I’ve become discouraged about writing social / political stuff – I'm beginning to think it’s pointless so instead I’m going to write about my dreams. Last night I performed a little scientific experiment – ie eating half a camembert on it’s own immediately prior to sleep to see if the old wives tale had any validity.

Dreams

1) Captured as a prisoner of war / deserter I was incarcerated in a strange triangular prison with my 2 Chinese wives and subjected to repeated harangues and rifle prodings. I was then taken to the interrogation room to see the ‘Spy Master’ who was wearing tracky bottoms and a T-shirt. In another room I could see shirt sleeved office workers being beaten to the ground. My hands were wired behind my back.

This dream was absolutely terrifying. Somehow the world was not our world but everything else about it was utterly real and convincing. I guess this is what it feels like to be in Guantanamo Bay. Except without the wives. Additionally I had the feeling that this whole experience was in some way a ‘repeat’ and that I had at least 3-4 years of incarceration ahead before I escaped.

2) I was living in North London with a woman who was a sort of cross between flatmate1 and my ex girlfriend. Both of whom are called Eleanor. Anyway we met the woman next door and cut off her ponytail which was a white and pink plait and put it in the oven to bake as a loaf of bread. The pink and white loaf started playing music.

Look I said they were dreams didn’t I?

3) I was shopping in the only place open on a Sunday evening (Woolworths) for some groceries and decided to buy some presents for the above flatmate / girlfriend. Unfortunately (it being Woollies) they had bugger all, and when I asked the shop assistant if they had anything else she was really sneery. I did however manage to find the following :

i) An 1854 copy of the Radio Times
ii) A book about the Trans Siberian railway
iii) A copy of The Terminator
iv) Another funny Pink&White plaited loaf thing.

I also learned the secret of how it plays music - kinda by it’s constituent parts selecting a song to play and having a continuous conversation with itself as to what to play. When enough parts have changed their 'minds' the song changes, which sounds very much like re-tuning a radio.

4) I was trapped in a large and spooky house with two friends and there was a terrific thunderstorm. Trying to protect the house I was trapped against an upstairs window and was about to be sucked out and killed. The window frame splintered . . . and then the storm stopped.

This dream felt very very real indeed. I genuinely believed I was going to die

5) Flatmate1’s boyfriend took me on a long walk through an abandoned and derelict city. We climbed up onto a rooftop that had been covered in grass and he showed me where he was building a new kind of urban dwelling for modern people until he was distracted by standing on a thistle because he wasn’t wearing any shoes. Later we watched Goebbell’s funeral cortege from the rooftop.

This dream makes easily the most sense of the lot, but only of you know Fm1’s bf ;-)

I know there were a couple of others that I can’t recall – can only recall these because I kept repeating them to myself and they were incredibly strong. I think there’s something about the memory that stores dreams after we wake up – it’s some sort of special non-permanent memory, designed to fade away. How often have you had a dream that seemed utterly real and detailed and 30 seconds later you can’t recall a thing about it? Of course it may simply be that you have the ‘memory’ of having the dream and the dream may never have actually happened.

I guess this is because in some way dreams can write to your core memory directly without passing through the logical, experiential part of the brain. This would also help explain the problems of causality we often experience in dreams – where things happen that are reliant on things in the future that we don’t yet know about etc etc. What I also find really odd in dreams is the way that other characters behave towards ‘you’ in totally opaque ways – you have no clue what they are going to do or say next, just like real people, even though they are constructs of your own brain, just like ‘you’.

Anyway, on the basis of the above 5 dreams alone I’d say the hypothesis under investigation has not been disproved so far : Eating cheese before bed gives you weird dreams.