I have to blog about two things I watched at the weekend.

On Saturday I saw the Northern Ballet perform The Three Musketeers. I get to see them quite a lot because my friend is a huge ballet fan. Earlier this year I saw them perform Madame Butterfly. Complete with music from Puccini’s opera it was a wonderful performance. A review said audiences would be moved to tears, so I wanted to tears - and I got them! At the end the actress playing Butterfly performed a powerful contemporary dance in lowlight with flowing hair and costume to Japanese drum sounds. It was full of despair and heartbreak and anger and moved me deeply. Dance has never really done that before but in combination with the visuals and sounds I became a sobbing mess.

The Three Musketeers didn’t make me cry - it wasn;t that kind of story. If anything it had some wonderfully choreographed moments of comedy, especially when the king came on in a dress and started to dance a la the Queen! The maliciousness of the Cardinal, Milady and Henchman No 1 came out fantastically, in the music and the creeping around! The portrayal of flight through the palace and Paris at night was brilliant done with lighting and candles, as was the secret love affair between the Queen and Buckingham, which the set beautifully demonstrated as the stage opened to reveal a secret room. And the music was tremendous. I continue to be impressed by the narrative ability this company has, and the youth and freshness of the dancers shines through in every performance I see. I thoroughly recommend them.

The other ‘watch’ of the weekend was The Da Vinci Code - true to the book but the whole point of the success of the book was the way it was written. It wasn’t the story that made it so readable for me, but the style in which it was written, the language and structure which added to the whole pace and drama. However seeing it as a film made some things clearer to me, but I it didn’t manage to create the characters too well. And there was a distinct point between where the story could be believeable and where it became total fancy….Overall watchable but not one I’ll be buying.

Well, this mild weather is confusing my body’s temperature guage - mind you, sleeping in pjs, socks and wrapped in a fleece, as well as being under a duvet, will make you overheat at any time of year. I do it because its cold when I get into bed - I’m not allowed an electric blanket!

Anyway, over the last few days I have dreamed a bonanza of wierd things.Including being on a double decker bus - I hate these in real life and will NOT travel on the upper deck. One will tip over one day, I don’t care about physics and where a buses centre of gravity is. I felt like I was choking on the bus, but that could have been Tiger treading on my neck.

I dreamed I was helping out some bloke at Longleat safari park on a special open day, we were going to be making moisturiser…… I forgot to go and help him in the afternoon - it was boring and there were people from school there. Then I was at a hotel reading a sign about a helicopter it owned, which my mum and brother had been on! Next thing I’m in an episode of the Flintstones (not as a cartoon) and Fred was giving money to everyone except me, apparently in a bid to start a business, but it got me really mad - I thought he was giving away MY inheritance. I even remember the wooden house I created for them.

For the past four days it feels like I’ve walked non stop around Prague, and for once it was exhilarating to feel physically exhausted, which a day in the office just can’t produce. The other good thing about it, apart from the obvious fact that Prague is very beautiful and romantic but I’m trying to keep on the dream course here, was that my mind wasn’t exhausted and so I had some vivid and amusing dreams.

One involved a piece of carrot cake which I was conscientously trying to carve into the shape of a carrot, naturally.

I dreamed I was back at work and someone had died in one of the first aid rooms. A woman had gone into a cleaning area to get paper towels for the toilets because she was so annoyed they were empty but she was exposed to chemicals that killed her.

I created another crazy film story, this time I was with Goldie Hawn and she was trying to get me to buy a belly dancer outfit - sequinned bikinis and veils and stuff, I refused and we ended up screaming at each other. We trashed the shop we were in that had balloons and confetti everywhere with a huge shop window. But then we had a brilliant idea, why didn’t we convince this strange man who was with us (actually he looked like Anne from Little Britain) that we wanted him to come along with us so we could buy all this stuff on his credit card. He seemed happy for a while and then realised what we were up to so I killed him and loaded him into our car……

My brain had to make up for the fact that all we had was German television!

Some Tiger pictures

 sleeping

 washing (note the ears - also referred to as ‘Donnie Darko’)

 being a nuisance near the laptop!

Recently I dreamed about life and death all in one night, it was all rather a lot to take in and its taken me until now to blog about it because I was really worried to do so. Mostly because Death was involved - note the capital ‘D’!

To begin with I was with my family and this small baby/child joined us - he wasn’t mine but he was very sweet, giggly and with a head of curly blond hair. I became very attached to him and remember having him on my knee holding his arms outstretched and singing ‘Jelly on a plate’ which he loved.

(For those of you that don”t know that one it goes:
‘Jelly on a plate
jelly on a plate
wibble wobble
wibble wobble
jelly on a plate.’)

And then I was around a table with people I didn’t know, and Death; wearing his shroud and looking like Darth Maul but more green and orange in the face. He was very ugly, but not at all like skeletor, he had a face. I was doing my best to move around the table so he wouldn’t catch my eye and start talking to me, but he knew I was there. I think he was in deep conversation with a drug addict, so wasn’t really bothered with me.

Since then I haven’t had another dream. I have decided to find out what death in dreams can mean and it could be closure or an end to something or change.