Do you ever get the feeling your life has turned into a West End musical?

Well mine is currently Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.

I’m thinking of the bit that goes “Strange as it seems, there’s been a run of crazy dreams, and the man who can interpret could go far”.

It’s the cue for Joseph to put on his coat, discover his special power of finding meaning in dreams, and make a name for himself.

Well, I’ve been having some crazy stressful dreams just lately, but I’m not the only one.

When I mentioned it to friends, several also said they are currently having what are commonly known as ‘anxiety dreams’.

This may or may not be a symptom of this ever-stressful year, but some people have already come up with the hideous word ‘quarandream’, to describe it.

These days we have Google to provide the kind of answers Joseph and his funny coat used to come up with, but not even that offers much help when it comes to analysing dreams.

Most of the people claiming to really know what is really going on in the Land of Nod seem to be the modern equivalent of quack doctors.

NHS websites have little to say about the subject, and you have to dig deep to find any proper science.

However, I did stumble on the work of neuroscientist Isabelle Arnulf, and she is also President of the French Society for Sleep Research and Sleep Medicine, so if anybody knows what they are talking about, it’s probably her.

She decided to research probably the most common of all anxiety dreams, which is the one about sitting exams.

Her idea was simply to study students who actually were about to sit an exam - and a tough medical one, with a low pass rate - to find out what they were dreaming about, then work out why.

Sure enough, some did have anxiety dreams about the exam, the night before, but here’s the thing: the dreamers turned out to get significantly higher marks than the rest.

So maybe anxiety dreams help us to prepare for something specific, maybe quarandreams help us through the challenges of lockdowns, and maybe Joseph was a fool to say any dream will do.

But can it explain my recurring anxiety dreams?

For some unknown reason, although I am retired, I repeatedly dream about starting a new job, only to find I am totally unqualified and unsuitable for it, so I end up wondering what on earth I am doing there, and desperately trying to cover up how utterly clueless I am, by pretending to look busy.

Then it struck me this is uncannily like the life of certain politicians we could name, even if some of them haven’t mastered the art of looking busy.

Please tell me this is not preparing me to become one of them or even just keep company with that sort of person.

Because that’s not a dream.

It’s a nightmare.