Waking up early on a weekend morning and knowing I can go back to sleep is one of my favourite things in all the world. However, for complex reasons that I'll happily bore you with another time, I believe that when I am a bit stressed in real life, my dreams become more stressful as a result. This morning was a case in point. This is a very brief sample of what was running through my REM-riddled mind at around 10am today: Scene 1 - Meet up with a schoolfriend of yore in some random bed showroom in a suburban town in France, end up going back to a motel and having vivid, graphic, lesbian sex - it is my first time with another girl but not hers and I am rubbish. She gets annoyed, reasonably. Scene 2 - I am with a guy. We're in the back of a pickup truck with rucksacks, I think we've just been to a festival. It is night time and very warm, and I'm wearing very dirty clothes. We are hitching a ride with two huge black men who are playing loud garage music and we are both laughing although I know he is uncomfortable so I have butterflies. We are dropped off in a strange town at a swanky hotel, and taken through to our ground floor rooms which have French windows that open on to a private beach and a huge lake. The boy cuts his hand badly on something and I go out into the town and try to find plasters, but I don't speak the language and I have to ask a policeman. He takes me into a toy shop and then a restaurant where the manager gets some plasters out of a first aid kit. I go back to the hotel, put the plaster on the cut and we leave. We go on, with our rucksacks, to a huge house that I think is a family home of his. Everyone in there knows him, but none of them know me. I feel deeply ill-at-ease. He goes upstairs for some reason and a moment later I hear him wailing like a child. I go up and a kid who is, I think, his cousin has thrown water all over him, and he is in another room crying, really screaming. The young cousin takes the over-reaction in his stride and says he's always like that. I try to comfort my wet friend but he pushes me away. Scene 3 - Cut to south west London and the place where I grew up. I am going for a run in the park and I'm carrying my laptop, for some stupid reason. I see my godparents and I don't want to talk to them because I'm feeling ugly, so I pull my hat down over my forehead and pick up the pace. Eventually I get to my destination, my parents' house, although it's not my parents' house really. I go in, run a bath and get in, still holding my laptop, and I try to get my hair wet and hold my laptop above the water with my feet, but I come up from under the water and I see that I didn't hold my feet high enough and the computer has been submerged. I leave it open in an upside-down V on the bathmat. I hear my parents coming in through the front door. I wake up.
It's little wonder I'm always exhausted, is it? Although going out late and drinking lots of wine probably has something to do with it. I looked in my handbag this morning and found a copy of a book called That's Our Baby! by Pamela Browning, which I stole from the pub I was in last night as I thought it was such a hideous affront to women and fiction that I couldn't bear the idea that anyone else would ever read it. I am going to put it in the recycling bin. The blurb on the back reads as follows:
"Unsuspecting Daddy! Sam Harbeck needed his best friend's widow to give him back what was his - the rights to the deposit he'd made to a sperm bank. He'd come to Alaska to get her signature on the release. But he was too late: Kelly Anderson was already pregnant... with his child!
Sam expected a fight from the ever-wilful Kelly, but he didn't anticipate his own overwhelming desire for her... or the emotions her impending motherhood evoked in him. Being snowbound together only intensified his need for this woman. Could he have arrived just in time to be a father to their baby?"
It's not often that words fail me. But those ones did.
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