Dream
Catcher
“I'm lying in bed and a buzz breaks the silence, I open my eyes and see a wasp, angrily bouncing off the closed window unable to escape, unable to stop buzzing. So, I get up and I go over and open the window and it lands on the windowsill, but it doesn’t go out. I look a bit closer and it's not a fly, it’s a monkey, about the size of my hand. Slightly concerned that there's a miniature monkey in my house in suburban Edinburgh, I try and coax it out the window but instead it jumps back inside my room and disappears under my bed. Before I have a chance to try and get it back out, however, I spot it walking back out from under my bed, followed by three others. So three of the monkeys jump up onto the windowsill and out of my open window, one of them is struggling to climb up onto my window, I bend down to help it up and realise it’s Casie (a friend of mine), well its Casie’s head on a little monkey and she's chatting away to me. At which point my mum walks in and offers Casie breakfast before she heads off with the other monkeys. And then I woke up.” A stunned silence greets the end of my story. Well, I think Mr Leask is stunned but the rest of the class probably drifted off to sleep themselves midway through the story. This is a regular morning in the L6R form class, Mr Leask intrigued by my psychotic dreams (mainly because he never remembers his dreams) while the rest of the class is thoroughly bored. We try and decipher meanings out of the jumbled-up stories that form my dreams, and regularly someone chips in with, “you’ve gone mad”. I’ve always been fascinated by my dreams, in awe at the storylines my subconscious puts together, the next famous director with its plots and scandalous tales, that I could never dream of when awake. There must be more to dreams than just hinting at my impending insanity, as many have suggested.
Dreams come in all shapes and sizes: recurring ones, stress dreams, dreams which you can’t distinguish from real life - I have certainly looked at people in a different light after having had a strange encounter with them in my dreams’- I one time had a very vivid dream that Mrs Bryce was stalking me, but I think it would probably be unfair to hold that against her, as the real Mrs Bryce has no such obsession. Equally, I was very disappointed one morning when I woke to discover that I was, in fact, not best friends with Simone Biles (4-time Olympic gold medallist gymnast) and that I hadn’t actually bumped into her in my hairdressers, only in my dream. 15
