Dreams can be so cruel.

One minute you’re soundly sleeping, letting your body rejuvenate itself, fully at peace and blissful rest.

The next minute your brain is chugging along with activity like a steam train working hard to get up a steep hill.

There is a distinct effort to take you away to somewhere else, somewhere not quite real and yet feels real enough to make you remember it when you wake up.

Sometimes your brain works overtime to conjure up the same dream multiple times, carefully reconstructing it as before like a child fixing a broken Lego structure by going back to the instructions and starting again, to replicate it perfectly.

In my dream my best mate and I are walking through woodland somewhere near our childhood homes. We are both in our early 30’s. For reasons unknown, I get annoyed with him and casually hit him over the head with a rock.

He drops dead.

I didn’t mean to kill him, yet here I am, an accidental murderer.

In this dream I calmly and carefully bury his body in a place where I hope no-one will find it. Then I go home and say nothing; I just wait for his disappearance to be noticed, go and comfort his family, and get away with it.

I wake up flustered and anxious. I know I am not a murderer and yet, I feel like perhaps I am. Did I really kill someone?

I wake up confused. In my dream I spent time with my best mate again, which feels so precious because in reality he died suddenly thirteen years ago, in a car accident.

I sometimes have different dreams about him. Once I dreamed he was sleeping in my attic; he simply told me he was OK. In another dream he walked right back into our lives; apparently he hadn’t died, it had all been a mistake, and we simply accepted this and welcomed him back. Man, that was the best dream.

All these dreams about him have been distressing, and yet, to experience moments with him feels so amazing, like I actually do meet him again, for a brief second, even if it is all just a fiction made up by my brain.

So yeah, sweet dreams…with the odd murder nightmare thrown in for good measure.