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I dreamed this morning that I stood ironing a pair of trousers and the iron slipped onto the side of my hand and stuck there.  I felt it burn through my skin but could not dislodge it.  The flat of the hot iron stuck to my hand as if it had been glued. I screamed to my husband for help but he went on reading the newspaper. I screamed and woke in fright.

Earlier in the night I had dreamed I was in a swimming pool with my daughter and a friend.  The swimming pool was also the home of a pet crocodile which gave no one any trouble as long as there was no food to be seen.  At one point I ate a banana outside of the pool and my daughter saw me eating and wanted a banana too.  I advised her against eating anything in the pool but no, she snuck off, took a banana and was half way through eating it back in the water when I noticed her.

‘Don’t eat in the pool.’  I could see the swish of the crocodile’s tail and imagined it was making its way towards my daughter and her banana. The crocodile reached my friend’s daughter instead and clawed at her leg.  My daughter dropped the banana and managed to drag her friend out.  Blood streaked through the water.  My daughter’s friend was only scratched but I woke again in fright.

And then just before I dragged myself out of bed in the morning I dreamed my husband had come in with one of the cats which he plopped on top of my chest, this dead weight that refused to budge and my husband laughing so loud my daughters joined him.  Before then I had been in a park where someone had dropped a load of children’s play equipment, which had already been vandalised.

Nearby I saw a cage high off the ground on stilts.  It was filled with small animals, monkeys, mice, marsupials of all kinds and birds.  One animal started to mimic my words like a parrot when I tried to converse with the other animals. It took me a while to recognise the owl as the speaker.  A large wide eyed tawny frogmouth with speckled feathers.

All the animals in the overcrowded cage seemed unhappy to me.  The owl spoke words to the effect that he would help them all escape and slowly using some part of his body for leverage he pulled down the front wire of the cage.

The smaller creatures fled but the tiny ones on the floor of the cage, the lizards, frogs and beetles and other small rodents could not leap high enough to get over the final barrier.  There was talk then among the bigger animals who had stayed behind of how they might help these last few stragglers.

A Noah’s ark that had turned into a prison.