To sleep, fat chance to dream. Wilbur – was it Wilbur? – Shakespeare’s famous quote tells its own story: you’ll be lucky if you go to sleep and have a dream.
Actually, that’s not quite correct. We have dreams all the time, apparently. It’s just that we don’t remember them. Generally speaking, I only remember those dreams that occur when I have gone back to sleep after waking rather late into my eight hours.
I had one such dream recently and, at the time of going to press, it still discomfits me. The setting was a house which was totally different from my old house but which, in the irritating way of dreams, was supposed to represent my old house – even though it wasn’t!
The garden was totally different too, but was supposed to be the same garden. I do wish dreams wouldn’t do that. But that’s what they do. Nothing in them is quite right.
In the dream, I gained entry to the house, and was rooting about the place, ostensibly looking for something that I’d left behind. Standing in the kitchen, I decided I’d better be gone in case I was caught on the premises.
And then … I was caught on the premises – by a constable. At first, he reacted well, so to say, seeing that I did not look like a hardened criminal, that I was harmless and possibly a bit simple.
I started to burble an explanation – about having come to collect something – but it was clear that I ought not to have been there. I started to make up stuff about just passing by and seeing the door ajar.
I know myself that I’m quite a plausible character – should have gone into politics really – and was hopeful of getting away with it, but the serious wrongness of the situation was clearly playing on the officer’s mind.
He said of my story: “It sounds over-complicated.” That is to say, it was implausible. It dawned on me that this was the sort of incident that could not simply be overlooked or explained away, and that I could be charged with breaking and entering.
The constable’s face changed. Clearly, he’d concluded I wasn’t a decent citizen at all. He started to reach for his handcuffs.
It was at that point that I woke up. Was there any deep meaning to the dream? I doubt it. The vast majority of my dreams are prosaic in the extreme. When awake, I go to a department store cafe and have a pot of peppermint tea. Asleep, I dream of going to a department store cafe and having a pot of peppermint tea.
The geography and furnishings will all be askew, but it’s essentially the same scenario. Cats and dogs dream, which presumably means they see images in their tiny minds, generally of themselves heroically chasing rabbits or mice. Bo-ring!
So I don’t believe there’s much meaning to my dream. At a push, you could say it represented how much I miss having a home to call my own, but that’ll soon be sorted and I’m looking forward to my new place.
My scientific analysis of the phenomenon, outlined with rigorous logic above, is that dreams are daft. Or as Walter Shakespeare might have put it: “We are but dafties that dreams are made on.”
