Your Dreams are my Nightmares

AN exhaustive guide of things to do while other people are telling you about their dreams has been published today.

Your Dreams Are My Nightmares – a 258-page handbook by Danish psychologist, Professor Eirik Wendel - contains more than 600 suggestions for ways to pass the time while your companions are boring you witless with vague recollections of things they imagined in their sleep.

The book's introduction says: “As soon as your friend or loved one says anything along the lines of “What you just said really reminds me of this dream I had last night”, you must immediately zone out, or risk getting sucked in to a cyclone of unspeakable boredom, which could last from 20 seconds to 12 minutes, depending on how dull the other person is.

“Once you have zoned out, take refuge in the 600-plus activities listed in this handbook, any one of which would be infinitely more rewarding than listening to your friend for a single second.”

Prof Wendel's top 10 suggestions include: counting to 20 in French, thinking about the best physical features of an attractive celebrity, miming the use of a yo-yo, painting an egg, and swearing internally.

Scientists, poets and philosophers have struggled for centuries to explain why other people's dreams are so boring, but Prof Wendel offers an analogy by way of explanation.

He said: “Imagine a friend telling you he's just seen the most amazing film in the history of cinema.

“Briefly, you'd be captivated, but your interest would soon fade when your friend was unable to explain the plot coherently, describe any of the film's sequences or name any of the actors involved.

“And your interest would disappear completely when he informed you that neither you nor anybody else in the world would ever be able to see this film.”

Earlier this year, it was revealed that US military officials tell inmates at Guantanamo Bay about their dreams as an alternative to waterboarding.

One former inmate said: “I'd survived all their torture methods - sleep deprivation, white noise, waterboarding - but when this one guard started telling me about this dream he'd had, in which his mother-in-law was taking him to a puppet show, but then she turned into his former geography teacher, and then all of a sudden he was in a post office but all of the stamps kept turning into butterflies and flying off, I just cracked, and without meaning to I started revealing that I'd hidden 3kg of explosives inside Charlie Sheen.”