Goodnight, Sweet Prince

What strange times I'm living through. I've been trying to lead a more sedentary life recently and have only been out on the town for a handful of times in the last two weeks. I must confess that last Friday was probably the biggest hiccough in the plan, when I drank enough red wine to wash down a large cow with, and my poor head certainly woke up to the full horror of that on Saturday morning. But apart from that specific excursion, my outings have been somewhat moderate by earlier standards, at least. I've been going to bed early, swathing my face in lavender oil (to aid good sleep), and reading a book to aid my rest. Why then have I been repeatedly tormented by the most bizarre, disturbing and (yes) cruel dreams every night?

My Great Aunt Dolores used to say that our dreams were evidence that none of us really exists. She said that the old religious ideas that dreams were god's way of talking to us were a load of old codswallop. She was more akin to the Greeks' theory that dreams came from within the self, but she took the idea even further in some ways, although stopping short of Plato's claim that dreams were 'communications from the soul'. Dolores's theory was that when we become unconscious (i.e. when we sleep), we are at once tapped into the consciousness of the Universe and that our dreams are merely the collective babble that emanates from that consciousness. From this she deduced that as individuals, we don't exist. Her claim was that the cacophony of voices that our mangled, incomprehensible dreams reveal to us is merely evidence that we are all 'One'. Our conscious physical selves are too trapped in our own egos to tune into the real collective mind (she said), and only when we sleep do we release our egos and slide into the deluge of combined communication. Dolores claimed that none of us really thinks as an individual, but that we all think as a single entity. Hence, her assertion that none of us really exists in the way that our waking worlds would have us believe. Many people have suggested that my Great Aunt Dolores was bonkers, although I have to say that this wasn't usually because of her philosophical views.

However, I remember a time when the two of us were travelling through North America and we stayed for a while with a group of Navajo Indians (Native Americans to you; Red Indians to my somewhat anachronistic aunt). This particular tribe has a tradition where dreams are considered vital to the understanding of life and nature, and during our stay they bored the pants off Dolores each morning by recounting the previous night's dreams to one other at breakfast (breakfast - by the way - consisted of hash browns, waffles drooling with maple syrup, pork roll, eggs and coffee). Hogwash, she called it - and told them so. Self-indulgent hogwash. She so insulted them with her assertion that dreams were nothing more than the channelling of all human thought - and nothing to do with messages from the gods - that they threw us out of their community, but not before we had been forced to buy a whole range of turquoise (plastic) jewellery and some rather tacky wacky 'dream-catchers' which are constructed like spiders' webs to be hung above the bed at night to prevent evil dreams from entering our sleep. I still use mine, although I don't know why I bother, because I still have nightmares.

When I next write to you, dear reader, I'll tell you about the time that Dolores managed to insult a whole group of Chinese people by telling them that whereas the rest of the world was frightened by China's communism, there would eventually come a time when the world would only be concerned about China's capitalism. This was in the 1970s and Dolores's prediction seemed farcical to say the least. When I asked her how she could possibly have made such a preposterous prophecy, she replied that not only does none of us exist - neither does time. "I heard it in a dream, dear boy," she said. "We all have this information within us. It's just that most people - like you - choose not to let their waking egos listen."

This is why I think my Great Aunt was so fearless. Because she believed that she was part of some huge universal consciousness, she believed too that she was immortal. Unfortunately, as her excursion over Niagara Falls in a barrel some years later proved, she wasn't.