I dislike dreams as a topic – to read or write about or endure on screen. They’re like liars – why waste a minute on them, their every detail is made up. For storytellers, they’re narrative sloth – instant metaphor! – neatly foreshadowing, without the effort required by mimesis. Tales of dreams vouchsafing revelations – Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Kahn” is an example – represent a misunderstanding about intellection. Our brains don’t punch clocks. Most of my writing is done sleeping: ideas coalesce, phrases shape themselves, undistracted by beeps or Henry pawing. Waking, if I’m lucky, my day’s work’s half done. I can no more force my brain to extrude than I can my gut.

This dream dazzled. I’d had my coffee, Henry’d breakfasted, and I’m still wobbly. I was hosting a housewarming afternoon for my new estate. Just completed, my estate was vast, palatial, perfect in every vista and doorknob, a contemporary Versailles with the taste of Southampton. This was my first visit there. My wife had organized it all. My wife wasn’t Jane but a laminated prodigy with style but no face. How had she managed it! We couldn’t have afforded one-thousandth this sumptuousness. Our guests were people famous for their wealth, dressed casually and expensively, the sort who paste their names on museums and hospitals. They weren’t friends but economic peers; a few I couldn’t identify. I smiled diffidently in response to their congratulations but said nothing. They admired me because I was rich. I suppressed any urge to explain this was a dream, not me – or maybe a stage set – only it was neither: this was really me, my place, if for this moment only. Wow.

I won’t weary you inventorying the magnificence – the pools – and lake – and swirl-pool (whatever that is) – and perfectly shorn putting green and soccer field (with amiable coaches for us oldsters) – and delicate viands materializing as if from nowhere – and the perfectly polite palaver, not a sincere word uttered – all real as real could be – and mine apparently – in name, at least – someone had footed the bill for building it. You might think I was ecstatic – a sudden pasha – but no, I felt sick at heart – empty as a dried gourd – trapped. These megarich were bores – and I was being lauded for my opulence not my eloquence – not for who I aspired to be but perhaps for who, God help me, I really was.

Eventually the guests bid goodbye, with effusive assurances of further fetes, for clearly a personage so rich was worth knowing. I dreaded their hospitality – I couldn’t even afford the swank clothes. How had my wife managed it! (Maybe reading Trollope’s The Prime Minister, which tracks the downfall of an arriviste, contributed to my dream-plot.) At the end, ownership of all this magnificence descended to two grubby construction workers, one of whom killed the other to secure it all (like Fafner and Fasolt in Wagner’s Ring?) – though that conclusion may have been superadded on waking, it feels too pat.

What was my dream telling me? A hoary story, I suppose – no salvation in things. All these megarich kept eying the others lest they be outstripped. No quantity of wealth could buy them ease – net worth would never amount to worth. Love’s the only gold – and there was no love here – only a ceaseless striving for more.

I’d have liked to eavesdrop the conversation between me and my faceless spouse after the last guest left. Where had she located so much moolah, even for an eyeblink? Why had she kept this project secret? My dream, though, omitted that scene. Or maybe it was Henry licking me awake.