It’s always difficult to recall a dream. Some parts float away the minute you wake, as soon as you try and remember them, whereas some other elements stick in the memory and can even haunt you later. Here is Igor’s dream, anyway, or at least the gist of it. Some bits I have forgotten – perhaps they were too horrific and the brain blanked them out – but other parts remain with strange clarity.  If you’re of a nervous disposition, look away now.

In the dream I was living in some tinpot island kingdom – a small country, I think it was, but I do know it had once been powerful and hugely influential and had never recovered from that period. Indeed, it was still obsessed with this past era and its various wars, and was unable to move forward. Political ideas and institutions alike were frozen in time, but many of the country’s people worked hard to make a virtue out of this stagnation. They were proud of it.

The people of one of the kingdom’s four constituent countries – the one that contained the vast capital city – felt that they were by far the most important part of the kingdom. They often forgot that the other three countries existed, and casually talked about their country as if it were the same thing as the whole kingdom.

The kingdom had a monarch with a nice shiny hat, I think, but it appears the real government was drawn from one of two tribes who conducted their business in some kind of fairytale castle, or it might have been a museum or a theatre or something. It was difficult to tell, but whatever it was it seemed to have a bewitching effect on the inmates. There was a kind of voting system to put people in the museum. I don’t know how it worked precisely, but it was clearly primitive. As far as I could tell, it gave the keys of the kingdom to the winning tribe for five years, and it looked like they often did whatever they wanted during that time. However, lots of people had left the tribes since the olden days and lost interest, and other smaller tribes had come and gone.

Many said the system should change to give everybody an equal voice and keep them interested, but the people in the castle didn’t want to change things and just smiled beneficently. They liked to pretend there were still only two tribes, and they really loved having the keys of the kingdom for so many years at a time, even when not many people had voted for them. Besides, life in the magic theatre place was so beguiling.

So the people grew less and less interested in what went on in the castle, which they saw as completely ignoring them except when the keys were up for grabs. They even began to think the inmates were corrupt and unimportant to their own lives. Besides, many years ago the loathsome dragon that was the emblem of the richer tribe invoked her god Mar Ket and told the people that the really important thing was money, money, money. Later, a gleaming young knight of the grail used magic to make his tribe appear the same as the richer tribe, and he too called upon the dragon and Mar Ket. After that, nearly all of the people in the castle/theatre worshipped Mar Ket, and allowed no other god. All judgements and decisions throughout the kingdom were referred to Mar Ket. Some people had become hideously rich and could do what they liked throughout the land. The castle inmates even made it easy for them to do that. This island kingdom was a very strange place.

Beyond its borders, the kingdom was an embittered member of an important group of nearby nations, but its people knew little about those other nations and their cultures and languages, and cared even less. The nations were just places to visit, or perhaps to live in if the weather was nice (which is the main thing about other countries). Other than that, many of the islanders saw people from other nations as a threat as well as inferior; they didn’t like them at all.

The kingdom had joined this group late but was nevertheless convinced it was better and more important than the other nations and thus deserved special treatment. Its representatives constantly harried the group’s leaders and the other nations, and whined endlessly at home and abroad about how badly they were treated and how much more they were entitled to have than everybody else.

Now, this is where it gets really hazy and even more bizarre, I’m afraid. The dream detail starts to break up. It seems some weak leader in the museum had promised a general vote to the people – he did it to settle a gambling debt or something. I can’t really visualise him now as he sort of had no face. For this vote, he told all the unhappy people in the kingdom that they should be contemptuous of foreign people to make up for everything they didn’t like about their own lives, and somehow find a way to punish them for generally being inferior. There were a couple of evil clowns there too, doing something or other, and a group of particularly evil heralds trying to whip the people into a frenzy of hate.

Apparently, the faceless gambler told the unhappy people that if they won the vote they could best punish the foreigners by making the kingdom leave the group of nations – no, I can’t see how that makes sense either, but we all know that dreams are just weird. It all seemed very dangerous. But the unhappy people didn’t seem to care and just wanted to break things – you know, like the mob with burning torches in all the Frankenstein films. It wouldn’t do them any good but they’d enjoy it for a little while.

Then it was the day of the vote. For some reason, one of the evil clowns was travelling up and down a river of blood while standing on the prow of a royal barge wearing a black shirt and waving a beer stein, and the other was incessantly spouting garbled quiz questions, taking selfies and claiming to be everybody’s friend.

And then they were ready to announce the result. Everybody was suddenly now at Tyburn, wearing pointed hats, and the clowns and the heralds and some other castle inmates were grinning from ear to ear – though one of the clowns was starting to look nervous. There was a huge mass of angry people waving burning torches. And the result of the vote was . . .

I don’t know, because at that point I woke up in a cold sweat. But what a strange and frightening dream. What could it mean? These dreams are so lifelike aren’t they.