Spandau Ballet are performing in my living room, but the concert is cut short when Tony Hadley suddenly flounces off in the middle of Only When You Leave. (Apt, no?) The Kemps are shaking their heads in disbelief and the audience are on the verge of turning hostile when in strolls Nick Rhodes from Duran Duran..

Nick takes Tony’s place as lead singer, which is Strange Behaviour (see what I did there?) because his place has always been behind his impressive organ keyboard. Whatever. I’m up for it because Nick is my life-long crush – a man whose wheelie bins I would lovingly trawl for traces of his DNA. (not really, M’Lud.)

So, what’s a stalker girl to do? I have to make my existence known to Nick or I might as well DIE!

Gets weird (er)

I find myself on an old-style double-decker bus trying to out-run a typhoon. (Typhoons in Manchester?) It’s during the confusion that I corner Nicholas and confess my love for him – especially during the years 1980-1987..

At this moment he pulls me towards him and kisses me!!

I don’t want this moment to end. Ever!

No doubt I was attempting to snog my pillow thinking it was Nick’s gorgeous face, but this was one dream that I did NOT want to wake up from – typhoon or no typhoon!

When it comes to dreams, most of mine are weird and not in a pleasant way, but then I’ve always been a bit prone to weird dreams..

I dream a lot, which is interesting as studies have shown that a lot of autistic people have poor dream recall. Other studies, however, have shown that people with Aspergers dream vividly and recall their dreams very well.

I’ve had anxiety problems all my life and severe sleep issues for the last seven years so I wonder if anxiety plays a part? Or the menopause? If I remember rightly.. my dreams always turned a bit funky when I was on my period – aka – minus the calming influence of oestrogen.

I would imagine that many autists have anxiety, so high levels of stress hormones in the body at night will no doubt affect the quality of sleep and influence dreams. I also know that If I have a nightmare in the early hours, I will have subsequent nightmares because the stress hormones have flooded my body – therefore there is zero chance of me achieving dreamless sleep.

I’ve also had premonition and visitation dreams.

No, I’m not a nutter. Well, maybe just a little nutterish?

See, there is a marked difference between your ‘bog standard’ dream and a visitation one because normal dreams are fragmented and make no sense – especially if you’ve been at the cheese. For instance, you might dream about your house, but the kitchen is a swimming pool and your back garden is a supermarket and a grizzly bear is chasing you with a wonky trolley that transforms into a sports car. How many grizzly bears have you EVER seen driving a car? These kinds of dreams are your brain trying to make sense out of the information it’s taken in during the day – often without you realising it. Visitation dreams, on the other hand, are rational except the people in it (aside yourself) are often dead. Or about to be, as many people dream of loved ones at the same time that they die. They often appear younger and/or in ‘good health’. You wake from such a dream convinced that you’ve experienced something far too real to be a dream. What’s more, you never forget it.

There are theories about visitation dreams, but I won’t bother with the ‘psychotic episodes’ one that pseudosceptics insist on peddling because the thought of an afterlife gives em the willies!

One theory is that it’s to do with the grieving process and that may well be true, except that many of these dreams foretell the future. In one of mine, I saw my dad sitting in the same crematorium where his funeral service had been held, with his arm protectively around his brother. I distinctly heard Dad tell my uncle that he would “take care of him”. The dream felt very real. I didn’t understand it at the time, but it made sense a few weeks later when we got the news that my uncle had died – just six weeks after my dad’s death!

I remember that dream very clearly – as is the case with visitation dreams.

Case in point: My Nick Rhodes dream has been sitting in my drafts folder for months. I’d written the details down within half an hour of waking up because I knew I’d forget them otherwise. As a rule, I don’t make a habit of writing about my dreams, but this one was about Nick Rhodes – the love of my teenage life. The man I used to daydream about pulling up at the school gates in a big limo and carrying me out of double-maths like Richard Gere in Officer and a Gentleman. The fact that I was a zit-ridden fourteen year old didn’t come into it, but let’s not get bogged down with the legal implications as it was only ever going to be a one-sided relationship between Nick and my adolescent mind, y’know?

The point is that this dream was special and a most welcome change from my usual Tarantino-esque offerings from my insane brain.

I had completely forgotten about the dream until I came across it one morning while I was looking through my unpublished posts. I read through it and honestly don’t recall any of it. I just know that it must have happened for me to write about it. In contrast, I remember visitation dreams in vivid detail, even though they happened years ago. I’m ruling out wishful thinking because if that was the case, surely I would remember every detail of my Nick Rhodes dream – especially the kiss part? Alas, I don’t remember it at all. 😦

Do you remember your dreams? Or do you wake up blissfully unaware of where your sub-conscious mind has been?

“I think we dream so we don’t have to be apart for so long. If we’re in each other’s dreams, we can be together all the time.” ― A.A. Milne ~ Winnie The Poo