Only in your dreams.....

Have you ever been in this situation?

You are desperate for the loo, and it can’t wait, so you dash off to try and find one.

Success, but the first one you come across is engaged, not to worry there is a row of them, but drat, each one has someone inside.

Desperate, you run off to find another, thank God, not too far away there is a convenience, and, joy, it is unoccupied.

But hold on a minute, that one’s no good either, there’s no door on the cubical and what’s going on? This isn’t a cubical at all.

The toilet is positioned bang slap in the middle of your office, and all your colleagues are standing around.

People who have never said hello to you in your life are suddenly desperate to strike up a friendship, and what better time than when you are on the throne.

Sorry got to dash, not using that one, and I’m off out the door to find another.

Bingo, there’s one, oh God, who designed this one? It stands proudly on a plinth in the middle of a town square, with flashing lights over it – oh well, desperate times call for desperate measures.

Just as I am about to...agggghhhh....damn, I didn’t notice there was a crowd around me, hold on it’s not any old crowd, this is trooping the colour, and I am stood in the middle of it. Oh my God there’s the Queen, and she doesn’t look best pleased.

You know where I am going with this don’t you? How about this...

You are on your way to work and suddenly you bump into a school teacher you haven’t seen for 20 years.

“I hope you are ready for your physics A-Level this morning”, he says.

“Physics A-level? But I am grown up, I have a career, I’m 38 years old, I sat my physics A-level when I was.....”

Hang on, I never took it, it’s today, and somehow 20 years have passed and I have forgotten everything.

I have an hour to revise, I frantically flick through the book, but there’s tonnes of it, and it’s all gobledegook. I can’t even make out the words they’re all blurred and make no sense.

Suddenly everyone else turns up for the exam, and yes, you guessed it, they’ve all spent the past 20 years revising hard, I am the ONLY one who forgot I had an exam  coming up.

I am the only one whose life is about to come crashing around my ears.

I decide to have a go, might as well see if anything comes back to me, I remember I was quite good at it the last time I tried, in 1992.

So off I trot to the exam, but I realise I am in a field, 100 miles away, and I have .......aagggghhh.... 15 minutes before it starts.

And my shoes are nailed to the floor....etc....etc.....

Yes, this is a glimpse of the almost nightly fun my mind has at my expense.

Dreams, what on earth is the point? And if I have to have them, why do they have to be so batty?

Believe me, the ones I have described happen with worrying regularity,  I am almost at the point of digging out my old Letts revision guide and mugging up so I am actually prepared for the next one.

Knowing my luck, I’ll spend weeks memorising formulas and re-learning how to measure momentum and the exam will turn out to be English lit.

Apparently I’m not alone.

The toilet and exam dreams  are common, and strangely they follow the same pattern in loads of people.

As does the teeth falling out one, my first thought in the morning is often where’s the Steradent.

We all know dreaming is somehow essential to our sanity, but why do they have to be so weird, and what do they mean?

Sigmund Freud suggested they represent unconscious desires, thoughts and motivations. 

Believe me, I have no desire to sit an A-level ever again.

According to Freud, people are driven by “aggressive and sexual instincts that are repressed from conscious awareness”. 

While these thoughts are not consciously expressed, he suggested they find their way into our awareness via dreams.

He might be right. I have often done things in dreams that could never happen in real life.

I have told people what I think of them, managed to evade detection from the law after becoming a criminal mastermind, and met Madonna so many times I am on her Christmas card list.

When you have the good ones, it is always such a disappointment to wake up just as you are about to claim that £10 million lottery win and find out it was all a dream.

Some experts say you would go mad if you didn’t dream, in which case the latest gadget on my list of things to try could have disastrous consequences.

It is an iPhone App called dream:ON

Its inventor, psychologist Professor Richard Wiseman, is conducting an experiment to see if playing gentle sounds to people in their sleep can influence their dreams and maybe clean up any nasty ones.

The idea is you put your phone by your head as you sleep and through your movements it can tell when you are dreaming, it then plays you these “soundscapes” which influence what you dream.

The App then wakes you up and you log your dream into your phone, Proff Wiseman will collect results from thousands of people and analyse whether playing these sounds to people in their sleep actually has an effect.

I am not sure whether I want to interfere with my brain’s natural cleansing processes, but, always up for anything like this, I downloaded the App and will give it a try.

Just hoping two things, please don’t let me find a private, luxurious, secure, lavender-scented toilet in my dream – I may well use it, and secondly, can I keep the Madonna ones?