I am on a holiday, perhaps a coach trip to Edinburgh or Paris or somewhere else. There is some confusion or hiatus in the trip and I am alone for a while. I find myself in a cafe or cinema with Leonard Cohen and I am in tears, saying ‘I’m still a young person but already I am thinking about loss’. I am wondering how he will react. Then I am in a lift with a nurse and paramedics being taken to the emergency department. I am talking to them about my medical problem deciding whether to go to get help or not, being doubtful that its either serious or could be helped

I am in a hot african country in an office in an old white building. I look down from an upstairs door and sense there is trouble brewing. I lock the front door but hear soldiers in the corridor. I lock my inside metal door with two locks. I am quaking with fear and think about hiding in a large cupboard but conclude that they will always look there and would find me cowering. This wouldn’t be a dignified way to be found.

Then in the next dream I am a GP in a rather squalid practice somewhere in London. I have a camp bed in the practice and am awoken by a butler or similar person to tell me that there is a phone call for me. I go up some stairs. It is 4.30am and a journalist is on the phone asking me about some new machine installed in a local hospital. As he asks this strikes me as commedy and I say that I know nothing about it. I go back down to the surgery. There is smoke-stained flock wall paper, dim lighting and an antique desk, a grumpy receptionist too. And I have to start seeing patients.

I am in a large old house, more like a mansion, early victorian possibly. Its night. The front room is more like a shop. I am in there with an elderly couple. A man comes in and sprinkles some white powder into the coals glowing in the fireplace. He does this to clear the fireplace or the chimney. Then he detonates it somehow, puts a match to it and we all quickly hurry out of the room into the hallway. As we close the door we hear a large explosion inside. We wonder whether that has cleared the chimney out. As we stand in the hall which has a high ornate ceiling (it is gloomy) reaching up to the roof, debris comes down from the chimney pots which seem to be above there. Then lots and lots of other plaster and rubble starts to come down. I think the explosion was too big and we dash out of the front door into the night. I oopen the door and go out first. In the front garden there are some letters in the ground fashioned from wire saying shoe repairs or shoe laces by someone ‘United’.

In another part of the dream I am going around thinking the phrase ‘use negative energy to achieve something positive’.

Someone told me recently that its the dreams that you just can’t quite remember that are most revealing about your unconscious. Often nowadays I wake in the middle of the night with a memory of a dream, telling myself I must remember what I’ve just dreamed but by the morning it is gone – just out of reach.

I am in a village in vietnam walking around with some village boys and I am moved to tears seeing the beauty of the place, a long straight canal with bridges over at regular intervals. The pale unspoilt light.

Later I am in some gentleman’s club, still in the same country I think, and Martin E is reading from a novel to me. the words are in gold type on black pages and almost impossible to read, he rubs white powder over them to help. It is a novel about a man in vietnam (or some other once war ravaged country like Iraq). We are stunned by the device that the central character dies half way through and describes his body being brought home. In the next chapter, and half way through the book, he is born again.