How much do you remember about your dreams? How many can you recall, right now?

During a recent conversation a friend was telling us about a very strange dream that he had had. He could recall it vividly, a few days later. As I listened I couldn’t think of any recent dreams. There are themes that come up repeatedly, like weird composite versions of houses I have lived in, and school and university buildings getting confused. My mother and father appear to me in my dreams in various ways. But I couldn’t think of anything specific from the previous month or two.

The clearest dream that I can recall, without much thought, was also the most terrifying. In my first year at university, over 40 years ago, I went back to my college room a few days before the start of the summer term. It looked like most of my neighbours hadn’t returned yet.

One of my History supervisors liked to remind us that our college was “built on the bones of monks”. Two monastic foundations had been merged and expanded to create a much larger college.

In my dream I woke up, in my college room, to see a hooded figure, an ancient monk, signalling towards me. He was stood beside the door and there was no way past him. Still dreaming, I closed my eyes and hid my head under the covers. I woke sometime later (in my dream) on a coach, not sure where I was heading. I was sat in the back row of seats

[The previous month I had taken a coach from London to Birmingham and fell asleep on the way there and back, waking disoriented both times.]

The coach stopped, in the middle of nowhere. I stood up and walked forwards. There were no passengers and no driver, as I discovered when I reached the front. I didn’t know whether to get off or head back to my seat. While I was trying to make up my mind I “woke up” again, for at least the third time in this dream. Once again I was at the back of a coach, having woken up from a dream about being at the back of a coach …

Maybe, when I was younger, I had other dreams that involved seemingly waking up multiple times, but this was the first time that I remembered it so clearly. This time I “woke up” five or six times before finally waking up for real, petrified.

Fortunately it was light outside, a sunny morning as far as I could tell. I didn’t dare to look towards the door, where the hooded figure had appeared to me early on in my dream. Daylight had not yet penetrated that corner of the room. I kept my eyes closed and reached up to open the curtain nearer to my bed. I couldn’t reach across to open the other one and I hid my head under the covers again. I tried not to imagine that there might be something, or someone, stood in the corner. I put my fingers in my ears, terrified that I might hear something, like shuffling feet, or the sound of breathing.

Eventually, maybe 10 minutes later I dared to look towards that corner. Nothing, of course. I got up briefly to open the other curtain and returned to bed. I lay there exhausted, but too scared to go back to sleep, fearful already about what might happen that night.

Typing these words, reliving the scene, all these decades later has literally made my hair stand on end, the tiny bit of hair on my head and my neck. Just thinking about this dream usually has the same effect.

The fear that I woke with did not last through the day. When I got to bed that night I was comforted by the fact that some of the neighbouring rooms were no longer empty. I could hear other people. This made a huge difference. The previous night I was probably further than I had ever been from any other human being. I had never spent the night alone in any building. There were dozens of rooms in that student accommodation building. Maybe there were other people in the building the night before, but I hadn’t seen or heard anyone. I figured that this contributed to my imagination running wild, and the vividness of my dreams. Unless there really was some hooded figure standing beside the door to my room, beckoning towards me …

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