I’ve rocked on splintery boats and I’ve rolled on dead seas - but I always had dreams come true

For a while, I analysed dreams for a living....

I’ve never mentioned this before, but I do believe in the power of dreams to predict the future…

Okay, okay! Yes! I am a bit of a mad old man and I need to believe in something, so why not my dreams?

After all, sometimes they do come true… don’t they?

I’ve always thought of dreams as allegories for life, hallucinogenic poetry whizzing around the corridors and halls of the mansion of your mind … secret rooms, haunted rooms, enemies undermining the foundations, lost loves crumpled on the stairs, fallen angels, gargoyles, the endlessness of Gormenghast in the gummy wind blowing in from the place of dead roads…

Dreams are all in your mind, you see – and, just because you are asleep, why does it all have to be incoherent glitchy rubbish caused the day’s stress, too many cheese sandwiches before bed and what Judge Judy’s just snapped at you over the telly before you turned it off?

What if dreams are really your map-makers?

When I was about 12 years old, I dreamt I got off an old red school bus, a double-decker with the number 7 illuminated by a wobbling badly connected light bulb. But all my pals and family, everybody I knew, stayed on.

Do you know, they didn’t even notice I’d gone ...

It was okay though, I knew where the bus was headed, so, obviously, I knew where they were going too. I knew which terminus they would disembark at.

It was in the heart of town, where the factories and the offices and the houses had all been built, back-to-back, cheek to jowl.

In a dreamy, hazy way I felt secure going off by myself for a little while, to have a look around… explore some back streets, some dark alleys, visit the places where the alkies and the drug addicts go, meet the dispossessed, the dark and the lonely. Commune with the romantic ones, their hair as long as the flailing streets and their eyes as shiny black as the oily puddles.

Today, I still like walking in the rain.

Anyway, when I found everybody again they were gathered in the big square that all the factories, office and houses had been built around.

They were sitting cross-legged by sweet-smelling campfires and drinking cups of tea, waiting while the teachers and the cog-makers ticked boxes and allocated their lives to them.

It was a shock when I realised that nobody would ever let me back in to that circle of homes again.

And the Number 7 bus had already gone.

So, I set off walking.

And I’ve been on that wonderful road of dreams ever since.