chrishansenhome

No, not my residence. It's the TV show, House. I'm sure my US readers are all familiar with it, but it is now showing on some Sky channel here, and HWMBO discovered it through a friend of ours who likes it.


I call it Sherlock in a hospital, and my feelings were confirmed when I saw a picture of House's house, with the house number "221B". Briefly, someone has an accident/incident at the beginning (à la Six Feet Under) and is taken into the teaching hospital where Gregory House, a brilliant but very eccentric doctor is the head of diagnostics. He's got a coterie of three young doctors with him, and when the victim^Wpatient is brought in, they all normally kill the patient at least once and bring out the paddles. The graphics of what is going on inside of the victim^W patient are gruesome. House had an accident of some sort when he was a younger drug-addicted doctor, and is lame in one leg. He pops Vicodin like TicTacs, and is grumpy, nasty, manipulative, but brilliant. At the end the patient is normally discharged beaming.

Now after the first season I happened to sit down to watch with HWMBO, who always complains I spend too much time with the computer. I found it interesting, and have continued to watch it for a couple of weeks, sometimes two or three episodes in a night: Sky+ records each daily episode.

My problem is that it is affecting my dreams. I take beta blockers, and one side effect of these pills is to give you vivid dreams. So I wake up in a cold sweat, after some operation or other, and have difficulty getting back to sleep. The dreams often have some medical theme, and they're gruesome. I wouldn't call them nightmares, but they are VERY vivid, and thus are disturbing.

My diagnosis is that House is very bad for my imagination. I must quit, cold turkey. Perhaps I'll start on Vicodin.

The part I remember best is sitting on a stage next to Tony Blair, who is going to introduce John Prescott (Note for non UKans: Tony Blair, former Prime Minister of the UK, and John Prescott, former Deputy Prime Minister, and a man prone to gaffes and verbal fuffle) who will be giving a speech.

So someone introduces Tony Blair, who goes on to introduce John Prescott. Prescott comes to the podium, talks for a bit about Blair, and then introduces Blair again to give a speech. Blair, puzzled, goes back, says a few more words, and says that Prescott will give a speech.

You guessed it: Prescott introduces Blair again who shrugs and gives a strange little speech. I left the stage at this point and went to the furthest part of the venue, way up in the rafters, to retrieve my luggage.

I was dreaming that I was on a bus somewhere in Massachusetts, near where my grandparents lived. My mate Ethel was on the bus doing some knitting or sewing, and I was in shorts even though it was snowing outside. All of a sudden as I was standing to get off the bus, I got a leg cramp. I stamped on the floor (as I would when awake) to stretch my leg and make the cramp go away, but it didn't go away. I stamped harder and harder, but it didn't help.

So I awoke to find I was having a leg cramp in bed, and sat up and stamped my foot on the floor; the cramp then duly went away.

Happy New Year to everyone!

I've had a couple of odd dreams lately. The first one was one of a type that many Brits (and other people whose Head of State is HM the Q) seem to report having. HWMBO and I were giving part of my old stamp collection to the Queen. The stamps were very ornate; certainly not part of my former collection, most of which was stolen when I was a child. The Queen was very gracious, and then, in return, asked us to take out the trash. We of course first had to find the skip. The dream ended as we searched Windsor for it.

I'm told that lots of people dream about having the Queen to tea. The one time it happened to someone for real, the Queen, in her blue dress and hat, perched on a dining room chair nervously holding her teacup, looked like she was about to be poisoned. The experiment hasn't been repeated. It was one of that long line of publicity stunts aimed at making the Queen seem more human to the public. I almost said "to her subjects" but as I am always correcting people, we are no longer subjects of HM the Q. We are British citizens.

The second one had to do with my job. For some reason a lot of the sales department was relocated to an upper floor (since the company I used to work for and am now consulting at is actually on the top floor, it was an obvious dream!) and I had to do up there to meet with one of the honchos. The floor was huge when I got up there on the elevator, and as I walked around there was food on almost every desk and table in the place. I finally saw the guy I was to meet, but before I could go into the meeting, I saw HWMBO, with his yellow rubber gloves on, washing up the dishes in the sink. We decided to leave. And that's where I woke up.

I don't often remember dreams, but these two were wacky enough I guess so that I could remember them. But as to what they mean, I haven't a clue.

Last night I had a dream, one line of which won't go away.

Some of you may be familiar with the New York radio station WINS, whose slogan is "All news, all the time" (or it was, when I lived there).

Well, part of my dream was a radio station WPHL, whose slogan was "All philosophy, all the time".

I really wish that, like many, I could remember more of my dreams. If the above is an example of what my subconscious is up to when I'm asleep, I'd probably be able to tap into it, write fiction, and make a mint.