Sometimes the drugs work too well

It was Wednesday night. Having done a lot of walking that day, and needing a good night's sleep, I took one of my lovely shiny sleeping pills.

Well, who needs a Thursday anyway? Oops...

An entire day's worth of sleep plus Radio 4 on in the background leads to some "interesting" dreams, that's for sure. I had assorted amusing storylines going on, none of which seemed to link together that well - I'm assuming the news intervened to change the details around.

I can't remember all of it, but one had me behind a door with a gun, shooting a procession of people trying to capture me for some reason or other. That then opened up into a proper Western, with assorted troops gathering at the house on the hill and having to be held off by my inventiveness, eventually escaping through a chimney (can't say I'd noticed it behind the door, but that's just picky) and escaping on horseback while the foolish enemy kept trying to get in the house.

Then I found myself on a raft, following a coastline until it reached a busy beach where I asked an official-looking chap in a boat if I had reached Italy yet. And I had! Yay! So I made my way on shore, and to a dingy-looking cafe to look for food and a job. The cafe owner had the radio on, and when a political speech played, the lights flickered and the sound came through him rather than the radio. As luck would have it, he was the leader of a local political party, and needed help in the upcoming election (which by now was in Iran, not Italy. Think I know what news story came on at that point then...).
This seemed mainly to involve driving through a busy market on the top of a particularly rickety car, and hacking at some wicker and seagrass hanging things on a market stall using a sword. Well, obviously... The car journey ended in a vast square covered in sawdust with a European colonial-looking palace at one end of it, and an oppressive army marching through. Oh and I almost forgot, in the market there was a stream of immigrants who had escaped from Europe, and who each received a bundle of sticks wrapped in twine. A tad fasciste, that bit...


Presumably there was a story about Burma on the news at that point, as we now moved to me discovering that Aung San Suu Kyi was being held under house arrest in rural Perthshire. Well, where else? And naturally, my dad was one of her captors. Naughty man. Amongst her few possessions was a large, heavy coin, which takes us to the next segment...

...where the coin is taken to blacksmith or someone similar (on a remote Scottish mountainside, of course), who transforms the large coin into many smaller ones, thus providing currency for the new state which I'm now setting up. I have a tent (which appears to be made of a saltire flag), a sword (ooh, again, how exciting!), some Scottish flags made of crystals which I hope to make a living by selling, and a small wooden bowl with provisions. While still in this guise, I find myself part of a Scottish delegation at what appears to be some kind of European conference. I find myself muttering under my breath every time the main English delegate (one T. Blair) claims to be speaking for the whole of Britain. One of the French speakers gets a bit annoyed, and we get thrown out.

And that's all I remember, boo hoo. I think I woke up not long after that, at the perfectly reasonable hour of 4am. Maybe I should just go back to sleep and see if I can get something more exciting to happen - it's still not a patch on a dream a friend had once involving Prince Charles, Sylvester Stallone, and diamonds hid in unexpected places...