I guess we all have curious and weird dreams, and maybe sometimes, troubling or disturbing dreams. Fortunately for me, I rarely have dreams which are unpleasant, and although some of the odd night-time adventures stay with me during the day, it’s rare that they worry me. Usually I just ponder on what on earth they might mean or what might have triggered them. I tend to have very colourful and bright dreams where I’m wandering about in an exotic city lost, but happy and excited by what I see. Sometimes I have curious dreams, which seem odd and more unbelievable – although in actual fact all my night-time escapades are fanciful.
Yesterday morning, having fallen into a snooze after being awake for a while, I woke up again quite normally. I got up, flinging back the covers and went to the window, pulling the nets aside and looked out on a gorgeous sunny, blue skied day. I looked down our road, empty of cars as no doubt the neighbours had gone to work, and then I looked out across the town, towards the wooded hill on the other side. Now this should have alerted me that I was in a dream, because in actual fact, we can’t see across the town because we don’t live in an elevated position, although we can see the wooded hillside in the distance.
So yes, I was dreaming and I could see more of the town and its red roofs stretching across to the woods. It was such a gloriously sunny day that the tiles on the roofs were a brilliant red, much redder than in reality. I could see the grey spire of St Paul’s Church (in reality we aren’t at the right angle to see it) and as I was looking at it, suddenly the spire slowly tipped sideways and all in a piece, fell off!! I was open-mouthed and utterly shocked, not believing my eyes, I closed them and when I looked again, the spire was still falling. Shocked, I turned to say something, cry out in alarm… And instantly, I wasn’t standing by the window, net curtain in hand, I was lying in bed, still alarmed at what had happened to the church spire! I was puzzled and confused – what had caused it, was anyone hurt, had anyone else seen it, should I ring the police? How could the spire have fallen from the church?
I got out of bed and went to the window, but of course, you can’t see St Paul’s from our window, we face the wrong way! It came over me that of course it was a dream, and looking out I could see that it was a grey sort of a day, not sunny and bright, and the neighbours cars were still on their drives. Even so, I tried to look sideways across the town, and even opened the window and peered out. I still couldn’t see the church and I took a deep breath and admitted that it had been a dream.
Later I realised that the “inspiration” for the falling spire was from the film “Hot Fuzz” – a rather gruesome scene, so thankfully my dream was just the tumbling spire!
Lois Elsden 