This is from February 4th:

Last night I had the most peculiar dream. Its peculiarity came from the fact that I was not in it, and it had very, very little to do with my life, it didn't really connect to events at all. It was wonderful, and because I wasn't in it, at least not as myself, and nobody else who I knew was in it, it felt completely real; there was no "in-dream consciousness" at all.

The only connection perhaps was that it started in a second-hand bookshop; I bought this novel which was published by Oxford Classics (I knew because it had the same crimson and cream spine). When I left the shop the cover was badly folded over, so I took it back and went to exchange it, but on the shelf where the replacement should have been I found another novel, one which intrigued me more, and it came free with the film adaptation.

I say "came free", but I really don't know that; I'm filling in blanks, because soon after I was inside that novel, not as a person who people acknowledged, but as an invisible onlooker. It was a period piece, full of melodrama, and I was watching on not as a film, but as if on a film set. Then I decided that I didn't want to spoil the book, so I stopped.

Really, the only thing that bore any resemblance to my "real" life was that, when I found this second book, I chose to buy it over one called Damnation; I remember thinking in the dream, "This must be the World Cinema original novels" section. The original title of Damnation read; "Karo ha zat".

It was like Tony Soprano's Kevin Finnerty dreams in season six, but here my dream character wasn't me, there was no identity crisis at all.

It's times like this when I wish I was seeing a shrink.