Just fragments of dreams: someone, a young person, is playing a piano, or learning to play some simple scale with just one hand. I am looking at just this hand and fingers. The person plays three notes of the scale then a person teaching knocks their fingers away and says ‘ The next three notes are for next week’s lesson’. It is a member of my family saying this, my father or my sister – though I don’t see them. I argue, ‘But it is only 2 or 3 inches for these fingers to move. It is easy to do now. Why delay?’

An even smaller fragment. I am in a plane again, landing and we are flying low, too low though it is not very frightening. I think, ‘Ah this is that low flying plane experience. It really does happen because this time it is not a dream.’

It is late in the winter afternoon. I am out in the near countryside by the river. I am on a bicycle and need to get home at the end of a day’s work on the path by the river. It is getting gloomy and I have no lights with me. I judge that I can make it back before it gets too dark. I take my bike over a style down toward the river and start cycling, but soon a fog comes from nowhere and as I pass under a bridge over the river, everything is grey, completely grey. Nothing is differentiated. All I can see is grey. But I keep cycling – as if I am going with my eyes closed. Then eventually I think of stopping and wonder what to do.

Later I am working for some futuristic government agency, in a building that is at once futuristic and decayed. It is darkish again. There are a number of us – in uniforms, men and women and I think someone is lost and we are gathering to go to lunch. There is humour but there is something uneasy.

I was staying in some kind of institution, it could have been a monastery, where the men in charge would just walk into my room without knocking. I was packing up and getting ready to go home for the weekend. I was meeting a woman who I didn’t know for a date in a cafe somewhere. I woke up at 10.10 and I realised it was too late and that I had stood her up. Nevertheless, I started the journey back to where I lived. First walking through narrow lanes quite high up, then I joined a group of others and we had to walk down some old fashioned black metal steps high up over a steep hill, or over or next to the roof of some large church. I was almost paralysed with fear of heights as I stepped down from one to the other. The people around rallied to encourage and support me.

I don’t remember getting to the journey’s end.

a muddle of interconnected memories of dreaming. I am in a plane returning from a holiday. We are flying too low and the wings almost crashing into trees, powerlines and now we stop just a couple of feet above a building just before the runway. Somehow we land. The captain wanted to land really slowly because there was some fault with the plane.

I am walking up a hill in some woody place with leaves all over the ground. I am pushing a pram and J comes up and holds my arm and leans her head against my shoulder. I turn to kiss her and she has turned into A. Oh no, A is NOT someone you do that to, being extremely upright. She is indignant and outraged but was clearly drawn into it for a moment.

Then a couple of nights ago was the helicopter and the excrement dream

I was travelling or visiting somewhere and in a cave or some enclosed space when I looked out or somehow saw a reflection and realised I was miles above the earth in an asteroid – I could see it from the huge height of space and was suddenly terrified and looked away, back into the cave. Later, I felt some gentle movement and realised that I was drifiting down to earth, now sitting on a black sheet of currugated iron fencing. I landed in an allotment, saying ‘Thankyou God. Teach me to see God in the people around me!’ then a man walked by.

I woke up in the night in a house I haven’t lived in for a long while. There were fat cats sitting in the passageway and I chased them out. There was one small kitten that darted away in every direction and refused to go. It was upstairs and dark and gloomy.