More than you needed to know

What if my job actually was stressful?

Although I think I take a fairly relaxed, even laid-back, approach to my job - and my editors could elaborate on that point - I have, perhaps once or twice a year, a recurring work-anxiety dream. The details vary, but the broad shape is always the same.

Last night, I dreamt that I was late for a committee meeting because I had had to go to the toilet, which was several floors below. On entering the committee room, I saw with horror that the meeting had already opened. I walked across the room as briskly as the requirements of professionalism would allow, the clerk glaring at me to sit down. The convener was still labouring through his prepared preamble, which I knew I could get a copy of from the clerk later, so I guessed that I hadn't missed anything vital.

How wrong I was. I had clearly missed the convener telling the members that, as the microphones weren't working, they should simply shout, which they started to do as soon as I took my seat - before I had even taken the lid off my pen, for heaven's sake!

I began to scribble down as much of what they were shouting as possible, fretting that I would miss something and that it would be lost to history forever because there would be no recording to back me up. It was difficult to start with, because they were speaking very quickly and it was terribly hard not to let my writing become just a long string of useless loops, but it became impossible when they all started speaking at once, some loudly, some quietly, some clearly and some in an almost incomprehensible mutter. Who was this muttering person beside me, anyway? I didn't recognise him. Could he be a new member? Had I not noticed him come in at the last election? As a matter of fact, who was the convener? Who were the people sitting across from me? I didn't recognise any of these people at all.

And that's with only 129 members in the Parliament. Westminster has 659. How on earth do they cope?

Paying the cost to be the boss

In the main street of a town where they were booked to play a show that night, four bearded members of a pop group that had some success in the 1960s before fading from public view and starting to tour small venues playing old-fashioned electric blues were talking and smoking cigarettes. They were already wearing their stage outfits, which were all-white dinner suits and top hats.

When B B King drove slowly down the street in his open-topped car, the men trotted alongside and entertained him with their bantering conversation.

Although he was slightly annoyed at first, King warmed to them and, later, they all bought steaks from a butcher's van while a camp friend of theirs made smutty comments that the Irish butcher, a woman, didn't understand.

Where was I? No idea.

Every father has dreams for their children

After visiting this site, my dad left these words, which I post here without further comment:

"I had this dream where I sacrificed, scrimped and saved, went without and pretty much worked myself to a shadow, all in order to fund the student lifestyle of my offspring. What did I get in return? One agent of the repressive state, one Wierdo who can take trips without having to resort to whacky baccy and a deep sea diver who is scared of sharks!

Thank God it was only a dream."

A Masonic Comandante

The unpromising set-up of the only dream I can remember from the weekend was that I was writing in my notebook in a committee room in Parliament as witnesses gave evidence as part of an inquiry into the influence of freemasons in Scottish society. Not only was this a wholly unremarkable work-related dream, it was, unbelievably, more dull than the incident on which it was based. The real-life committee had not been a sober series of questions and answers, which was the uninspiring scene that unfolded in the dream, but had featured a man who may well have been a lunatic calling for an inquiry into freemasons and the Illuminati who were responsible for the deaths of Scottish children. Security guards were called in to eject the man, who had accused the politicians of being incompetent because they were having difficulty believing his unsubstantiated and, frankly, insane allegations. Happily, he stomped away from the table without having to be manhandled.

However, whereas the real committee had been held in a committee room, this meeting - I now noticed - was taking place in a small cinema. In fact, wasn't it the one in which Oliver Stone had interviewed Fidel Castro in Comandante?

Indeed it was. Neither Stone nor Castro were in the room but the next witness entered in a huddle of secret service agents. Only when he sat down in the third row did I see that it was George W Bush. I hadn't realised it before, but the inquiry seemed to centre on him and his business connections. Was he a freemason? Was he connected to the Illuminati? Sure, he was a freemason, he said; he had never tried to hide it. He proudly held up his hand so that we could see the masonic ring that he always wore.

Here, Oliver Stone handed over to David Lynch. I'd spent the evening before I had this dream watching the entire first season of Twin Peaks, and was therefore able to recognise the masonic ring as being made of a gambling chip from One Eyed Jack's, the brothel where Laura Palmer had worked and which was frequented by the cabal of local businessmen and drug dealers who had conspired in her death. Was George W Bush in league with them? That would be staggering news if true.

I noticed that Bush's ring was chipped and that the "J" from the One Eyed Jack's logo was missing. A small shard of plastic stamped with the letter "J" had been found in Laura Palmer's stomach during her autopsy.

The committee continued to question him. I am not supposed to talk during a committee meeting, so I kept my suspicions to myself, but I was happily confident that we had enough evidence to bust him.

Intolerable Cruelty

Last night's news showed a grim little shot of the ditch in which the bodies of the two girls who were murdered in Soham were found. The dampness of the scene, the colours of the fallen leaves and the bare, black tree trunks dotted all around made everything look as if it had been arranged by someone who had recently watched the Coen brothers' Miller's Crossing. Perhaps they had been especially impressed by the scene where a decomposing body is found in the woods.

In my dream, a news reporter stood at one end of a shallow pit in a wood, describing how the girls' bodies had decomposed. As he spoke, the camera drifted down to the ground and slowly tracked across the fallen orange leaves that were plastered to the earth around the grave, showing the wet earth and bits of twig, eventually pulling back to reveal the reporter squatting at the other end of the pit, holding a bunch of dead leaves in his hand.

I told Ellen, who was watching the news with me, that the shot was just like one that Woody Allen used in Crimes and Misdemeanours, when the doctor visits the apartment of the woman he has had murdered and sits beside her dead body, as if numbed by the enormity of his crime. However, Ellen wasn't very interested because, at that point, she realised that, although we hadn't murdered the girls, all the evidence had been arranged to make it look as if we had. We'd been set up! And by whom? Why, by none other than Rex Rexroth, the wronging husband from the Coens' Intolerable Cruelty. Heinz, the Baron Krauss von Espy, may have denounced him as a "seelly man" in the funniest scene of the film, but he appeared to have stitched us up pretty good. There was nothing for it but for us to pack our bags and flee. My rucksack, however, was far too heavy.

The Attack of the Birds

Among the most disappointing dreams are those in which you are simply watching television. Last night's one was a prime example of this pointless variety.

I was watching television in someone else's darkened living room when I was mildly pleased to see that an old Dr Who was being shown, one that I hadn't seen or even heard of. It opened with Tom Baker and a vaguely imagined assistant stepping from the TARDIS in a public park very much like the one behind the house where I grew up. By this point, of course, I wasn't aware of the living room any more, but was still quite aware that I was passively observing a recorded show. Kind of as if I were a large invisible floating eyeball on the set.

As Tom Baker and his assistant stood rather aimlessly in the park, the title of the story was superimposed on the action: "The Attack of the Birds". This flimsy title didn't bode well. Sure enough, the next scene began with a close-up of two fat pigeons, which a slow pan back revealed to be roughly the size of plump little dogs. The Doctor and his assistant, who were sitting on a park bench, reacted with shock.

Some actual birds could be seen on the roofs of houses in the background of the scene, which undermined the premise of the story, which was that all of the birds in the world had grown to immense size. Or at least as big as little dogs (that's 70s BBC budgets for you).

Yesterday, I was outraged by David Blunkett's introduction of ID cards and dismayed at the complacent reaction of the public. In addition, I read two long articles on Israeli settlements in the occupied territories and one infuriating article by a pro-war liberal. Why, then, were the main influences on the dream I had last night an article on Dr Who that I skimmed in the Sunday paper and some rather well fed pigeons I saw in the Botanic gardens?

My subconscious has no political conscience.