I tried to have a suitable dream but my brain just refused to cooperate

‘We’d like to analyse your dreams on live TV’, the researcher tells me. I had feared as much. For years, I have sat companionably with psychoanalyst Michael Murphy in the Today Show green room and then watched while he takes the top off viewers’ heads and tinkers with their dreams. But when the show returned a couple of weeks back, it was my news panel colleague Shane Coleman who had his dream analysed and I knew the jig was up and it would be only a matter of time before they got into all our heads.

Still, I’d been particularly dreading the call. In the two years since my brother died, I have been blighted with terrible, fretful nightmares. Many have gone the way of most dreams — mercifully, without memory to anchor them in my mind, disappearing with the dawn. The few that have been too awful to forget are honestly too shocking and too gruesome to repeat — though I was briefly, darkly amused last year as I waited in the green room while Michael dissected some lucky viewer’s perfectly harmless nocturnal nonsense, on the day after I’d been visited by the worst, most violent nightmare yet. If I’d shared my own awful involuntaries that afternoon, I’d have been dispatched directly to the old Big House on the hill in Cork and there’d have been no need for my return train ticket.

I explain some of this to the researcher, and promise to endeavour to have a less traumatic and more suitable dream in the nights ahead. And sure enough, that very night, I dream that I am pregnant. Delighted with myself, I tell anyone who wants to know. It is only when a stranger points out that I don’t appear to be getting any bigger and that I am some considerable way beyond menopause that stuff stops making sense. ‘You’re not pregnant; you’ve got cancer,’ they tell me.

Now, by the standards of the last two years, that’s a very good dream for me. I wake up punching the air and fire it off to RTÉ suggesting that in order not to ruin everybody’s dinner, we change the ending just a bit. It’s telly, after all.

A couple of days later, The Small Girl tells me about the dream she’s had the night before. In it, the IRA tried to blame Dylan Moran for everything that’s happened by creating a deep fake video in which he’s making his way up a downward escalator while simultaneously attempting an act of self-pollution. Now, I think to myself, that’s a dream. If I can pass that off as my own, Michael Murphy will probably shoulder me around the studio just for being so beautifully bats*** bonkers.

I resolve to send The Small Girl’s dream off to RTÉ as soon as possible, but it’s the weekend so there’s one more sleep to go before I have to travel to Cork to offer up some nocturnal meandering to be puzzled over. And I swear to God, in the dying moments before the light of morning, this happens:

I am producing a new celebrity game show in which famous people admit if they’d kissed people they shouldn’t have when they were growing up. The details are a little furry, but I know the show involves Nicky Byrne, his wife Georgina, her sister Celia Ahern and Ben Volpeliere Pierrot, the singer with Curiosity Killed The Cat. The dramatic element comes to a head when Byrne very reluctantly admits that he once got off with his future sister-in-law — a development that reduces all three of that triangle to devastated tears and as every viewer, including this one who’d come up with the idea, can see, will clearly have catastrophic consequences well into the future for all concerned. Watching, trembling, I move my cup of tea and underneath it there are quite a lot of cooked egg whites.

To clarify, and in order to keep the peace in the Byrne/Ahern households: the only place that any of this actually happens is in my head. Still! What will Michael make of that, I excitedly wonder, as I fire it off on email.

When I arrive in Cork the producers take me aside and gently tell me they’ve had a chat and all things considered, I should stick with the pregnancy dream with the cancer ending. To be honest, they all but send me a card with ‘you OK, hun?’ written on it. An hour later, on live television, Michael looks at me sadly and tells me I really need to write something creative. Or maybe that was a dream as well. Honestly, it’s getting harder and harder to tell.