Dreaming with Stephen

Joe’s Palace (BBC1),  A Room with a View (ITV), River Cottage: Gone Fishing (Channel 4)

The word ‘dream’ has different meanings, as in the greetings card: ‘May all your dreams come true, except the one about the giant hairy spiders’. Martin Luther King never said, ‘Brothers and sisters, I have a dream, and in this dream I am shipwrecked with my wife’s sister, with 2,000 tins of spinach, and for some reason Doris Day is there as well…’ ‘Dream’ meaning ‘longed-for desire’ is, I suppose, short for day-dream, in which you are in control of the fantasy. Most real dreams consist only of bizarre and surreal situations, meaningless juxtapositions. Sometimes, even when awake, you think you must be dreaming. The other day (I have mentioned this in the Guardian) I found myself sitting next to Princess Michael of Kent at lunch, discussing how to rub suntan oil into the ears of baby elephants.