C.r.e.e.p.y.

So I'm just about falling asleep, writing in my notepad in bed about songs I'm working on (this happens every night), and trying to stay awake but lapsing into a very strange dream:

Because I'm dead, I flit off to limbo where I meet lots of other interesting and friendly dead people. A chance encounter with late filmmaker and queer demiurge Derek Jarman stands out particularly firmly in my recall of the environment. Suddenly, from our previous Limboid surroundings, I am following him around his beloved garden as the sea beats against the nearby coastline. Derek is wielding a trowel with brutal intent and introducing me to some of the less expected details of the quote-unquote deathstyle.

One of the really unusual things, says Derek, is that being dead, of course, you don't have much to lose by dishing all the dirt -- by giving away all the salacious, entertaining secrets that you've been entrusted with. Noted fictional thespian Lawrence Montreux may once have buggered his understudy senseless in a tin bath filled with potato peelings, and everyone will be very entertained to hear it spun into a charming anecdote. After all, you're pretty much all dead -- what else is there to lose?

Derek pauses here and says: "The truly funny thing is, even though you've died and are pretty much hanging around without much of an idea what's going on -- just like being alive, really, ha ha -- you don't have the motivation to exact revenge, or humiliation. It just seems rather childish."

He looks wistful, and then says: "Also, dreams are the only way the living have a hope of finding out what's really going on. Poor bastards."

Just when I'm about to ask him what he means, I get distracted and dream a strange cartoon where a family of pink and vaguely humanoid blobs congregate in a purple-and-yellow kitchen to eat lunch. It's a weekend, and Mother -- who has at least nine eyes arranged in an approximately triangular pattern in the centre of her face -- has made a cake for dessert.

Unfortunately the cake turns out to have been swapped for a self-inflating hot-air balloon which starts to unpack and expand as soon as Mother attempts to slice it.

However, the family of peculiar blobs manage to manoeuvre the expanding apparatus out onto the patio -- which is on fire, incidentally -- and take off for a delightful afternoon observing their hometown. Despite possessing not a single shred of previous experience navigating or piloting a hot-air balloon, they improvise well and succeed in landing it safely outside a small tavern in Hampshire where they decide to have dinner and wine. Aww.