The Watkins Dictionary Of Dreams [2007] – not a very catchy title, I know, but I vehemently deny any responsibility whatsoever for its coining – was another labour of love, just like my Dictionary Of Cinema. I’d been interested in dreams all my life, and when Michael Mann, my editor at Watkins, suggested a dream book, I leapt at the idea – I had no notion that it would end up transmogrifying into a 200,000 word manuscript, with over 15000 cross-references, and take up a solid year of my life. Right from the beginning, however, I had decided that I would try to incorporate every symbol ever likely to appear in a dream, and back up my interpretation by drawing on the full complement of possible readings, rather than on just one or two partial ones, as is the case with most Dream Dictionaries – readings inevitably informed by an unconscious psychological bias on the part of the writer.

Having been trained as a comparativist [I studied Comparative Literature at the University of East Anglia], I therefore decided to draw from all established archetypes, as well as myths, cinema, fiction, theatre, art, popular culture, religious iconography, tribal customs, witchcraft, and the inevitable detritus of history. I then interleaved these readings with the work of such acknowledged dream interpreters as Freud, Jung, Adler, Plato, Reich, Artemidorus of Daldis, etc., to achieve what I hoped might be a dream book which would amount to more than merely the sum of its parts – a dream book that would incorporate and encourage serendipity, happenstance, spontaneity, and coincidence, just as dreams themselves do. It is up to my readers to tell me whether I have achieved it.

Here, as a teaser, is my entry on Mobile Phones:

‘One really doesn’t relish drawing attention to this, but mobile telephones are undoubtedly phallic symbols, and that is likely to be their major symbolical use in dream terms. They are infinitely manipulable, they afford pleasure to their possessor, they are intrusive, they demand attention, they are antisocial, and they are about the size and shape of the average penis, give or take a centimetre or two (and a mild suspension of disbelief). They are, in addition, fetish objects, and much care and attention is lavished upon them – their size is significant (in inverse proportion to their power), and they are a means of domination (travel on any train and you’ll get my gist), as well as being a sure sign of sexual status (ringing, ergo erect, implies importance – silent, ergo flaccid, implies neglect).’