I definitely think you should do that Raising of Lazarus painting — and then have your agent approach some of the more successful heavy metal bands to try and license it for a CD cover. I’m serious. You could reach a whole new fan base that way!

The video isn’t from 24, but is simply a clever remix of scenes from the show with Rebel Virals’ own actor playing Santa. I suspect that they must be partly or wholly British, but their website doesn’t say. They’re a marketing firm dedicated to creating non-ad-like ads that people will want to spread around so they’ll go viral, which is actually a pretty creepy idea if you ask me.

A lot of Welsh people settled in eastern Pennsylvania, but I don’t know how much of their accent has been preserved there. Traces might remain in the older folks.

This is intriguing. Although the Through the Looking-Glass-strangeness-of-a-dream is evident here, I wonder how much you’ve re-wrought it in the re-telling… apart from the end that is. Could you say whether the conscious creative process has made the written-down account now seem to you to be what you actually dreamed, or can you separate the origins of the material from the finished work?

I have some fairly ornate dreams sometimes and find myself for an hour or so after waking trying to spin a narrative out of them as I go about the business of walking the dog, making breakfast etc. Never write them down though. Peter however always wants to tell me his dreams when he wakes. (I think it helps him shake off the tone of unease many dreams leave as a residue after the sleeper emerges from sleep.) His dreams, like yours above, seem so entirely plausible they stick stick in my head far longer than my own sleep-time conjuring. He once initiated a fantastic idea for a painting… yet to be done… when he told me of an autopsy dream in which both he and I were present as a partially eviscerated corpse sat bolt upright, restored to life. (He recounted this when it was still fresh on his awakening, gruesomely vivid enough to really rattle both of us.) As a result of the dream I’ve long been planning a Raising of Lazarus set in a pathology lab. The painting is clear in my head in nearly every detail so I really should quarry the time to get down to it. No-one will ever want to acquire it though. Far too unsettling! Mmmmmm. I really must get down to it.

I assume the clip is from some episode of Twenty-Four. (Never watch it.) That Santa has a Welsh accent. Not an actorish assumed one either, but the real thing. I always find myself astounded that Welsh people are out there in the world. I thought we were all here!

D’you know Dave, that bird felled by the wind turbine video you posted has exactly the tone of a nightmare/dream to me. Can’t shake it off even now. Even the distance seems familiar in the manner of dreams, where inescapable horrors often occur some way off from the dreamer. Well, they do in my dreams anyway.