Here is my bed. Yes, this shot was staged.

Two year-old queen size bed. The bedlinen is about the same age, and most would probably say the doona cover is a pretty typical blokey choice. Second pillow generally thrown off the bed when sleeping, more used for propping-up to read the paper on the weekends.

• No tooltips on this one. Nothing much more to say, and I can’t be stuffed doing them today.
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On a related note, I had four mini-dreamlets last night:

• The Lombard Paper factory fire became known in the media as the “Susannah Bowen Fire” — not because my sister was involved, but some other person with the same name had invented something that was inside the factory.
• Then I was reading the newspaper article about the fire in a service station. I was on a long drive on my own, and had stopped for some breakfast, but I didn’t understand how the cafeteria system worked. Another guy showed me: you had to get a bowl from the pile, choose and pay for your breakfast cereal at the counter. He then did so with me, also paying the shopkeeper with a $20 note. I got my change back right, but then I realised the guy had done some trick with both our $20 notes, and conned the shopkeeper into giving him more money than he started with, something like in the opening scenes of “Nine Queens.”
• Then I was on the 246 bus with Tony, going from Elsternwick towards Elwood. The bus turned off Nepean Highway into Glenhuntly Road, right over onto the wrong side of the road. It then corrected itself, but as we went on, lots of cars were coming at us on the wrong side of the road. We and a couple of other passengers went up to ask the driver what was going on, and he pointed to the other side of the road and said there was bad flooding.
• Finally, I was at Marita’s house, early on a weekday morning. I suddenly noticed a lot of smell from traffic pollution coming through the window. I pointed it out to Marita and Justine, but they said they couldn’t smell anything.

What all this means, I don’t know. I just find it interesting on the rare occasions that I do remember my dreams.

I had a dream on Friday night. For someone who doesn’t often remember dreams, it was quite startling in the amount of detail (and plot, for want of a better word).

Staying overnight with Isaac, Jeremy and I at my house were my lovely Marita, my friends Tony and Rae, their daughter Phoebe, my sister Susannah, her husband Adrian, and Zoe (who is not a blood relative but probably qualifies as a pseudo-second-cousin).

On the bus driver’s radio was Kevin Rudd, ALP foreign affairs spokesman. But he wasn’t talking about foreign affairs, he was talking about transport, saying something about getting to Werribee at 15:00 the day before. Then he started talking about foreign affairs, something about a withdrawl from somewhere called Herrion Island (or similar).

Then I woke up.

The other night I had a dream that there was a hole in my thumb. Near the base, a slot about two millimetres long by perhaps five millimetres across. I could look through the hole and see inside my thumb. No blood, but a kind of weird mostly hollow structure, a bit like the inside of a capsicum, but skin-coloured. It didn’t hurt. I marvelled at it for a bit, and it was one of those dreams which isn’t immediately obviously a dream.

Odd.

I dreamt that I woke in the night (not unusual recently), hearing noises in the house. Not just the usual possums ballroom dancing in the ceiling, but something louder, like people moving about the kitchen and the hallway, creaking on the floorboards. Initially I felt groggy and unable to move, but eventually woke up enough to go and confront them, holding a towel (!) for protection.

I burst into the kitchen, and found 4-5 blokes in dark suits and sunglasses in there. I gurgled something at them, attempting to shout at them to get out, which they did, running out through the back door. I ran back, grabbed my camera, turned it on and turned the flash off (so they wouldn’t see it go off) and took some pictures of the men as they ran out, which given it should have been nighttime and dark, and they were running, and the flash was turned off, came out remarkably clear, and I was feeling very damn pleased with myself that I could take the pics to the police.

At some point the running men all stopped and came back, convinced me that their intentions were good, that they hadn’t been trying to break in or burgle, merely to deliver a surprise package, which was in the kitchen. Sure enough I found it and opened it, and it turned out to be a big picture of me, getting shaved for a charity day (something like the World’s Greatest Shave or Bluey Day or one of those, though in real life I’ve never done it).

Dreamt last night that I was walking in the city and came across three blokes in business suits. One was unconscious on the ground, one sitting, bleeding slightly and the third standing but obviously in a daze. They’d obviously been in some kind of accident. I whipped out my shiny new mobile phone and dialled 112 (the international standard emergency number)… and got a wrong number. Hmm. Tried again with 000… another wrong number. Tried a couple more times and each time got a wrong number. Meanwhile someone else tried and got through.

I had a dream a couple of nights ago that I got into work, and instead of wearing my usual shirt/tie/trousers/shoes, I found myself wearing shirt/tie/jeans/runners, which looked very odd, to say the least. A somewhat incongruous mix of clothing styles.

Mind you, one office I used to work in had a bloke who regularly wore runners to work with his trousers/shirt/tie. I know it’s common for some women to wear runners on their commutes, to minimise the effect of their painful high-heeled PowerShoes, but for blokes to wear runners — let alone in the office — just doesn’t seem right.

This guy had another quirk. For the sake of argument and anonimity, I’ll call him Geoff, though his real name is… oh, wait, shouldn’t say that.

He kept his own special milk in the fridge. I’m not sure why the varieties supplied (full cream 4% fat, Rev 2% fat, Skinny 1% fat) were inadequate, but perhaps he had a particular taste or dietary need. Perhaps 1.5% or something, though I suppose you could get that by mixing Skinny and Rev. Might taste horrible though.

All this became apparent one time when he came into the kitchen and asked somebody to pass the milk.

Somebody replied. “Which milk?”

“Geoff’s Brekky Milk”, he replied, in the kind of voice which made it sound like we should be impressed. And yes, he referred to himself (or at least, his milk) in the third person. (Or should that be third carton?)

The somebody looked in the fridge door, and sure enough found a cartoon with a big label which said “Geoff’s Brekky Milk”.

And yea, the milk was passed.

This morning I dreamt I was sitting on a tram, with my kids and a platonic friend who turned out to be Deborah from
Men Behaving Badly, when an ex-girlfriend (one I had taken some time getting over) got on the tram and sat nearby. Her hair was different - much longer, and dyed purple. She was dressed in work gear, but looked the worse for wear… older, or something. We exchanged glances, and smiles. She asked how I was, and if I was happy with Deborah. I said oh no, I wasn’t with Deborah.

That’s all. Odd.

As I write this, the noise from a mower in the front garden pervades the normal Sunday morning tranquillity. The good people from D&K mowing are here, finally dealing with my grass and weed excess problem. D&K Mowing turns out to be a couple of teenagers called David and Keith. With a bunch of equipment including a noisy mower and rakes galore. Cool. Better them than me.

12:34pm. They’re still here (two and a half hours and counting). And they’ve just called in a parent with a whipper snipper.

12:55pm. Finished, except a jungle-type bit at the very back of the back garden which the mower choked on - they say they’ll do it next time. $75, money well spent to sit around relaxing while they did all the hard work!

An interesting dream last night. One of my ex-girlfriends (which one I don’t know, the dream didn’t reveal it) turned out to be related to one ofthe Sopranos, but it was like the Sopranos set in Melbourne. The cops were closing in fast on her, and she’d decided to skip the country, to move to New York and start up life there, to avoid them. For some reason I was not only helping her in a bit of very rapid packing, but I was seriously considering going with her. Hmm.

Then my mother turned up with dozens of kids’ shoes. Why, I don’t know, but it reminded me that there’s no way I want to go and live anywhere without my kids. So I decided I’d just drive mystery woman to the airport, though I was worrying if I might therefore be implicated in any police investigation into her disappearance.

The real world then intruded, though indirectly. I usually turn off my mobile phone at night, to save a few hours on the battery, and because I am loathe to interrupt my sleep for a phone call. This week this has been somewhat re-inforced by my starting to read "Blast From The Past", which revolves around a latenight phone call. But last night I forgot to turn off my mobile.

And it rang. At 4:54am - and 41 seconds. I didn’t hear it, though it would have got reasonably loud. It’s not one of those godawful jingles like some people have, and not one of those wanky polyphonic rings. (No doubt in a year or three they’ll be the norm, but right now they sound like the owner is showing off what an expensive shiny new phone they have.) No, mine’s just a fairly standard ring, which starts off quiet and gets steadily noisier, then by about the fifth ring, stops and diverts the caller to voicemail.

It didn’t wake me. I think it did, however, nudge my kids just slightly out of the land of Nod. Perhaps just across the border from Nod, to some Tijuana-like resort town. They were sleeping a room and a closed door away from the phone, and I remember being awake, hearing them coughing (they have colds at the moment), and glancing at my clock and noticing it was just after 5am.

So, who rang? I don’t know. The bastards didn’t leave a message on the voicemail, and as for the phone, well it helpfully recorded the time of the call to the nearest second, but as for the identity of the caller simply recorded "(no number)". Very bloody helpful.