Severed heads

I don’t know how often you talk about heads impaled on stakes, but it’s not often I do.

I have recently had a knee replacement. The pain relief isn’t working well so I am spending a lot of time in the arms of Morpheus, via his friends Timmy Tramadol and Catherine Codeine, so vivid dreams are the norm. I got back into bed in the early hours of this morning after a visit to the bathroom and as soon as my head hit the pillow I could see the bed was surrounded by impaled, mediæval-looking heads on stakes in various states of decay. Oddly enough they just seemed natural, not particularly scary.

This morning I had a physio appointment. There was a major traffic jam so there was a lot more time than usual to chat, and the taxi driver, whom we’d never met, talked of his time as a lorry driver in Eastern Europe. There was one place he’d love to revisit – Vlad the Impaler’s old castle. “you walk up the drawbridge,” he said, “and all around you are these stakes where he used to impale the heads of his enemies.”

Was it pure coincidence, or a dream foretelling the conversation, or the stranger picking up on my dream, and diverting his own thoughts? Graeme Kenna Wallasey, Merseyside