Lowering the moral toner

Erotic dreams - now, that should get the number of hits up.

Erotica - why bring that up, you ask? Because all of yesterday I had to sneak around Central for fear of meeting the eye of one of our fellow doctors, who had made a surprising, out of character and rather disturbing appearance in my dreams the preceding night.

The details of the dream need not concern you here. It had all the usual dreamoid sudden shifts of narrative focus (rapidly moving from the big story to the small), the non sequitur plotting and characters with strong but utterly foreign motivations that dreams often have. There was the usual undercurrent of anxiety. From what I can work out, many dreams for many people are about anxieties, are vaguely disturbing, the kinds of things you can't bring out during the day - this was one of those. The plot, I believed, was something about an object of great value, perhaps an enchanted goblet or something, but also involved a photocopier jamming.

Presumably not an enchanted photocopier.

And towards the middle of it, Dr Dryad (a pale, dark-haired woman, well spoken, clinically very good, a bundle of neuroses wound as tight as the inside of a golf-ball) shoved me up against the wall and had her surprisingly wicked way with me.

Anyway, even in the dream I can remember being surprised. Predictably, even in the dream I was wracked with guilt (even more predictably, the guilt came after the event, and not before or instead of). I woke up feeling uncomfortable, drove into work disquieted, and mounted the steps dreading seeing anyone who could have been witness to my shame. I prepared my morning coffee with the shaking hand and blanched face of the condemned.

And to my horror, there she was - brazenly leaning, almost lounging on her desk, erotic in her cardigan, fully buttoned up blouse and sandals. I averted my eyes, painfully conscious of the tension between us as she blatantly refrained from running her fingers through her hair and insouciantly didn't flutter her eyelids. For her part she did her best to avert suspicion, explaining how last night she'd been been at her nine-year old's birthday party and then cleaning up most of the evening.

"You wouldn't believe ten girls could make such a mess of a kitchen. I was mopping the floor at ten thirty at night" she said, before adding "I've never been so glad to crawl into bed"

God, woman, do you want everyone to know?

The others in the room commisserated, but I imagined a few knowing smirks beneath their murmuring. I swallowed in my suddenly dry throat. The electricity was palpable. Dr Dryad was evidently discomforted by my nearness, she left a few minutes later, making some tranparent excuse about "admitting new patients", doing her best to pretend that nothing had happened between us.

Anyway, by the end of the day, my mind was made up. This madness had to stop now. We'd both succumbed to temptation, in a moment of weakness and considerable emotional stress - no matter how we tried, we hadn't been able to get the photocopier to shrink something from A3 to A4 and print it double sided - we'd done something we shouldn't have. We had to put this behind us and go on with living the lives we were meant to. She had her husband and her two children and I had Sarah.

Sarah. How would I tell her? Still, if the honesty in our relationship meant anything...

"Why are you telling me this?" said Sarah a few hours later.

"I thought it was the kind of thing you should know"

There was another pause.

"Why?"

"Well... I don't know. I wanted to reassure you."

"Well, maybe if you hadn't told me inthe first place about you having erotic dreams about coworkers - "

"Well, I didn't want you to worry that I want to run off with her."

"Well, do you?"

"God, no. She's crazy."

"But you sometimes say I'm crazy"

"But you're good crazy. No, you're not crazy. Not crazy crazy. But even when you are crazy, you're different crazy. She's not you crazy or me crazy, she's crazy crazy - why are you turning off the light? Hello? Hello? -"

Anyway, a damn cold night in the Bronze residence. I've given this a lot of thought and I think I can see how the seeds of lust, unsprayed by the weed-killer of self-control, and lacking the scarecrow of - somethingorother - have yielded this harvest of sorrow. I can see how and to whom the blame should be apportioned.

I can only hope Dr Dryad feels guilty too.

Thanks for listening,
John