I'm no Twitter addict - really, I can shut down TweetDeck when I need to, for half an hour at a time. But I work from home, and it's an easy way to keep in touch with people.
So it came as something of a surprise when I had my first Twitter dream this week. Not only that, but it was a waking dream - a night terror, some might say.
These are nothing new to me. I don't have full-on night terrors where I wake in a sweating, screaming heap or anything. I just dream things, and then wake up, and carry on dreaming for a few minutes.
Let's be honest, if you've woken in the dark and your subconscious thinks something was there a moment ago, you're gonna have to persuade it otherwise. Right?
The Twitter Dream
Here is what I dreamed. I'm in bed, when I receive a tweet. Only this one doesn't pop up on my screen like a regular TweetDeck alert. Instead, it slides through my bedroom wall as a giant concrete slab - like a TweetDeck alert made real, and laid flat.
This slab is a few inches from my mattress, and it's coming right at me. The only way to avoid being crushed is to flatten my body against the bed and press into the mattress, hard, with my head hanging down over the side of the bed.
And this is how I woke, face down over the edge of the bed, forcing myself against the mattress as though my life depended on it, and convinced - without being able to see in the dark, or even to move my head for fear of being crushed - that a gigantic concrete tweet was looming over me in the darkness.
I stayed like that for a full five minutes before I realised how ludicrous it was and dared to move. Compared to the aliens, lasers and giant spiders that have attacked me in the past few weeks, it wasn't so bad.
The summary? I'd like to think these dreams are proof that my creative side can't stop even when I sleep. I hope they don't mean I'm verging on insanity. And although they disrupt an otherwise lovely night's sleep, they don't half make things interesting.
