Dreams of a bird with flu

I've just spent the past three days out of action with flu. Before anyone comes to cull me I should add that it was just the usual kind of flu - temperature, fever, mucus etc and not the tail feathers poking out of the pond type. I'm not going to go into further detail as I think (and rather hope) that most people do not enjoy reading about illness.

But one aspect worth recording though was a fever-driven nightmare which replayed in my mind for several semi-conscious hours: I kept seeing hundreds of boxes painted white scattered out on the earth almost like matchboxes - except that they were almost certainly coffins. There was something in the middle of all the coffins but I couldn't identify what it was. I could hear loud cries of violence or anger and my mind kept searching for a reason, for an understanding of what had happened to produce all the white wooden coffins. Towards the end of the nightmare two words were chanted repeatedly: "Jamal Islamia".

I'm not about to look those words up - as far as I know its the name of a group held responsible for several bomb attacks in Asia.

A few days previously I had a dream in which a twenty-something Nicole Kidman was sitting on the floor of a dark room in a red dress and whispering to me about some kind of a clinic she had sent her (unnamed) man to. Both dreams were unusually bizarre but if I had to choose one to suffer repeatedly through the torture of a fever - and I think most of us can agree - I'd take the red dress over the white-washed coffins any day.