Why do I keep having such strange dreams? | Steve Canavan

I’d already done the prep – chopped the onions and carrots and mushrooms, and had some peeled potatoes boiling in a pan (all while trying to stop my three-year-old from killing her baby brother because he was trying to hit her over the head with a toy guitar) – when Mrs C came breezily through the door holding two Morrison’s shopping bags.

‘Have you got the mincemeat?’ I asked.

‘Oh no I forgot,’ she said casually.

‘What?’ I exploded.

‘Well it’s no big deal, it’s only mincemeat,’ she responded.

‘No big deal?”’I spluttered, taken aback at her lack of concern or remorse.

‘I’m making cottage pie and the main ingredient is mincemeat. Without mincemeat you can’t make a cottage pie.’

‘I’m sure you can use something else instead,’ she remarked, disinterested, as she started unpacking her shopping, which, I noted, included smoked salmon, falafel, hummus, and couscous …

All stuff I can’t stand (I have a long held policy of not trusting food that can’t easily be spelled. So ham, beans, eggs, chips, I’m fine with. But falafel? Couscous? Not a chance. I refuse to touch it).

I stood in the middle of the kitchen, sulking like a child but not sure what to do next.

‘It was the one thing I asked you to buy,’ I said sullenly.

‘Oh dear, not to worry,’ she replied, as if a teaching assistant addressing a toddler who has just knocked over a pot of paint.

We haven’t spoken since, and probably won’t for another couple of years.

Anyway, whether it’s that I don’t know but since then I’ve had two very strange though fairly entertaining dreams.

The first involved me being in a musical.

I’m not sure why as I have never been in a musical and the chances of me being offered a part in one are on a par with Matt Hancock’s chances of ever responding to a question and not looking slightly under-prepared, vacant and stupid, ie. non-existent.

I had, from what I recall of my dream, a key role in the musical and was dressed as a multicoloured dragon.

I was late to the show – which was being staged in my old high school sports hall, a place I’ve not been to or seen for nearly 30 years – and it was only as I was about to enter that I realised I’d not learned my lines.

I felt sheer panic and ran around apologising to the director and co-stars, while begging for a copy of the script so I could try and learn it in the minutes before the show began.

There was a huge audience and as the show started I frantically leafed through the script looking for my lines, but suddenly realised there was no way I was going to be able to learn them in time.

I felt absolute terror – and at that point woke with sweat dripping off my head onto the pillow.

Weird.

Then the very next night I had an even stranger dream that involved my 74-year-old mother – a former teacher – being presented with an award at the school she used to work at.

I was driving over to see her receive the award but was late – again – so ran in through the back doors just in time to see my beaming mother step on stage.

She was wearing, to my utter horror, a sheer dress with no underwear beneath and I thought, ‘mum, what the hell have you got on?’

For her acceptance speech she adopted a really odd posh voice and said, sounding just like the Queen, ‘of course with some kids you just can’t help them. They will always be no-hopers’.

I thought it was an odd, out-of-character thing for her to say and looked around the room worried someone might take offence.

Then, for reasons unknown, I had to go but when I returned later, there were crowds of people coming out of the school talking about death threats.

One said, ‘well, she shouldn’t have said what she did, it serves her right’ – and I realised they were talking about my mum.

Then my mother appeared, staggering and clearly drunk (although, thankfully, now with a coat over her x-rated dress), being helped out of the school by my old headteacher, who looked at me and mouthed ‘she’s had too much of the sherry, bless her’.

I reached out to help her and saw out of the corner of my eye, a man crouching in the bushes with a rifle about to shoot … and then I woke.

It was 4.10am and again I was sweating and panting – I desperately wanted to wake Mrs Canavan and tell her of my latest dream, but wasn’t sure she’d appreciate being roused in the early hours to hear a story about my mother being assassinated while wearing a transparent dress.

It was all very strange and it’s no wonder that scientists have for years been trying to work out a way of capturing dreams – in the 19th century, for example, a French bloke called Louis Darget used took photos of his wife’s head while she was asleep and claimed the images showed what she was dreaming (Google the one he reckoned showed an eagle – it looks more like a deformed blackbird at best).

In Japan at the moment, they are working on a dream machine that they reckon is right about 60 per cent of the time.

It involves hooking yourself up to a electroencephalography (try saying that after a pint) machine and falling asleep inside an MRI scanner, as a result it isn’t exactly something you can try at home – but it’s reckoned to be the biggest ever breakthrough in the science of capturing what a person dreams.

I’d love to fly to Tokyo and test it out, I reckon even it might struggle with mine.