More bad dreams

What did I eat last night? If I recall, it was one single sausage and a blob of herby mashed potato. It certainly gave me some weird dreams - three, to be exact. I usually only remember one, so it was quite remarkable that I can remember all three. Another remarkable thing was that, looking back now, I can see that each dream related to something that had happened that day.

The first - arachnophobes, leave the page now! - involved a lecturer and a spider. I was sitting in the front row when my eye was drawn to something on the wall. I had taken it for a light of some sort, but when it began to heave and unfold long, striped legs, I realised it was a huge spider, the size of a plump cushion and that the lecturer, who had raised his arms to make a point, was lowering one onto the spider! I tried to should a warning but it was too late. His arm made contact with it and it bit him and the next minute he was lying dead on the floor. When the medics arrived, they told me the name of the species and that one bite was fatal to humans. (I can't remember the name now, worse luck.) Yesterday morning, I had been photographing stripy garden spiders (none of the photos came out properly as I still haven't mastered the art of macro photography), so it's fairly obvious that this is what sparked off a spider dream - though why the lecturer and why the fatal bite? Perhaps my imagination just embroidered it because it needed to create a proper story.

The second was rather more bizarre as I came walking into a room with a dead, stuffed fox in my arms, its pelt beautiful and glossy. The next minute, 'our' vixen came trotting through the door. She saw the dead fox and stood on her hind legs to sniff it. I laid the dead one on a shelf and the vixen climbed up to the shelf below it, lay on her back with her legs in the air just like Flad does, and I started feeding her small cubes of chicken. End of dream. Thinking of it today, I remember that I fed Charlie, the ginger stray who is exactly the same colour as a fox, cubes of leftover chicken last night and later, I ventured out into the gloom to throw the rest of the scraps out for the wildlife and something ginger, which could have been Charlie or a small fox, went streaking along the side of the hedge behind the pond at a rate of knots. But why the dead fox? I have no idea where that came from.

The derivation of Dream 3 is patently obvious. Our friend with the five boys tends to get involved in conversations and leave her horrors to their own devices, which are invariably destructive, if not downright dangerous. For the last two weeks, her partner's shop, our local butcher's, has been closed for a transformation into a farm shop and Mr Grumpy has been down there all day every day, sawing, making rustic shelving and laying laminate flooring. You can imagine what that did to his ankylosing spondylitis, osteo arthritis and the rest. I gave him all my tubes of pain-relieving gels and creams - Biofreeze, Arnica, Ibruleve - but, as usual, he preferred not to use them and to be a typical man and sit and moan and grumble instead.

Yesterday, he came in quite shocked at the fact that the toddlers had been picking up sharp knives in the shop and their parents had been too busy to notice and he had had to step in and stop a massacre happening. So when I dreamt that the two-year-old had stabbed himself in the privates with a splintery piece of sharp wood and I had to take him to hospital, where he was found to have jammed other objects up his nose and down his ears... well, it's obvious what sparked that dream off, isn't it?