“Dreams can come true,” according to eyepatch-wearing 90s popster Gabrielle. But was she right? And would it even be a good thing if she were?

Over Christmas I’ve been sleeping on a sofa in a house I’m somewhat allergic to, which means I’ve been waking up a lot to blow my nose and unwittingly remember the night dances of my subconscious.

Pauline Mole said there’s only one thing more boring than listening to other people’s dreams, and that’s listening to other people’s problems. So continue from here at your own risk.

The dream leading up to Christmas morning involved Brighton’s Palace Pier. It was a stormy afternoon, and I was in an old theatre cum working men’s club, which formed one wing of this fantasy pier’s unusually ornate and capacious interior. 

It looked, in fact, much more like Brighton’s other pier, the old West Pier, which dominated the seafront with its spooky, fading, crumbling glamour, before it burned down in an arson attack that definitely had nothing to do with its rival.

In this dream world, the pier is creaking and straining under the storm’s battery, and myself and an unnamed companion are discussing getting out. Before we have time to act, the whole guilded lounge lists dangerously to the east, and breaks free from the main structure. There is panic and screaming, and a great terrible noise as the old iron supports, like the legs of a Wellsian tripod, begin to buckle in the strain. 

We are lucky. By a quirk of dream-logic, the doomed section crashed back against the main body of the pier, allowing us to clamber onto the roof and, from there, pull ourselves up to safety.

Dream-me is bemused at the lack of urgency shown by the pier staff – where are the emergency services? Worse, the owners haven’t even closed the pier to customers, with rubberneckers and holidaymakers alike still thronging, despite the pier’s clear impending total collapse.

I scream at the staff and as many people as I can to do something about this. I lose my temper a lot in dreams, and wake up startled by the violence of my imaginary shouting. This doesn’t happen much in real life.

Myself and my companion, who by now mysteriously resembles Chris Martin from Coldplay, make our way off the pier and onto the promenade, which him trying to calm down dream-me, still raging at the pier staff’s lack of safety management. And at this point the part of the pier we were in collapses into the sea, 

The rest of the pier soon follows.

Last night’s dream also involved high drama and soggy situations.

In a landscape ranging from stately home gardens to the wilds of Rannock Moor, I could see my friend Ros in the distance, walking down a winding, gentle country brook. 

Then, further uphill and upstream from Ros’ peaceful wander, I could see a raging torrent making its way down the water course towards her.

She was totally oblivious to the danger, and I was too far away for my shouts to reach her. So I started running across the wild grass towards here, while I watched the disaster unfold in slow motion – her belated realisation, the waters reaching her, and quickly enveloping her.

By the time I got to Ros she was unconscious on the grass, the storm waters now passed and the broom returned to its calm, burbling self.

Another figure had been running towards her from another direction, and arrived shortly after I did. This was Dan Christmas, Ros’s real life boyfriend, who she met on Christmas Day last year (hence the nickname).

He seemed annoyed that I had got there first, and as she woke up, totally unharmed, I tactically left them to it and went for a walk, finding myself on a high path that led to a terrifying vista over an impossibly vast and impassable landscape.

Thanks for tuning in to festive dream corner. For many years I didn’t really remember my dreams, so at the moment I’m trying to write them down when I can, full Murakami style. I’m interested in the means by which my brain chooses to process things. 

Sometimes the dreams are obvious and basic bitch retelling a of IRL events; sometimes they’re more outlandish and tinged with the surreal.

What does it all mean? Everything, but more importantly, nothing. And that’s okay.