One night some of us broke into the Tzar’s palace. There was so much freezing snow and grey fog that all you could see was the moving white discs of our torches. Some women, princesses, warned us that the police were on their way. We knew that it would be some time, perhaps days, before they got to us in this weather so we enjoyed our forbidden time romping in the Tzar’s palace.

In the mud again and I am/am watching a young soldier. He crawls out from undersomething, some low building onto the grass and feels an exquisite fear. He thinks about his strong helmet, his tough crewcut and piercing blue eyes and that they are his protection against fear.

Later we are on a fast train bound for Paris. From the window we see Montmartre down below. We don’t get off here as I say there is a stop closer to the city centre but almost immediately we are in the country again, seeing beautiful fields passing by. We are wondering what happened to Paris and how easily we can get back there.

… it could be a nightmare. I was playing guitar and singing country songs quite successfully with a few other people. I woke with Willie Nelson’s Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain going through my head. In fact I’m listening to it now.

‘Don’t you know how to behave when there is a death!’

A man, a strutting doctor I think, shouted this, slamming down two plastic signs (I couldn’t see what was written on them) onto the floor of the hospital ward I was working in as a nurse. Then he swang the doors closed. He was balding and wearing a brown suit. The doors were brown too. Earlier on there was something about either 13 or 31 people, hiding by railway sleepers just out of Kings Cross station which seemed to blur into the hospital ward.

H’s mother is about to die – I mean in real life, not a dream.

I am at some large cafe with H and our children. H tells me that a government agency has told her that I have a brain tumour. this is rather a shock to me. then I am lying down in her house or rather a large hall while a nurse she has arranged aims a radiotherapy machine at my head from an upper gallery. I lie down and have the treatment while some other people walk around. then we are back at the table and she is telling me about all the scans of my skull she has seen including some oblique (ho) fisure that runs right through my skull. I am impatient to learn more from her. I am trying to adjust to this news and thinking of our children who are at the table too. Then I think this is just the kind of situation that could be a dream so I shake and shake my head saying ‘this is only a dream’. It doesn’t work and I say ‘So this isn’t a dream’. then I shake and shake more vigourously and then wake.