Dream

 

It is a known fact that everyone dreams about the Queen. Dim-witted journalists looking for a story ask why we grieve for someone we’ve never met. These writers should consult their dreamlife, their fifteen volumes of dream diaries, their inner self for the last time they interviewed her in an intense five-part series sitting opposite each other on fluffball clouds, no subject off-limits. I couldn’t count the number of times the Queen has shown up in my dreams, but then I’m not counting. Sometimes I cannot remember even meeting her the next morning, which I don’t put down to brain fog, or a temporary lapse, or denial, but the simple fact that we don’t remember most of what we dream, even when it’s a very pleasant conversation about horse racing and whether to put the cream or the jam first on the scone, with the Queen, beside a teeming skateboard rink surrounded by an arrangement of some hundred gold-edged teacups and saucers. There is no reason to have a survey asking have you dreamt about the Queen, even though there have been plenty of them, especially in England, because over a brief lifetime of seventy years the chances of the Queen showing up even just once are statistically 100%. I have found her reassuring since she first entered consciousness, she keeps to the point and is always dressed appropriately and well for the occasion. Heads of state speak of her enquiring mind and innate curiosity and I can corroborate these attributes from my own subconscious world summits, as we gaze (this is in another dream) around the orangery and through its hundreds of well-fitted panes with looks of blank amazement, sipping a very pleasant Indian brew. People who know about these things say that Queen dreams signify feelings of power and being in charge, that we are leading toward some victory in our lives. I suppose that’s right. Apparently these dreams can be about channelling my female energy and well who am I to argue, with the Queen? It makes perfectly obvious sense that someone we encounter every week in some film or newspaper or novel for decades, someone who is a living dream that we but see passing by, would blur in the nicest way imaginable into our own dreams, which is why it’s always perfectly normal (why wouldn’t it be normal?) to have the Queen come around the corner of our already hectic schedule, fix us with a hard stare, tell us we must sit down and have a cuppa and scones with strawberry jam, because truly she has a number of things that need saying right now. Having covered major issues confronting all 56 Commonwealth nations in about four seconds, the Queen departs via beds of daisies saying it was good to catch up, even as a voice can be heard from another part of the house saying Wake Up Australia, you’ll be late for work.