It happened again, somehow more as teenage viscera than the teenage innocence of before but no less warm in effect. Only there were three this time. One was a boy - a cheeky, impudent libertine. Another was an ex, tacitly competing with me for the libertine’s attention’s. And one, curiously, was a girl.

I know. So far this reads like a BBC Sitcom proposal.

I met the girl on a bus. There was some sort of major delay on the underground (a dream clearly not steeped entirely in fantasy) and we were two of several hundred people who found themselves shoved together in typical London commuter joined-up thinking, trying to board a rail replacement bus. We got chatting. She seemed to think I was straight, and I let her (for some odd reason, a lot of women seem to. Note to self: say ‘whoops, duckie!’ more in company). Next we were kissing, and I went along with it. Somehow it wasn’t all that bad. Y’know, for a girl. I even remember feeling something close to genuine affection at the time (about as much as I’m capable of offering any man these days, certainly, not that that’s a great deal), but I’m relieved it’s merely a dream. Waking up remembering kissing a girl the night before is, I’d imagine, a similar response to waking up remembering you had a cigarette after one month of virtue.

The libertine meanwhile was your typical nineteen year old - dangerously clever, impossibly energetic, impishly witty and intolerably cute, blue eyed (naturally, though surprisingly neither blond nor Canadian) with all the chutzpah of someone recently aware of people laughing louder at their jokes as an act of foreplay itself, and the reluctant attraction to them you increasingly submit to as a result. I say ‘typical nineteen year old’, but I’ve yet to meet any such boy. If my life were a Raymond Chandler novel, this sort would clearly be my homme fatale. This apparently grants me a future somewhere between Quentin Crisp as Philip Marlowe and Uncle Monty.

Immediately my ex silently declared a cold war as far as this boy was concerned, a war he seemed to immediately win by the event of my surrender. If you ever want to win against me, simply force me into a competition. I will instantly walk away. I rarely compete against anyone except myself. If you ever want to lose against me, give me an ultimatum. I will nearly always choose the alternative that didn’t. I think the ex factor (ho ho) probably represents my insecurity of separate friends I’ve made ‘coupling off’ after I’ve introduced them to each other and leaving me behind. It also makes me realise that I can be very passive aggressive / passively defeatist in relationships by immediately refusing to ‘fight’ for someone I’ve just met, surrendering to the assumption that if they were truly interested in me then they would do a little fighting of their own. You can only chase after something that leaves you a trail to follow after all.

I’m not quite sure what lesson this was meant to teach me however, as my habitual passivity ultimately won out. After an age (or a nanosecond according to current oneirological studies) of watching the ex peacock-step about my Devil-May-Caring Lolitus, the latter trumped the former’s colourful display with a quick turn to me and a politely wicked enquiry as to whether he and I should bathe together now, or just go straight to bed. In a gloriously unsportsmanlike victory, we then proceeded to eat each other’s faces off for the remainder of the evening, until my ex slunk away sullenly from the dream as a deposed alpha male. Serves him right. Even in the dream he had a boyfriend.

I woke up at the precise moment my dream self fell asleep in his Rimbaudish lover’s arms. There was no eczema on my paw this time, but my right hand was sore from where I’d slept on it, my wrists and metacarpels already sprained from yesterday when I sat down somehow stupidly in Soho Square, distracted by the self-satisfied offensive tramp who had invited himself to join us. As I slowly became aware of the dim light of the real world, Friday flavoured from behind the curtain, I recognised this playing on iTunes beside me.

I’ve been walking about the house since I got up with a feeling that I’m meant to be somewhere else - that I’ve left someone behind, and that I’ve forgotten their name. And that this clearly won’t be the last time. Somewhere in my head is lodged this stubborn conception of a phantom lover, more real and familiar than anything I could encounter from the moment I wake up to again falling asleep.