Dream diary

What a night for dreams! Such stormers that I had to change nightclothes twice with the perimenopausal sweats. Those nightsweats are always preceded by dreams, but whether the flushes cause the dreams or vice versa is not clear. H.-who-is-very-good-to-me tells me that nightsweats are exacerbated by alcohol, but I get them worst when sober.

The first one last night had us in a carpark. Carparks feature frequently as allegorical labyrinths, despite the fact I haven't driven for the last year. They nearly always bear a passing resemblance to the old bus station on New Street that subsequently became the Bongo-Club-before last. Last night I'm trying to lead our milling, ant-like party up and out when the kiddos decide to start down through a trapdoor to some Hadean floor below. Cue wakening in cold shivering sweat.

Later, I'm back in a basement flat in Brighton from 25 years ago when hordes of young hippies arrive looking for a flatmate who no longer lives there. I do not know any of them, but there's to be a Velvet Underground gig in a couple of hours so I let them stay and start endlessly washing up after them. There are at least three kitchens filled with dirty dishes, and now the flat has taken on corridors and angles like the basements under the Sick Children's Hospital. I'm developing an attitude problem when I find magical foods in the fridge. The best was a fruit that resembled a pomegranate, filled with tiny granular seeds surrounded in a starch matrix. When plunged in water, the half-fruit expands ten times its original size and fills a stockpot with a bubbling, sweet-smelling cous-cous-like fluff, which I season with jasmine flowers from the fridge. Cue another wakening bathed in sweat as salty as the Dead Sea and cold as the Bering Straights.