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All of the following is true
A few years ago I dreamed about you. It was so unexpected, so vivid and unlikely that I wrote it down. Then I wrote it up. I showed it to you, and few close friends, and my boyfriend and then I put it on the internet because I was really pleased with how it turned out.
I didn’t see what was right in front of me. Nobody really pays attention to their dreams, do they? Sometimes you’re in my dreams now, just the way you just are there in my waking life. I don’t have specific dreams about you. I don’t need to. And then, at the end of last year, I dreamed about you again, as vividly as the first time. When I woke up I shook you out of sleep to tell you about it. You laughed and asked me why the urgency? It was only a dream. It didn’t mean anything. Dreams like that are never nothing. Never nothing with you and me in them.
I wrote it down. When I looked at it later, I had to laugh. It really was just a dream. It didn’t mean anything. This wasn’t a dream to write up and put on the internet.
***
This time, we’re in a kitchen. In fact it’s our kitchen, although this is where it becomes obvious it’s a dream because it is a hundred times messier than you would ever let it get in real life.
We’re sat on the floor, between the oven and the sink. You’re giggling and I’m giggling and there’s a lot of … cake mix. You’ve got a bowl full of it and you’re carefully pouring it into the cake tin I’m holding. Although we’re laughing, we are concentrating hard. This is one important cake. The tin is sprung, but we’ve lined it twice over with greaseproof paper. We don’t want anything to go wrong.
You open the door of the oven and the blast of heat takes my breath away. Then gently, gently gently, we put the cake inside and shut the door. We sit there, and watch it rising and I can smell it, so sweet and hot and delicious. I put my hand out to the door a few times, but you stop me. So we just sit there, watching. And I wake up, slowly, the smell of baking the last thing to disappear.
***
And it’s only now, of course, months later that it’s obvious. As I’m laying on the couch trying not to get annoyed that the sonographer accidentally put most of the gel on my knickers, and we’re listening to the crazy drum and bass of our baby’s heartbeat; it’s only now I remember the dream and I think ‘oh I see…’ and wonder why my subconscious has to be quite so obtuse.
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