Coming Soon to a Movie Theatre Near You...

Well, if I'd been worried that my last few nights had been uncharacteristically dream free (or at least forgotten), then last night has definitely put paid to any doubts in that respect, as my subconscious came up with a whole host of weird and wonderful episodes over the course of an epic 12 hour sleep...

Of these, the most in-depth dream was about a film called 'The Black Dot', which played out coherently in my mind with all the typical plot twists and turns of a real-life Hollywood movie. To give a brief synopsis, the film was set in an aspiring black American household (not quite living in the projects, but not too far off), in which a struggling single mother was raising two girls age 5 and 15 whilst studying for a Masters and PhD in Neuroscience at the same time. The father (in flashbacks revealed to have been a hard-working family man working long hours as a coach driver to provide for his wife and children) had died of leukemia some years before, and in her grief the mother had shorn both her and her children's heads as an expression of life-long solidarity with their poor dead cancer-stricken father. However, as the film went on, via various flashbacks, leaps in perspective, and narrative juxtaposition, this initial wholesome appearance was shown to be more and more an invented self-delusion of the mother herself to avoid having to confront the far more seedy reality that had previously constituted her family life... Bit by bit it was revealed that while her husband had indeed been a coach driver, this had been only as a front to hide his main role as drug-dealing kingpin, and that rather than having been a devoted family man, he had actually been planning to shoot through on them to evade the law men who'd increasingly been on his trail... Somehow the mother intercepted his attempt to flee, however, her intervention leading to the husband shooting a policeman and trying to drive off with the cops in hot pursuit, with the wife clinging desperately to the side of the vehicle to keep him from leaving them. Within seconds she inevitably lost her grip, however, hitting the tarmac with such force that it caused a sudden near-death experience, propelling her at high speed down the stereotypical tunnel of light, before everything suddenly folded in on itself just like a television turning itself off - ending in the temporary suspension of that little black dot in the middle. In a dramatic flashback of twists and turns, at the last minute of the film everything hitherto - from the shaving of heads to the obsessive study of neuroscience - was seen as a result of the mother's delusional attempt to block out reality and instead focus on her elusive search for the one thing that she felt would answer all her questions - the rediscovery and embrace of that "dying of the light" little black dot. Hmmm think I have the making of a potential blockbuster on my hands here - Spielberg and co, am open to negotiations!!! :-))

Apart from pulling an entire end-to-end psychological thriller seemingly out of my arse, other shorter, less coherent (and sadly also considerable less dramatic) dreams of last night include:

• Going to a supermarket in my old home town, filling my shopping basket with various boxes of chocolate, bumping into two old school friends at the checkout, and then - later regretting my uncharacteristically greedy purchases - offloading a bunch of Smarties on to my work team, who collectively will typically devour any type of confectionary put in front of them with the speed of a hoard of hungry locusts descending upon a cornfield.
• My boss (in between munching handfuls of Smarties) giving me a project to see how dream management could impact the working of the team, but after several nights' attempts concluding that dreams only ever present options and not solutions (though I did experience one rare moment of dream lucidity whilst liaising with the Customer Service team in Brno).
• Having a colleague and an old friend as guests in my old UK house and offering them Ricicles and Crunchy Nut Cornflakes for breakfast, but when opening the fridge having all the ice from the overhead freezer rain out on my head.
• Inviting my parents as my guests to a formal banquet, only to find to my embarrassment I was only supposed to be there in the first place as wait staff, and only got to shovel down bites of all the posh nosh in between courses.
• Attempting to strangle one particular girl who called me names in primary school, but who I couldn't bring myself to insult back at the time because she had been off school for months with social anxiety or something and I might inadvertently effect a relapse... manipulative little bitch.
• David and I getting ourselves arrested in Holland for drug taking (apart from alcohol not a very likely holiday pasttime for either of us) and other various unmentionable misdemeanours.

Hopefully will carry on this renewed burst of productivity (not to mention land a multi-million dollar movie deal!!) in the next few days and nights to come!