I try to have mysterious dreams; really, I do. They seem like the sort of thing you ought to try to have if you want to grow as a person, and while I'm not a particularly spiritual person I do enjoy hacking symbolism to death and what better place to do that than in a dream?

A week ago, I was dreaming about a concrete staircase, with worn stairs which I proceeded to slide down instead of climb down. I noticed a door about halfway down which I declined to enter, instead continuing all the way to the bottom where a single, cheap-looking door awaited. Inside the door there was a party, and while I was initially frightened of gatecrashing I was invited in.

Wow, I thought, this is all very Freudian.

Exploring the party, I came across a slim, dark-haired girl drinking orange juice out of a beautiful, wide absinthe glass.

"Excuse me," I said, coming up to her. "Can you say something profound?"

She put her drink on the table behind her. "Huh?" she answered. She looked nothing like me, but her voice sounded a lot like my own.

"Well," I explain, "this is a dream, and it's very vivid, and I don't want to leave my subconscious empty-handed. Come on, tell me a profound truth about myself."

Her eyebrows knotted together with thought, as she turned around and sipped a small amount of juice from her glass, thinking. I waited, awkwardly. The post-modernist revelation that this was a dream was starting to jerk me out of the dream world, and black was starting to cloud my vision - I could feel myself waking up. I concentrated on remaining asleep. I didn't get a lot of opportunities to flat-out ask my own subconscious what it thought about life, after all, and I wanted to hear a good answer.

Eventually she turned to me and regarded me through bored, deep brown eyes.

"Well," she started, "I don't know how to spell it, but; 'A helicopter is just a rain that shoots death.'"

"What?" I complained. "That makes absolutely no sense!"

She gave a single nod and sipped at her drink sullenly. "I know."

After waking up, I proceeded to write down the phrase in big capital letters at the top of a sheet of paper, which I carried around for a full day in the hope I'd work out what it meant. I didn't.

I'm so damn mean, stringing myself along like that.

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