Weird dream crushes

Every so often I will wake from a dream with a guilty feeling that I have cheated on the Boy Wonder. Exciting though this may sound (or repellent, depending on your point of view) I should confess now that even in my dreams I am never actually unfaithful to the Boy Wonder, so the kind of romps that I enjoy with my dream crushes tend to be chastely affectionate hugs, chatting about subjects of mutual interest and the general feeling that I am important to someone. None of these are things that our relationship is lacking, but I assume that these dreams are the playing out of some kind of Freudian tomfoolery not least because the men involved are rarely age-appropriate but also because there is an element of revisiting the people who I idolised in childhood.

Last night's dream featured Hugh Laurie who filled a kind of avuncular role as the provider of a meal whilst we discussed books and shared innocent albeit slightly flirtatious hugs. Even as a child, I always like Hugh Laurie, probably because he was an adult who acted like a child, and his recent appearances on television combine my old affection for him with his current New Orleans connection. Either way, I awoke with a slightly guilty feeling of inappropriate behaviour tinged with a sudden urge to gaze at a picture of Hugh Laurie imagining that he was a friend of my parents who I would occasionally get to hug.

I'm assuming that the Boy Wonder wouldn't feel particularly threatened by this, not least because whenever his dreams feature real people they are always dead musicians who have come back to life to play guitar with him, which I suppose is along the same wish fulfilment lines as my desire to squeeze Hugh Laurie. If not though, I can rest assured that the fact he never reads this will protect him from the knowledge that his wife is a faithless weirdo who secretly wants to read books with popular comedians and then discuss them over a nice meal.

Glad I don't believe in interpreting dreams

A couple of nights ago I dreamt that I was tied up at the wrists by a girl I hardly know (a friend of a friend) and forced to sleep in a room filled with fibre glass despite telling her that I was not only afraid of it but also concerned for my health. I was really angry with her for reading a book I was writing in, and wanted to punch her.

The night before I dreamt that my engagement ring was falling apart and the stones were shattering so I couldn't even pick them up to have it repaired.

Last night I dreamt that the Boy Wonder and his friend were playing a monopoly game based on the world cup which I wasn't allowed to join in with. Instead of proper dice, they were using an apple with numbers drawn on it in a cup of water - you tried to roll the apple and when it came up with no number on top it was declared 'in the sea' and had to be rolled again. They were supposed to be headed off to a strip club afterwards, but none of them really wanted to go, and Eric was actually riding his bike around the village letting everyone know which televisions were working in all the pubs. He also had five TVs in his bedroom which was a bit weird, but I had to stay there while they all went off to the strip club so I had plenty to watch which was a bit of a relief.

Clearly these dreams are a sign of my slightly overstuffed brain, but for anyone who actually believed in interpreting dreams, I can imagine it would be pretty terrifying to guess what the hell it all meant.

Uneccessary specifics of dreams

Last night I had my usual round of peculiar night time experiences, but this time with an odd emphasis on the specific: At one point the Boy Wonder took some salad out of the fridge to eat, and I was a bit worried that it had been in there so long that it would have gone bad, but I didn't want to say so in case I gave the impression that I thought he was incapable of working that out for himself. A colleague of mine asked how fast a person could walk a mile - I answered that average walking speed was 4mph, but then said a mile should take 20 minutes to walk. As I sat there, I wanted to correct myself to say 'of course, at 4 mph a mile should take 15 minutes, but I meant that he should allow 20 minutes to be sure' and when the moment passed, I was really annoyed with myself for not speaking up. I sometimes wonder whether my night brain is trying to make me the sort of person who pays attention to detail that I sometimes want to be whilst I am awake. But if this is all it can offer, then it can bog off as I already have the ability to worry about tiny details that I am pretty sure (objectively) nobody else would even notice - it's other details (remembering dates, tasks and information) that I need to brush up on. I also seem to remember something about sharing the details of your dreams and how fascinating it can be for others...

Dreams reflect life...

I am in Amsterdam with friends from school, who are bickering amongst themselves about something I don't really understand or want to get into. Finally they persuade me to come along with them to a concert and when we get there, to my horror, it is a show featuring Mark Owen and Liam Gallagher (I found out I don't know what he looks like as he looked like Vernon Kay in my dream and then somebody had to tell me who he was). I leave the show immediately, but now I am in Amsterdam on my own, and I don't want to be there, I just want to be at home with the Boy Wonder. I resolve not to call him as I know I will cry and make him feel bad that there's not much he can do to help me, and fortunately I come across a Mutley-a-like selling tickets for a boat tour. I board the boat and try to enjoy myself, but all I can think about is 'Why did I agree to this - I knew I wouldn't have a good time and now I'm not.'. In some ways this genuinely reflects the situation I often find myself in - with advance notice I occasionally agree to do something without the Boy Wonder, about which I get a growing sense of dread in the few days before the event and then when I get there, far from what I tell myself, I actually don't have a good time and I want to come home. I don't really get homesick, but I miss the Boy and I can't really imagine anything that I would rather do without him. However, this is generally considered to be pretty pathetic - I have been told so by people when I explained that I didn't really want to attend the Christmas party at work, the fact that he wasn't invited being one of the major reasons. Now why people who I only spend time with because I am paid to do so would think that I would choose to spend time with them over him of an evening, I don't know, but I do resent being told that I should be able to 'manage for one night' when the fact is I choose not to. But apparently, honesty is not what's required of me in this situation - I am supposed to pretend that it costs too much (the option I have gone for in the face of scornful remarks) or that I wouldn't be able to get home, when the truth is, I would rather be snuggled up on the sofa with the man I just married than watching the people I work with getting drunk. Astonishing? Maybe, but I think the astonishing thing is that people really cannot grasp the fact that I am happier with the Boy Wonder than I am anywhere else - I wonder how sad their lives and relationships must be if they long for a night out with their friends which doesn't include their partners, but it wouldn't occur to me to insult them on those grounds. I am aware that people think it is normal to spend a great deal of time apart from their other halves, and as far as I am concerned that's their business. But being without the Boy Wonder trying to have fun against the odds is something which I not only don't enjoy, but which invades my dreams, and anyone who has a problem with it can cock right off...

Dream Snippets

I am standing on a balcony looking down on a row of children dressed in pink rabbit outfits with their own heads showing. Some words seem to make the children glow, and they like it too, so I am trying to say words which will do this, but there is someone on the balcony trying to stop me and another person with the rabbit-children trying to stop them listening to me.

I was involved in some kind of contest with some ‘friends’ who I had never seen before – we were having fun, but I wasn’t really sure what was going on.

Matt from work wanted plain crisps, but only had bacon. He was desperate to swop, so I did.

I was wandering down the road where there was some kind of gay pride thing going on. People were drinking weird stuff out of flower shaped costumes.

‘An ants’ shell

So hard to crack

To Hell! To Hell!’

I found this written on a piece of paper in the drawer of an antique chest which I was looking at. There was an armed robbery going on but I really wanted the chest and the note, so I just carried on as if I hadn’t seen them in the hope that I could just get away without them noticing me.

I gave a guy some fairy lights and he was really pleased and started trying to hug me. The Boy Wonder was there and he was impressed at the good choice of present for this guy, and said he could hug me as he would be pleased to have got fairy lights, so he could understand.

Stupid sub-conscious

I have dreams most nights. They tend towards the stressful and frustrating, but occasionally veer off towards downright terrifying and upsetting or, rarely, into enjoyable. Whilst planning the wedding, I was surprised that I didn’t really have many dreams about it, proving that the lack of stress really was genuine as my dreams are often depressingly literal when it comes to confronting issues which are on my mind. However, since the wedding, or more particularly, since we finished clearing up the wedding on the Monday after and slept for about 18 hours straight on Tuesday, I have been having stressful wedding dreams. In last night’s dream I was trying to make mini muffins for everyone, and the chocolate chips were not dispersing throughout the cooked muffins, just forming a block of chocolate in the middle. I don’t even like muffins that much, mini or otherwise, they weren’t served at the wedding and, more importantly, the darn thing’s OVER! What is my subconscious playing at? I appreciate the fact that my nights leading up to the wedding were relatively dream neutral, but I suspect that did have something to do with extreme tiredness and even more extreme Bow consumption before bed. To have saved up all the pre-wedding stress dreams and inflict them on me now seems both churlish and irrational. If there is some kind of post traumatic stress disorder than only manifests itself after a perfectly happy event, and even then only in dream form, then I wish I didn’t have it. And if I actually have a deeper lying mental health issue, then how can I ever hold my head high in a support group or suchlike when the involvement of mini-muffins is a symptom?

I had a dream, I had an awesome dream...

There's generally no excuse for quoting Lionel Ritchie unless in the context of The Commodores, and particularly this song, but I am making an exception because such was the awesome nature of my dream last night it outweighs any negative feelings I have about Vinyl Lionel ruining precisely half the tracks the Commodores did by stifling their funky and writing songs himself. Now, I generally have pretty rubbish dreams, sometimes distressing (like the one in which my older brother gave me my own dead body as a birthday present, after some weird out-of-body experience, and I entertained myself happily by cutting off one arm and sewing it onto the other side of my body before panicking that someone was going to think I was responsible for a murder), sometimes actively tiring (like the night before last when I had to find homes for a snake, a lizard, several types of fish and some worms all of which required separate habitats which had to be made of things I had lying around at home, and all of which had to be constructed before I ended up being late to leave for work), and very occasionally just weird (like the one where the Boy Wonder and I were out looking for some ear-rings for his grandad and he got distracted by wanting to buy a waistcoat with snooker balls all over it). You get it - lots of weird stuff goes on in my head once I'm asleep, probably a Freudian's idea of a lifelong project, although I never attach much importance to the content. But my dream last night, as previously stated, was awesome! There were still elements of my normal panic dreams, but with one important difference - last night I dreamt that my boss had hired Stephen Colbert to work at our office! I was so stoked, so even though I was supposed to be delivering a presentation that nobody had told me about, I didn't care because it was to Stephen Colbert! I was just sitting in the meeting grinning at him and hoping he didn't know anything about what I do because I wanted to impress him. Half way through the meeting my boss did a trick he does in real life and just wandered out and Stephen leant forward and said 'Who do you have to dry-hump around here to get a marijuana cigarette' proving that my subconscious also has a healthy respect for the man! This was one of the few dreams I have ever had, particularly in my adult life, from which I awoke thinking 'That would be so cool if it was true' and because it happens so rarely I thought I should preserve the memory. Life has been a much more entertaining place since we got the Colbert Report on these shores - my favourite thing about America is now available in the corner of my living room, and apparently in the recesses of my mind. Now if I can just get a reliable supply Pepperidge Farm goldfish, I will never want for anything again...