About erotic dreams and dead kittens. Not necessarily in that order.

I'll tell you what we are NOT watching tonight. Football. I am possibly one of the few women in the UK whose husband is not obsessed with it. I knew there was some good reason I chose him after all!


I was leaving someone’s house and walking to the gate. They had a few pets in the garden, a very large playful dog (I think it was a Great Dane), a cat and a few chicken running around. As I approached the gate, I noticed a tiny kitten. Really tiny. Possibly only a few weeks old.

I thought it was adorable and was going to pick it up to show to my child when the dog just snatched it from under my nose. He held the kitten in his enormous jaws, and the mother cat hissed and jumped, and I shouted, and shouted and tried to grab the dog.... and the dog just swallowed the kitten. Just like dogs would swallow a stolen sausage when you tell them off- in a hurried, awkward way.

It was a pretty nasty thing to have witnessed. Fortunately, I woke up straight after that.

When I was a child, I had two reoccurring nightmares. One was about the little dog I had then. As if I come up to the double doors leading to our balcony. And notice that my dog is stuck between them. As I rush to open the doors to free him, I hear him bark behind me. Which one is the real dog and which is some spooky thing pretending to be him is the disturbing question.

Another, similar dream was about my mother. As if we are sitting in our old arm-chairs, me reading and her sewing, when I suddenly realize someone is washing up in the kitchen.

'Who is washing up?' I ask her, sort of beginning to worry a little. And my mother stares back, because we both know there isn’t anyone else in the flat.

I get up and go in the kitchen and I see...my mother. Calmly washing up. She does not look at me, she just stands there. So, I retreat quietly and return into the room, and tell my real mother that we’d better leave the flat ASAP.

I am sure there are specialists who could explain why I kept getting those nightmares where my dog or my mother would double up in such a scary way.

I can understand dreams that are caused by something that happens in real life. For example, I watched Snatch in the evening. Would it not be only natural if I made passionate love to Brad Pitt in my dream that night? But noooo, of course not. Instead, a huge dog swallows a little fluffy kitten in front of me.

And speaking of erotic dreams, wouldn’t it be great if we could choose who stars in them? I am almost never that lucky. The best erotic dreams I can claim to have had were during my pregnancy. (Thank you, hormones.) Normally, however, I end up in bed with people who, in real life, would be the most undesirable, unrealistic choices. A very short and very old arts teacher, a hairy chushka at work, or a Japanese wife of one NGO worker I knew socially in Baku. Could not look her in the eye the next day.

So... yes. Dreams can be weird and scary, and bizarre. But then again, I am quite a bizarre person.