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Just recently, I've started having the scariest dreams. Not wake-up-screaming scary, but scary in their banality. Last week, I dreamed that I was thirsty and wanted an icy Fanta from the fridge, but that it was too cold to go and get one. And do you know what? When I woke up, I did go and get it, even though it was cold. The next day, I dreamed that my boyfriend gave me a lift to Marks & Spencer on his way to work - and yes, within two hours, I was rooting around in the Luxury Fish cabinet. Either I've achieved the gift of prophecy, or I'm just incredibly boring. However, this week, there was great excitement when I dreamed that a) the journalist Miranda Sawyer had won a small part in a television hospital drama and b) that I'd broken my favourite Frosti-Mug. So far, neither has transpired.
Is this what I've got to look forward to: a lifetime of dreams about watching paint dry? It has been suggested to me that this is happening for exactly the same reason I don't have sexual fantasies any more. When you've packed an awful lot in, so to speak, in a relatively short time, and you've spent your life pretty much following your desires wherever they may take you, there isn't an awful lot of slack for the mind to play with.
"Dreams": the very word conjures up sumptuous vistas of the barely believable, fantastic transports of delight. Is this what I get for having a happy private life at last - dreams that make Watercolour Challenge look exciting? It wasn't always this way.
In my teens, 20s and early 30s, I had the most amazing dream life, which would more often than not wake me up in a blushing muck-sweat, glancing across the bed at various husbands, to see if I'd been rumbled. My first husband actually caught me out committing adultery with my second when, having fallen asleep on the marital sofa one night under the loving gaze of Husband One - "Exhausted herself baking cookies, poor sweet!" - I began to talk loudly and extremely graphically about what I would do to my lover next time I saw him. How we laughed!
During my second marriage - my husband having been a bit of a lad, though by then totally uxorious - I was tormented by the most amazingly rude dreams of his putative adultery, often with the most unlikely people (Princess Margaret once, I remember), which would leave me in such a fury next day that I would often not speak him for the next 24 hours, reducing the poor follow to the depths of despair.
Then, in the early 90s, when I'd gone off both of them, I started to have the most outrageous dreams about famous people - it was during this period, of Modern Review Rat Pack repute, that I probably got a bit carried away by my own publicity, shall we say, and was so intent on admiring the reflection in the pool that I tumbled all the way in, self-adoringly treading water in the shallow end of my own psyche. In the space of two weeks I had the following dreams:
A week after Elizabeth Hurley became the first actress to advance her career by putting on her clothes - That Dress - and was popularly believed to be about the most desirable thing on the planet after her boyfriend, I had the most amazingly realistic dream that the pair of them were fighting over my sexual favours outside the front door of my flat. I dived under the bed, all the better to protect my honour, but such was their frenzy that I could clearly hear their voices from my lowly sanctuary.
"Leave it, Liz! She's straight, I tell you!"
"Oh, sod off, H! I saw her first! In the Ladies, at the Groucho!" Sound of savage shin-kicking. "Now get out of the way!"
In my dream, I moaned to my husband, "Make them go! Get the police!" Then I woke up.
A week later, I was travelling across Siberia with Madonna sitting opposite me in the first-class carriage of the Trans-Siberian Express. Wrapped in soft furs, she looked beautiful and alluring, much better than her photographs. She was staring at me. But when I leaned forward to speak to her, I saw that she was crying, very quietly and softly, perfect tears dropping like tiny diamonds from Max Factor'd lashes.
I sat back in my seat, confused. At that moment, though, the train stopped and Oprah Winfrey got on. She stepped up into our carriage, cast a look at Madonna and sat down beside me. As the train started moving, I whispered under cover of the noise, "Oprah, why's Madonna crying?"
Oprah looked at me with that famous steady gaze, and then at the now openly blubbing Madge. Then she spoke: "Girl, she used to be the most famous woman in the world. Now you are." Leaning across the carriage, she tapped Madge smartly on the knee. "I said, get used to it, bitch!"
Those were the days. Now I'm reduced to listening to other people's celebrity dreams with the open-mouthed, green-eyed envy that sumptuously-appointed globe-trotting inspires in the impoverished and deskbound. Recently, my boyfriend dreamed that Tom Hanks had kidnapped us, my friend Emma and Ken Livingstone, and that he'd tied us all to hospital trolleys and was masturbating over us prior to torturing us to death. "And you all thought I was such a nice guy, huh?" he kept saying as he whetted the chainsaw. I know it must have been damned unpleasant - my boy can't even watch Big any more (previously one of his favourite films), but I felt nothing but covetousness. The bittersweet phrase, "I can dream, can't I?" takes on a hollow ring when you can't.
I'm glad that the Berlin Wall celebrations are over for another year. As a diehard Eastern bloc cheerleader, let alone one who has never been in the habit of being on the losing team, I have spent the past couple of weeks smiling from behind gritted teeth. Having sampled both copiously, I honestly think that I prefer the gung-ho, rah-rah-we-won Reaganites to the mild-mannered liberal democrats who nod and admit that, yes, there are serious problems in the former Communist bloc but insist that, on the whole, life is better than it was - especially in what used to be the USSR.
Really? Perhaps one of them could explain to me, then, why life expectancy in the countries of the former USSR has fallen by some 10 years over the same period. This is, apparently, the first recorded incidence of a mortality U-turn in any developed country, and exposes the lie of capitalist "progress" in the region even more than the civil wars and the persecution and the prostitution. What are they dying of out there, anyway - happiness?