I shall always give out useless information about myself if it is early morning.

I haven't had much to write about recently, but there has been a Significant Event in the house lately. The landline conked out after much wheezing and groaning, and the Pater went and got it replaced it with what I am told is a functional handset. Tata Indicom and LG are either trying to pioneer a new kind of plastic toy-inspired handset fashion, or they're making plastic toys and getting them to work like phones. Either way, every time I walk across the hall and catch a glipse of the handset sitting on the table like a squat, shiny frog, I catch myself smiling. It just falls short of being an inconspicuous black because of the receiver, which is a cherry red. And it has these big square buttons that can distract you during a phone call and make you chuckle in your head, involuntarily. It's asking to be demolished, this handset, but it makes me smile. For more reasons than one.

I don't dream much, but when I do the dreams are usually bizarre, bordering on nightmares. I once dreamt I was witnessing an accident standing on a pavement, where someone got squished beyond recognition, and then a forensic team arrived wearing clown suits, and demanded that I identify the victim. Another time I was sailing on a boat which suddenly sprouted a tree, and ran into trouble when the tree decided to drop its roots right down into the ocean floor. The passengers couldn't sail on towards their destination, and there wasn't any food, and pretty soon it turned into a survivor's tale with the inevitable eating up of co-passengers and chucking each other overboard. There are other dreams with strange creatures and monsters in them, but I find them easier to deal with than the ones where I am stuck in a ridiculous situation with a crowd of people, all humans like me, who won't listen to reason. It scares me because this can only lead to my being eaten up or killed. Don't ask me why, but this is how it eventually ends. With aliens you can at least get away with lying. Or improvising.

One of the scariest dreams I have had involves me making a phone call in a locked room, where the phone comes to life and slowly entwines itself around my body. It then proceeds to strangle me, while the voice at the receiving end gets more and more urgent.

Tonight I was making a call on the Noddy handset, and I happened to move away from the table for a bit. I remember looking down suddenly and finding it hanging from my hand, receiver still at my ear, with the telephone cord reaching to just below my elbow. I then started thinking about how wonderful it would be if LG kept on manufacturing stunted little toy phone sets, and if everyone bought them. And in between people buying cordless phone sets and phone sets with short lengths of telephone cord, maybe the idea of strangling someone with them would die out. And before you argue that you could buy loose telephone wire from somewhere and use it to the same effect, let me remind you that it is much scarier to have the plastic parts come to life with the wire.

Besides, you really wouldn't want to strangle someone with a handset that looks like a toy.

I haven't the heart or the initiative to go Freudian on myself now, especially since the dreams only assumed stranger connotations after I tried reading Freud. I should have been asleep a long time ago. Everyone who knows me knows I malfunction after midnight. I'd go to sleep now, but I'll probably have a dream about having a dream, which is by far the scariest category yet. It has happened before. If I think too much about dreaming, I dream about dreaming. Sometimes John Lennon really makes no sense at all.

I hope someday you'll join us. And then strangle us.

Maybe I should stop.