I’ve always had quite bizarre dreams. Monday night saw two for the price of one – I wonder what Freud would say…?

The first dream I had was that I was Jack Bauer, trying to prevent a bomb going off on a runaway train. I seem to remember getting to the bomb to try to deactivate it, realising it was about to blow up, getting off the train in true “leap and hope you land on something squidgy” fashion, and seeing the train explode. So much for saving the world then!

I then had a dream where I was represnting Scotland in the Eurovision Song Contest. It was being held in a large sports stadium, and I remember being backstage going “Why me? I can’t even sing! Why have they chosen me to represent them at singing?!” and having a right flap and panic. Luckily for all involved, I never actually got to the singing part of the dream, which would have probably seen me singing out loud in my real bed and waking up my housemate, my neighbours, my neighbours cat, people across the street, and any bodies in cemetries within a couple of miles.

And all that without eating cheese before bedtime.

Recently I’ve been having difficulty with breathing – nothing major (obviously, I’m still here!), just a near-permanent blocked nose that probably makes me snore like a trooper at night.

I saw the doctor about this back in the late summer / early autumn and finally it was found to be a polyp in the right side of my nose. It’s basically like having a pea in my my nose. Quite excitingly, I had a CT scan this week so that they could work out how to remove it. The machine was very cool, you lie down and are put in the centre of this donut type thing, it spins around you, and it’s over before it’s begun.

Apparently they built up a 3D image of my sinuses and I’ll hear how they’ll remove the polyp within two weeks. The tests on whether they could find a brain in my head remain inconclusive. Speaking of which, is it weird that I’ve called it Polly the Polyp?

Oh. It is.

I do enjoy maths. I enjoyed (and still enjoy) the Maths Challenges for secondary school students run by ukmt.com , and I like “numerical crosswords” that are included in the crossword magazine Magpie (www.magpie.com). Occasionally I manage to solve a wordy cryptic crossword too.

The other night I was unable to sleep and I started thinking about one of the latest numerical crosswords I had solved. It occured to me that one of the clues “Palindromic prime” could not have four digits. To cut a long story short… within 30 minutes I’d realised that there can be no palindromic primes with an even number of digits, as they are all multiples of 11.

Talk about an over-active mind, all I wanted to do was sleep!! Still, it did help me get to sleep.

My PhD thesis plans have changed a bit recently, I now hope to submit in the first few months of 2012, as there have been a few techinical difficulties that we’ve had to overcome. One of the difficulties was the super computer that I use stopped working. I wish I could say the same about me!!

I dreamt last night that I was a small dog and I couldn’t bark. I hadn’t lost my voice completely, I was just a little husky. Boom boom!!