ofthewedge

In my waking life I do not hold David Cameron, Jeremy Corbyn or Donald Trump in very high regard.  But in my unconscious on sundry occasions in the last year or so, our relations have been quite sympathetic, even cordial.

I am persuaded that, just as implied in the Acts of the Apostles and the writings of Freud, God visits you in your dreaming to disrupt and to reset your prejudices, to help make you a better person.

One

I am watching the climax of the latest Superman film. Superman is getting properly beaten up by a beautiful but deranged young girl, on the grounds that he had earnesly declined to together with her. As he lay there broken, I was now in the film myself, trying to help him. He located on his person found some emergency serum thing which would enable him to recover his powers, she having presumably dosed him up on Kryptonite. His assailant then countered that she herself had some serum of her own that made her really fast. Anyway Superman and I managed to slip away to a couple of washing machines where I had been stuffing dirty washing. Superman’s jilted foe now reentered the scene, sliding in her stomach at speed towards us. She confronted superman and he said I think I have my powers back so your blows won’t hurt me. Indeed as she laid into him once more, he just smiled indulgently. Realising that her labours were in vain, she crumbled into a heap.

What have I done with my life? She railed. Here I am 25 years old at my peak and I am taking toxic substances to try to win someone who is not interested in me.

Superman by this point had, uncharacteristically, donned makeup.

I left them to their delicate business.

The washing machine had been stuffed with clothes and was now expelling a mighty jet of water. I was obliged to fish out the soggy clothes. I decided I would separate the colours from the whites and start again.

Then a sudden shift in the backdrop to all of this action.  There now entered a large delegation of officials which included bald William Hague, then Foreign Secretary, and a friend of mine who works in the Foreign Office. It was all something to do with the Germans and Americans.

The room cleared leaving noone but myself and none other than David Cameron, presumably to take a breather from it all. He mused aloud on how the Germans were now really into foreign policy and that they had made lots of visits to Islamabad this year.

Are you enjoying being PM? I asked.

Not really, he said. It’s all rather boring to be honest.

I sympathised.

What you need is a real job. Like banking.

He gave a polite, whimsical grunt. Then he left the room, me and the washing and my thoughts on the life choices of members of the aristocratic leisured classes.

Two

We were on a campsite by a river. It was summer, warm, but very early – 6am. We leave the tent and Jeremy Corbyn walks past with a young boy we assume to be his grandson. He is wearing a pensive face of rather cosmic melancholy.

I stop him, shake his hand and make some complementary, empathetic remarks about his ongoing travails, all of which he receives gracefully. He acknowledges that yes, life is tough at the moment and the day ahead will be another busy one, fresh with new and unheralded controversies.

We exchange parting greetings, I with a weak wish that he will have some time in between crises to enjoy the weekend.

Three

About midway between the election and his inauguration, I was a junior aide to newly sworn in President Trump. I was, suffice it to say, shitting myself. I went to to the Oval Office to receive my first instructions from him.

– I want you to go down to Congress and fix me a meeting with these people: Secretary Clinton, congressman so and so, senator such and such etc.

– Yes of course, Mr President. What shall I tell them you wish to talk to them about?

He jerked back his shoulders, stifled a guffaw, opened his palms towards me. It’s the President of the United States!

Yes Mr President.

I pretended to understand who he wanted to meet. I clutched to my chest a dossier of papers, and wandered the corridors not knowing what to do.