Dreamland: The Obama Mushroom Excursion

Last night I had easily one of the most bizarre dreams I have ever had.

It began normally enough: I walked down the stairs of my old house (a pretty standard setting for my dreams) and into the drawing room, and sitting in an armchair was Barack Obama, reading the paper.

You know how in dreams, vastly inaccurate things can happen, but you just accept it? I just accepted that Barack Obama was now my Dad. I gave him the cup of tea that was suddenly in my hand, not questioning how it got there because of course when you're dreaming you don't pause to consider the logistics of random tea apparitions.

Then we went out the glass door onto the patio up the steep hill of our lawn (this is how I know the dream took place at Pinswell, because the garden was so distinctive). It was sort of foggy - not in the sense that the weather was meant to be foggy, but in the way that your scope of vision in dreams is limited to what your brain wants you to see until it's ready to reveal it.

I could make out the shape of what looked like a deer at first, in fact I could see antlers, but suddenly it was a wolf, and I began to notice more and more creeping up the hillside behind the crumbling drystone wall. Then Obama-Dad sort of glared at them and they slinked off back into the mist.

Then we were picking mushrooms, brushing away the snow to find them, and I was explaining why you should avoid Fly Agaric to the President-elect of the United States of America as if it was the most normal thing in the world.

That was when I woke up, utterly bemused and wondering if this somehow reflects my optimism about the Obama Administration.