Dreamland

As I may have said before, there is nothing more boring than accounts of other people's dreams and I certainly don't want to lumber you with descriptions of my own.

Instead, here are one or two observations of a more "distanced" character, some of which may be of interest to some of you.

• If you speak two languages, which language do you dream in - your mother tongue or your acquired language? I have ALWAYS dreamt in English except for a short period many years ago when I was trying very hard to learn French. As soon as I had "mastered" the language, or at least felt relatively at ease in it, I reverted to English and have never once had a dream in French since. I should add that I am not a bilingual in the strict sense of that word; I learnt French far too late in life for that ever to be the case. I wonder how my experience compares with others in the same situation.

• I cannot swear to the absolute truth of the following, my memory not being what it used to be, but I am pretty sure that I am not very wide of the mark when I write that, in all the years I was in boarding school - roughly between the ages of 8 and 18 - on the first night I was back at school, I always dreamt I was at home; and on the first night of the holidays, I always dreamt I was at school. The sheer misery of waking from the former dream was matched only by the unadulterated joy on waking from the latter. Do others report similar experiences?

• People and Places:  Family and friends are of course prominently featured in my dreams and that means that, like all of us, I am not spared the desolation of waking to a world in which those so close to my heart are missing. The funny thing is that such dreams rarely occur in settings that I recognise, or if I do, only from other dreams. Paris, Dijon, New York and London are among the regular backdrops but they bear little or no resemblance to the towns that I know in reality. There is the Dijon station of my dreams and the Dijon station of my waking hours; there is the Paris I know so well from countless visits and a very different Paris, strung out flat and endless, like Phoenix, Arizona. There is the Boating Museum in Saint Jean de Losne where a group of us meet to help and advise expatriates with administrative and other problems, and the building on the edge of collapse situated in an unknown village also on the verge of collapse....

Go figure, as they say!