I HAVE been having some very intense and vivid dreams over the last few months, much more intricate and detailed ones than normal.

When I spoke to my pals about this, they confirmed that they had been having them as well.

I searched through Twitter to see if other people were having them too and there was hundreds of people talking about it. The phenomenon seems to have become known as ‘Pandemic Dreaming’.

Millions of people across the world are going to bed each night and their minds are just going haywire, concocting the most bizarre, ridiculous, scary and funny dreams they’ve ever had.

I think it’s because our waking lives have become quite dull, boring and monotonous and because of this, our brains are trying to stimulate us at night while we are asleep, creating exciting and sometimes terrifying scenarios for us to enjoy.

My wee brother’s dreams have become so wild that he’s been writing down as much about them as he can remember so he can put together a book. Several of them, he says, have involved Kanye West being his pal.

I wonder if Kanye sometimes wakes up in a cold sweat in his LA home having had a weird dream where he was hanging about with a wee guy from a made-up sounding place called ‘Springboig’.

My pal, Paul, said he’s been having a recurring nightmare throughout the pandemic. In this dream he’s holding a wee hamster while he navigates his way through a packed nightclub, petrified that he’s going to drop it and cause the poor thing to be squashed under the feet of the hordes of revelers. You may laugh at this, I know I did, but imagine if that happened to you. How anxiety inducing would that be? It’s hard to imagine the specific set of circumstances that would lead you to be holding a hamster in the dancing. The build up to the moment of finding yourself on a dancefloor, Bits n Pieces in your ears and a small furry mammal in your hands is probably even more anxiety inducing.

I had one a few weeks ago and actually managed to wake myself, and my girlfriend, up as I howled with laughter at something I couldn’t remember.

Tears streamed down my face as my girlfriend opened her eyes to find I had turned into the Joker. I had one the other night where I got the jail.

I have no recollection of what my crime was, but imprisonment felt unjust, whatever it was.

It was way into the future and the jail was very white and clinical, like a hospital. In my cell, a helmet was place over my head. I strained to get free of my restraints but couldn’t.

Someone told me that I was to be placed into a simulation as my punishment. I’d be spending decades trapped inside a wee marble. A cruel and unusual form of incarceration and I wonder where my mind pulled this from. Is this secretly my deepest, darkest fear? Can my mind not come up with anything more terrifying to me than being a tiny little ball? Anyway, I was able to roll about and there was even tracks for me to careen down like a wee rollercoaster.

It turned out to be class and I hope, that if I am ever jailed for real, this is how I am forced to spend my sentence.

Even my dug has been having more dreams than normal. He likes to lie next to me while I pretend to work away at my laptop and often dozes off.

Recently, the silence in the room has been punctuated by a tiny sleep bark from him.

His face twitches all over the place, sometimes twisting into a snarl, and his feet move as if he’s either running or tickling someone.

Perhaps he’s dreaming of finally exacting his revenge on me for putting daft wee jumpers on him and in his dream he’s putting one on me. Or tearing my face off. It’s hard to say.

There’s something quite nice about our brains creating these wee escapes for us, however nightmarish they may be.

I like the fact I get to watch my own custom-made film every night, sometimes several of them.

I read an article about pandemic dreaming and it said a period of vivid dreams tends to follow a big upheaval in your life, explaining why so many of us are experiencing this at the same time as we live through a major historical event.

My advice to anyone having these mad dreams would be to try and write them down, with as much detail as you can remember before the memory dissipates.

They’re excellent inspiration for stories if you ever fancy doing a bit of writing, a hobby that will definitely keep you entertained as we trudge through these dark winter nights towards the spring.