Dreams

I’m not particularly into dream analysis, let me say at this juncture - and I think that far too much is read into the nuances of dreams.

In any case, I know the ones I must take some notice of; it is those that have a strong audio input that are important. Sometimes there is no visual part to the dream at all; I hear speech in blackness and need to listen up, as I’ve had several very accurate pieces of information that way. At other times it will be a spoken message from a stranger in a more “average” dream, but the person giving the message will always touch me.

I had one of these last night. A nondescript man shook my hand and told me not to worry about not being here in twenty years’ time as I would live to be 93. That would be nice, as long as I can stay in reasonable health as I want to get as much out of this life as I can.

That was all though; the dream was just a fragment, but the message remains.

In complete contrast, I had an utterly mad and cheese-induced dream a couple of nights ago.

In this dream, I was driving a car through a very concrete city; underpasses, subways, metal railings. It was all very grey, but daylight. Then I found myself in an urban area with a number of very brightly-lit shops; I think a couple of them might have been takeaway shops as they had neon signs in the windows. I parked the car and got out of it.

Another shop stood on the corner of a street; an older building, the doorway was painted blue and there were three steps up to the doorway. It was a sweet shop and just inside the door on the left were boxes of the sort of sweets that kids buy for 1p-2p each with their pocket money.

Except they weren’t the usual type of sweet. A number of these boxes contained candy mushrooms, all sorted into individual colours, lurid fluorescent shades like lime green and purple; they were almost iridescent and pretty unappetising.

I wandered on further into the shop and found that at the end of it there was one of those amusement arcades full of laser games rather than fruit machines. Teenagers were playing with the machines, but the most memorable thing about this arcade was that it was lit by beautiful ultra-violet lights. The kids in the arcade were oblivious of me, so I walked back out into the rest of the shop, which was full of the standard sort of shelving seen in many shops these days.

Reaching up on to a top shelf, I found some bags of what I thought were fruit jellies, packed into individual flavours. I opened a couple of the bags and found shapes so perfect that they could have been made of glass. The lemon segments were flecked with lavender and when I checked the label on the bag, lavender was listed as one of the ingredients. There were also some perfect raspberries that also looked as though there were made of glass. I didn’t attempt to taste any of them!

Next to these bags on the shelf were a couple of lilac-coloured glossy paper bags with pictures of Alsatian (German Shepherd!) puppies on them. The bags were stamped with pale yellow “cameo” shapes containing a puppy’s head in each one. I opened the top of the bag and there were a number of dark chocolates inside it.

I then turned over the bag to read the ingredients of the sweets and was horrified to see that they contained dog! To be precise, there was a detailed explanation on the bag stating that it was only ovarian tissue that was used in the making of the sweets.

How utterly gross this was! The “yuck” factor was immense and I can’t remember any more of the dream after that point; in fact, it may well have woken me up.

So, ultra-violet lights, fluorescent sweets, glass sweets, sweets made with dogs’ ovarian tissue.

Sounds like a bit too much Dolcelatte to me; I really must lay off the late-night cheese….