I'm strange in that I can have consecutive dreams - I'll dream of one scenario one night and in consecutive nights, the dream will continue more or less where it finished previously. Sometimes I'll go back to a dream I had months before and continue it as if it were never interrupted.   They usually involve me performing some athletic or heroic feat that I could never imagine doing in my waking life, and occasionally I have superpowers. Quite often there's a lot of cooking involved and I've been known to dream smells too.

The dream that's stayed with me most vividly though - for other reasons - I was being chased through my in-laws' bungalow, which was filled with giant steel daisies. I was weaving in and out of the daisy stems, running towards the front door and the lighted hall and I was watching myself from above. There was a chiming bell that wouldn't stop and I could smell fresh cut grass and vanilla.

It's stayed with me because of where I had it - in the cardiac care ward of my local hospital. I was suffering from cardiac arrhythmia and had been experiencing chest pains. I wandered down to the hospital where they admitted me to the ward for 24 hours. I was wired up to a monitor geared to sound an alarm when my heart rate dropped below 50. The alarm sounded so often that earlier in the evening the techs had lowered the limit to 30. It was this alarm sounding that I could hear in my dream and I woke to see four nurses standing over me with the adrenalin needle unsheathed and ready. I remember saying as they took a collective short sharp intake of breath, that I was being chased. I didn't feel any pain, I wasn't breathless, it was just like I'd dozed off and woken normally.

LTS