Last night I had a dream that I feel compelled to share.
In this dream, I dreamt that I had a dream that I felt compelled to share. Yes, I know - divulging one's dreams is rarely a good idea. Viennese witch doctors are liable to pounce on them, friends sigh with boredom as we embark upon the sentence beginning 'I had a really weird dream last night', and as for relatives, they despair, having heard it all before. But this dream - the one in which I dreamt that I had a dream that simply had to be revealed - was something else. I dreamt that I was dreaming of being asleep on a beach, dreaming. If this sounds like a ridiculous post-modern conceit, consider that the excellent Italian writer Antonio Tabucchi wrote a book called Dreams of Dreams, in which he imagined the foremost dreams of 20 great artists, musicians and writers. Why did he do this, and did he do it successfully? My own dream did not yield the answers to these questions, for, at this juncture in the dream, I was sleeping a dreamless sleep (the best kind of sleep, for my money). All was therefore well, for in the deepest dreamless somnolence lies peace, until reality, in the form of a dream, intruded. Suddenly, dreaming of a dream that had to be shared, Aerial Attack was looming over me.
"Alex!" he shouted.
Yes, I replied.
"Spot M was epic yesterday!"
I thought it might be.
"And so was that special place I've been telling you about. About 6-8ft, clean and hardly anyone out. It was epic, I tell you, epic! There were stand-up barrels galore!"
I thought it might be. I sat in the car park at Marazion, discussing the state of British surfing and wondering whether to go out. In the end, I decided to preserve my ability to walk, for ever since the flight back from Hawaii my neck has been killing me.
"Sorry to hear that, mate," said Aerial Attack. "But it should be good today as well. The Boneyard might even work."
And then I awoke. Spot M will work, the Special Place will work, the Boneyard will work, even the mighty break of D-Bay may come alive, for the chart looks mighty fine. But that damned neck is playing up, and although it has taken me 45 years, I now understand that discretion is the better part of valour.
Pictured: Pereira Maintains by Antonio Tabucchi. Like the beautiful Requiem, it is a much better book than the rather pretentious and unwieldy Dreams of Dreams, perhaps proving, beyond doubt, that one really should keep one's dreams to oneself.
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