I haven’t written this blog for ages, and what follows is a comment neither on nature nor the universe. It’s an account of a vivid dream from which I’ve just awoken, and it might be a comment on the human part of this small dot in the universe today. Or it might not. See what you think.

Somewhere in the industrial north of England, I was running to catch an underground train. I couldn’t quite keep up with my partner and when I arrived on the platform, he was just pressing a button to get on a single huge, black, open carriage – which was all the train consisted of. The doors slid open, he got on, I went to follow and the doors closed in front of me. So I waited a while and got on the next, identical, “train”. It resembled an old-fashioned coach without a horse – with a roof, but no glass in the windows. There were quite a few passengers sprawled around inside, on seats, the floor, or couches.

I didn’t know where we were, and wasn’t sure what my partner would do – go on to our destination and wait for me there, or get off at the next station and come back to find me? I also couldn’t remember, or had never bothered to find out, our destination. No matter, I thought, I’ll look at Google maps….. Only, I seemed to have lost my phone. We had bought a cheap sort of “toy” version for emergencies, which we hadn’t got out of its box yet. Of course, there were no Google apps, or else I couldn’t find them. In fact, I couldn’t find anything useful. Well, never mind, I could just ring him and he could tell me where we were, why we were there and where we were going.

But I couldn’t fathom how to make a simple phone call on the device. There seemed to be lots of games, but no means of communication. Station after station went by as I struggled with it, and endless vistas of industrial wasteland and dark satanic mills – and networks of grimy canals – were the only clues I could see as to where we were. One passenger, a middle-aged man, offered some help and advice, but none of his tips and instructions seemed to make any sense, or they didn’t work, and soon he fell asleep. The train hit the barrier which marked the end of the line, but without a pause reversed and set off back on the same track. This happened repeatedly; it got dark – and I had another problem.

For some reason, I was carrying the smaller of my ginger cats, Jeoffry, in my arms. A very biddable and lazy animal, Jeoffry was finally showing signs of annoyance and wanting to get off the train. Fearful he would jump out of the open window, and desperate not to lose him as well, I clung on to cat with one arm while trying to get some sense out of the phone with the other hand. It dawned on me that all I had to do was read the instructions, which, after a struggle I prised out of the base of the box. This thick wad of paper, as I supposed, must have the answer to how to use a phone to phone someone.

But as I opened each layer, out jumped some cheap plastic toy or game or cartoon show, which expanded with the air to make a growing heap of unwanted junk on my lap (with the cat), and nowhere in all these gimmicks could I find any decipherable instructions. I noted that a disproportionate number of my fellow passengers were children, all busy playing with games and toys already. I tried to offload a set of plastic animals the phone had disgorged onto one of them. He wasn’t interested – he had loads of plastic toys already, surrounding him on the floor. If they weren’t so distracted, mightn’t one of these (presumably) tech-savvy infants be able to get my “phone” to work?

Getting desperate, I appealed loudly for help. The man who’d first advised me woke up. “Are you still looking for people to help you?” he sneered. “What is it it now?”

“For a start,” I replied, “where are we? What is this place?”

He tutted. “Great Yorrington”, he said, and proceeded to lecture me on then history of the murky waste we were passing through. By the time he finished we were somewhere else entirely, but equally murky.

So there I was. Left behind, not understanding where I was and ignorant of where I was going, unable to communicate with anyone who could tell me. Confounded by crappy technology which delivered only junk and gimmicks and no truthful information, while surrounded by people so completely engrossed in their own junk and toys they were totally unaware of anyone else’s difficulties, and had no apparent interest in where they were going. And all the time, desperately trying to hold on to the living, breathing, warm thing that was all I had of value on that train.

I’m glad to say I woke up.

One other thing. Of course, the train was driverless, and completely unsupervised.