A little self-indulgent posting just for posterity.

I had a dream on Saturday night\Sunday morning that I was at the foot of a mountain by a lake. In the sky around me were huge white cranes with scarlet red wing feathers, wheeling around on the updrafts. I picked up my binoculars and tried to get a closer look at what they were doing. They were building nests, large flat discs made of mud, that floated on the lake. Around the edge of each nest the birds had planted a kind of cage of upright sticks and longstalked flowers, tulips and daffodils, which were being visited by iridescent green hummingbirds. In my dream it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen and it made me cry. The rest of the dream descended into the usual pattern of me trying to do something (photograph the birds with my camera phone in this instance) and being massively, irritatingly, thwarted. Then I woke up.

I have a (probably not all that original) theory that the frustration theme in dreams, most commonly experienced as the "trying to run through glue" feeling, is the consequence of your body trying to move the parts of your body that have been deactivated by your brain as part of your sleep cycle. I had a good one once where I was trying to shout out in my dream and the frustration built up so much, stressing me out, that my heart sped up enough to partially wake me and enable me to spaz out, "Mwaaarrrdle!!". I sounded like I was brain damaged. And to a certain degree I had been.

Anyway, Sunday morning we set off to a carboot looking for junk (I actually picked up Wang Chung's Dance Hall Days on 12" for 50p - yessss) and as we pulled out of the drive, above me a huge white bird wheeled round and descended on the house opposite. It was a heron. No red feathers, but it was a big old bird alright.

Is it a sign, or is it just a coincidence....?