I had a dream...

Christine Priestly ponders a premonition.

Last night I dreamed I visited my dead grandfather.

He was slumped in an almost-modern couch inside a box-shaped room. He wore a pin-striped suit. My grandfather never wore pin-stripes.

Rheumy eyes peered up at me. 'You look like my daughter,' he said.

His daughter died as a child of cystic fibrosis. In the only photo of her I ever saw, she was a pudgy-pale thing, artificially pastelled in blue and pink, a hint of yellow hair that would turn to mouse if she'd been allowed to age. No sign she would grow up to resemble her unborn niece.

He seemed fit, virile in a way he had never been - at least, not while I knew him. My memories are of him snoring for hours in his armchair, keeping the hours of a cat. 'It's because for me, it's fifteen years ago,' he said.

We got talking in a way we never had. It was a surprisingly lucid conversation. 'I liked myself better then,' he said, of this fit, stronger him.

And then, when the alarm cruelly hammered me, I was left staring into dark, wondering, will someone die soon?

-CP