I’m not sure if there is any correlation with this spell of scorching weather, but lately I’ve been having some epic dreams; real edge-of-your-seat, night-long dramas, with casts of thousands and plots so tightly woven I would doubtless make millions if only I could re-create them back here in the real world. Which sadly I can’t. Which sucks.

Last night, for example, involved some kind of (low recall rate being my barrier to fame and fortune) city-wide treasure hunt, at the end of which I purchased four beautiful and ingenious Dartmoor crystal tumblers (despite being pretty sure Dartmoor crystal is not even ‘a thing’, I am reluctant to divulge details of the tumblers here, seeing as that is the one part of the dream I can recall in detail – look out for me on Dragons Den at some point in the future..).

A couple of weeks ago I dreamt of losing the gem stones from my grandma’s ring, which, depending on which dream meaning website you look it up on either means I’m soon to shuffle off this mortal coil or run into a big streak of luck (I know which I’d prefer).

I’m not normally a great believer in dream interpretations, primarily because (as demonstrated above), they tend to vary wildly, implying a total lack of reliability. But many years ago two dreams I had did challenge my usual pessimism.

The first was in the summer of 1989, when I was only seven years old. I know this because it was just days before the Marchioness disaster, a fatal collision between two rivercraft on the Thames in London on 20 August 1989, which resulted in the deaths of 51 people, most of whom were in their twenties. I remember dreaming of a boat in a narrow river channel, packed with people who were dancing late into the night. And then, suddenly, the boat capsized and everyone was in the water. When I subsequently saw the news on television my blood literally ran cold.

The second was probably around the same time. In this dream, I was introduced to a girl on the first day of term at school. Her name escapes me now, but I remembered her so well from my dream that when, on the actual first day of school, I saw her sitting at the front of the hall in assembly, I walked right up to her and called her, correctly, by her name. Oddly, it transpired she lived in our parish, and subsequently our parents became friends through our local church and she would sometimes came to my house after school when her mother was working late.

It’s disappointing to me that those are the only two concrete examples I can give of dreams that were clairvoyant in their nature. Some do say that children are more likely to exhibit clairvoyant tendencies than adults, before the onset of adulthood beats their belief in anything supernatural out of them. It’s likely, therefore, that my only two chances to predict the future in my dreams have passed. But don’t expect me to give up the ingenious Dartmoor crystal tumbler design just yet…