"I know a mother-in-law who sleeps with her glasses on, the better to see her son-in-law suffer in her dreams."

I had a dream recently in which I woke up to a giant tortoise outside the window. On further inspection I discovered that it was accompanied by a killer whale and they were lounging around in a pond in my girlfriend's back garden that doesn't exist in reality . Not long afterwards they were joined by a whole host of creatures ranging from grizzly bears to meerkats. One has to question what I had been eating/drinking/snorting just before bed to have had such a bizarre night's entertainment.

Dreams are very odd things. Despite the fact that we all have them psychologists still have no idea why. I used to think that it was your brain replaying and sorting out all the stuff that had happened in a day, but such a concept is highly disturbing when you think I once had a dream about marrying my guinea pig in Hawaii. Some people think they are the expression of suppressed desires and thoughts, our subconscious if you will, but again either I've got a bizarre fetish for South American rodents or Snowy was just particularly appealing when I fed her that morning. The truth is we really have no idea why we dream, but at the same time we wouldn't be able to function without them. They're a bit like the appendix of the mind: no-one knows why they're there but they must have or have had a function once upon a time.

And it's possibly the mysteriousness of dreams that make them so fascinating. Whole books are written on interpreting them, inevitably leading to the conclusion that you fancy one of your parents and want the other dead regardless of whether you dream about Hamlet or of the donkeys at Skegness. Films such as the recent 'Inception' explore the idea of the dreamworld and what could happen if we were able to manipulate them for our own devices. Superstitions have surrounded them since time began (apparently dreaming about ham means you will lose something dear to you). The very fabric of dreams is intriguing, and our experience of them can shape our day. Dreams can be so realistic that we wake up in floods of tears or with the urgent need to contact Winston Churchill, and yet at the same time can be so bizarre that we recount them at every dinner party thinking they're witty anecdotes when in actual fact the guests listening want to have you hung, drawn and quartered. They can take place in a familiar setting and with familiar people, yet still have odd twists such as axes over your grandmother's mantle piece or a lack of gravity. All in all dreams are weird. What a pathetic conclusion.

If only we could record them, like we used to record 'Antiques Roadshow' for Nanna on VHS because she couldn't work out how the "television box" worked. On waking they so often slip from our grasp and this is massively infuriating. There have been occasions where, on describing the least amusing of two dreams, I've forgotten the far more hilarious one and can only remember that it involved the Statue of Liberty and a packet of ginger nuts. This obviously leads to much embarrassment and seems such a shame, particularly when you have really enjoyed a dream. I've had adventures I would consider worthy of a Hollywood blockbuster, or at least £200 from 'You've been framed'. And perhaps if we could record and replay what goes on in our heads when our bodies have shut down we would have a greater understanding of why we dream and maybe even comprehend better the human mind.

On second thoughts that's maybe not a good idea. The implications for Snowy could be dire.