Yet Another Dream

I got shot at! Me, my brother and one of his old friends from school (God knows what the selection process for my dreams is) were sitting playing cards on a table by a ground-floor window. The window is wide open. A boy is standing in the street, looking at us. I am holding a book. After a short interval in which the boy is staring resentfully at us, he comes up to the window and, slurring his speech, demands to know what we're playing, and seemed to want to take my book. Within seconds he has become angry and, as if he was determined upon this course long ago he takes out the gun. He aims at me as I run out of the room. He misses narrowly. After a minute or so (or faster, we all know how instantly things happen in dreams) I return to the room. My brother is fine, his friend has escaped and the gunman is nowhere to be seen. At first I am relieved that no-one else has been shot at. However, I am reminded that there is somebody out there who actively wants to kill me and this thought haunted me for the rest of the dream. Until at one point, later on, I started discussing it wilth a friend. "Of course" I conclude, "that must have been a dream. Nobody is trying to kill me. That room we were playing cards in, it was like my brother's room in real life but on the ground floor. And I can't think of any reason why [brother's friend' would be there! We haven't seen him for years!". However, I was still anxious about whether this new assessment of mine was indeed correct.

At a later point in the dream I was walking around St Ann's Well park (or a similar, larger version with fewer trees which only appears in my dreams) dressed at the Pope and, on spotting two boys having a minor quibble I ordered them 'on the Authority of the Pope' to stop. Indeed they did.