There are three things I find fascinating about myself that I can’t tell anyone about without boring them to death: music, food and dreams. Someone in an audience the other day asked me what music I liked, what moved me. Don’t get me wrong: I was flattered to be asked. It’s just that there’s no way of answering the question without losing the interest of the audience, including the nice chap who asked the question in the first place.
What kinds of music do I listen to? Lots of different things. What moves me? Well, lots of stuff but, now you mention it, there was this old song by a Yugoslav pop singer, which I heard sung by a Croatian tenor at a recital in Split last summer, and I just started sobbing, I couldn’t help myself … And then I look up and see the worst sight in the world – people stifling yawns. Quite right, too, because it’s so boring listening to people bang on about what music they like.
Oh, you like cooking? You’re into food? What do you like to cook? Again, nice to be asked, but no idea how to come up with an answer interesting to anyone but me.
And the big one is dreams. There is nothing as wide as the chasm between how bewilderingly fascinating we find our own dreams, and the interest levels of whoever we relate them to. On a TV show once, we did an item in which a dream interpreter fielded questions from the audience about dreams they’d had. Someone had been dreaming about losing their teeth. The dream interpreter said this was rooted in a fear of losing teeth. Someone else had dreamed they were falling. This, said the dream interpreter, was – yes, you guessed it –all to do with a fear of falling. Desperate stuff.
Anyway, since you ask, I had a really vivid dream the other night in which I stole a bus in a small town somewhere, which might have been Midhurst in West Sussex, of all places. The police didn’t catch me. The passengers were perplexed more than frightened, but, when I woke up, I felt very guilty about the whole caper. And I still do.
Interpret that one, if you can be bothered – if indeed you’ve bothered reading this far.
• Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist
