More than half of all Herald readers booked a short break in UK last year

as such they’ll get the right to go everywhere with their partner.

David Green served eight-and-a-half years with the Royal Artillery, including tours of duty to the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. He began suffering PTSD symptoms after he left the Army in 2001, with depression, stress and night terrors.

The nightmares can leave him exhausted the next day, but his year-old Bravehound springer spaniel Rosie instinctively knows how to help.

Green explained: “She will not so much give me early warnings of nightmares but she’ll wake me up before I have them. Before they even develop in my mind Rosie will crawl up the bed and rest her head and her front paws on my chest before any nightmares kick in.

“My partner has watched the dog come up and do this when I am just starting to stir. If the nightmare does start to develop she will put her full body across my chest and lick my face or lick my hand. That’s enough to wake me up and bring me out of it before I have the attack.

“It’s now two months since I last had one, and because I have a good night’s sleep and I am rested, in the morning everything else is a lot easier to deal with, so I can handle the normal day-to-day stresses of life.”

It seems like remarkable foresight from the bouncy dog running around the garden centre in the happy-to-be alive way springer spaniels do, but Green says the dog is

Above left: Paul Wilkie and Irma – ‘She knows when I am sad, she knows when I need her support, she’s an amazing dog’ Above: Bravehound founder Fiona MacDonald with one of the pups in training, Gabby, a labrador