Now I’m not saying anyone’s to blame, but I keep having this recurring nightmare. Exactly the same – walking along by the canal, as it makes its way from Jericho into town, early evening, summer, when I spot a huge dorsal fin break the surface and then slide under again.

Of course, it could be the very cleverly photo-shopped picture displayed next to our photographers’ desk that’s triggered this dream (it shows the Botley Road, flooded, with a shark’s fin menacingly circling).

But truth is, I actually think I had this dream, or versions of it, long before I ever spotted our snappers’ gag – it’s always summer, I’m always on my own, and the fin only ever appears once.

More likely than not I suspect it’s the Piri Piri curried chicken I had from Tesco last Wednesday that first lit the cranial touchpaper.

I like this supermarket in Magdalen Street, just along from Debenhams, but I think this particular ready meal ranked as one of the most disgusting I’ve eaten.

The chicken felt as oily and ‘squidgy’ as…well a squid, and actually seemed to cling, almost deliberately, to my throat as it slopped down. Plus the after-taste wasn’t great either – it felt like my mouth had been flooded in a spray of warm and speckled fat.

But what’s really disturbed me about this whole episode (the dream you understand, not the chicken) is the number of people who, having heard me recount it, suggested I should have it analysed.

By their reckoning, the Piri Piri chicken shame is clearly of little consequence; while whatever ‘meaning’ the fin is emblematic of is clearly a matter of concern.

I don’t know what your opinion is on this matter, but as far as I’m concerned, dreams don’t mean ****.

When I was in my teens I was always having dreams, two or three a night in fact, and I never felt I had to question their significance. Yet bizarrely it seems not doing so is now considered as criminal as admitting on Facebook that your life really is boring and ho-hum.

In fact, just for the hell of it, I Googled how many books on dreams – and their meaning – are currently available, and there are hundreds, written by all manner of self-proclaimed experts, all claiming they can offer ‘closure’ on whatever haunts you (in case, presumably, their precise meanings keep you awake at night – and how’s that for irony?).

Me, I think it’s a load of tosh, like believing because I’m a Scorpio I’m can only find true love with a Pisces or Cancerian (they apparently have a close affinity with my changing moods…).

But to put things truly in perspective, I even found a book purporting to help unravel the mysteries of pet dreams (as if a Koi, a very proud and dignified fish, is going to spill the beans to its owner?).

Anyway, I’ll be sleeping tonight, as I always do, so who knows? Maybe I’ll dream of Sigmund Freud.