Now here you go again,

 It can be very dispiriting to hear about other people's dreams that they think are amazing but you think any cod psychiatrist could explain away. If you think so, abandon hope all who enter here.

I don't imagine that it's anything to do with preparing for this evening's (very successful) poetry club session on song lyrics, I didn't need to give that much thought - The Tracks of My Tears by Smokey Robinson and Break by Me. But in the last two weeks I've dreamed pop songs, the sub-conscious providing them more word perfect than I'd do if I was awake.

This morning I woke up having dreamed I was employed by Donald Trump in Trump Towers. The boss comes down and I find a pretext to pick an argument with him - spoilt for choice as I must have been - and then lay into him with a tirade of, 'you're nothing, you're nobody, you're Nowhere Man' and then sing Nowhere Man to him, or at him.

 

So Trump says I'm fired and calls one of his men over to throw me out. But it's not a heavy bouncer type of bloke, he's middle-aged and tired-looking. I ask him if I can just collect the things from my desk and he says, 'yes, yes' in a resigned way. On the way out he asks me what I did and I tell him and it's like he's used to it and heard it all before. Then outside, walking through a park, two old schoolfriends come up and I say I've been sacked and why and they say,' yeah, we know, we heard you'.

 

Last week I was in a rundown bar which was obviously meant to be Marthas in Portsmouth in its last days when it had become a bit seedy. I think, 'this is a dive bar' and my friend Gillian comes back from where she's been and I recite Stephin Merritt's Papa Was a Rodeo to her, a masterpiece and big favourite of both of us,

What are we doing in this dive bar
How can we live in a place like this...

and say I've had enough and am going home. Then one of her friends turns up with another girl and I go home through a shopping centre full of escalators and moving floors and jump off to the side when I realize I'm heading for a precipice.

 

I'm not interested in the traumas that prompt these dreams. Heaven knows I've had far worse than them for Freudian analysts to interpret. I'm thrilled by those songs being so perfectly stored deep down somewhere and can only hope there'll be more in the series and see which other songs surface, and in what context.

 

Many years ago I had a series of sport dreams. The horse racing one came well ahead of the other three. I was on a horse at the start of a race at Fontwell Park, looking forward to riding before realizing at the last moment that I couldn't ride a horse.

The cricket, football and cycling episodes followed much later on successive nights, all similarly vivid, preparing to take part in top class events before suddenly realizing I was massively out of my depth. At least I had done cricket, football and cycling before but not at England international and Tour de France level. There's no need to go into 'impostor syndrome', which these clearly are examples of, when I experience that in poetry which some are kind enough to say I can do. But maybe one day I'll dream I'm doing a reading with Auden, Elizabeth Bishop and John Donne.

 

If you didn't want to know that, I did warn you at the start. Being asleep can be much more interesting than being awake, though.