply some sort of meaningful interpretation as to the weird and wonderful night-time contents of my head...

Maybe it's down to an otherwise over-active imagination, maybe (as I suspect) a combination of undealt with issues from the past and a series of daunting situations facing me in the present, or on the other hand maybe it's just a matter of too much cheese and wine before bedtime... :-)))) And now THAT is something I am just never giving up - dire nocturnal consequences or not!!! :-))))