Saturday 7th January 95

A weird one this.

I dreamt we had a rat in the basement and that the environmental health people had come and put down trays of blue poisonous pellets all over the place. Then somehow we, my wife, the kids and I , were in bed or on a sofa with Diana, the Princess of Wales. She was very obviously pregnant, dressing in a beige stylish kind of wrap around dress. After some time she asked if we would like to see and examine her pregnancy and of course I agreed. I hoped she would permit me to innocently feel that drum hard belly a pregnant woman has. She began to unwrap.

Strangely I was not startled when her stomach did not emerge from the cloths around her. I took it all very matter - of - factly. What was making the bump was a developing foetus on the outside of the womb. The placenta was still inside her drawing nourishment but the baby was on the outside of her stomach. It looked not at all developed - like the fish embryo stage shown in encyclopedias - but it was quite active in movement and had well-developed fingers. Behind the baby I could see the white of Diana's lower belly but thought it tactful not to look any farther. It seemed generous enough of her to show us this far.

She explained there was some medical reason why she had to give the embryo tablets - small two coloured capsules - blue and green, I think. Then she dropped the container and all the capsules scattered down the sofa and onto the floor. I crawled around the floorboards picking them up to return them to her - highly conscious that we might be giving the next king bacteria or even worse, that we might kill him with traces of previously laid rat poison from our living room floor.

Published in The Tiger Garden - A Book of Writers' Dreams ed Nicholas Royle
p153 (Serpent's Tail)