A woman in purple trousers approaches a large hotel. She runs up the front stairs and into the foyer, where people's faces loom up and recede. A middle-aged queue is waiting for a formal breakfast in the restaurant. She cannot find the room she wants. She pounds up more stairs, bursts into a claustrophobic curtained room where a group of people are staring at a flip chart showing the digestive system, while a mild-mannered man in a shirt and tie talks about spirits and auras . . .
Surely she will wake up any second and find herself bolt upright in bed staring at the opposite wall.
But no. This is not a dream. This is a dream interpretation workshop.
Dubliner Michael Sheridan (35) has been running such workshops for the past five years, under the name of Aisling (Dreams Are Us!)
His normal practice has been to run evening courses, one session a week for six consecutive weeks, but this summer he has branched out into a two-day intensive course, covering techniques for remembering and interpreting dreams, how to recognise health warnings in dreams, acknowledging "guides" (or guardian angels) in dreams, and the importance of colours and numbers appearing in dreams.
The first of these two-day events, at a cost of £120 per person, was held in Dun Laoghaire and he is planning others around the country, depending on demand.
The dreamophile is a dedicated breed, however, and at the Dun Laoghaire workshop there was one woman who had driven from Galway that morning, and two people from Wexford.
Sheridan's approach is what could loosely be termed New Age rather than scientific. He emphasises the spiritual benefit of examining and analysing dreams (he only became really interested in the subject, he says, after he started seeing spirits.)
"Dreams reflect the birth imprint - the ongoing effect of the birth trauma on your personality, self esteem, philosophy of life," he teaches. His handbook says that dreams "provide us with healing and guidance".
"If the messages and healing in dreams are constantly ignored or blocked, then we may develop a physical problem in an area affected by the imbalance."
At the first session I attend (prelunch, unfortunately) colons get quite an airing. The word seems inseparable from the topic.
"Dreams tend to show what the areas where the toxins build up are in the colon, and the toxins are then redistributed by the rest of the body," the class is told.
"Dreams about a garden path, leading to the back door of a house, represent the colon. Dreams about tights or hosiery refer to the intestines."
Wallpaper, seemingly an innocuous household concern, also means colonic inspiration in dreams, for the colon becomes caked with hardened food in the way that wallpaper is stuck to a wall, so Sheridan says. The message is to examine your diet and start eating properly, or perhaps give yourself more time to digest.
Garden gnomes in a dream mean kidneys. (Apparently because in graphic representations of the bladder and kidneys the kidneys look like two garden gnomes sitting by a pond. I'm only passing it on, if that is not an unfortunate phrase in the context.)
This might all sound like a lot of nonsense. But in some places dream interpretation has evoked a more serious response, with citizens taking to the streets in protest. "A colleague of mine was giving a workshop like this in Galway a few years back, and the hotel was picketed by a demonstration saying that it was the work of the devil," says Sheridan.
"The Catholic Church, however, doesn't have an absolute negative position on this because its view would be that some dreams are messages from God."
His own journey to dreamland was a gradual one, coming through meditation and the insistence of George Rhatigan, a former Dublin dream expert, that Sheridan had a special gift.
"I didn't acknowledge this myself, even while I was having dreams about myself walking around with dream interpretation books in my hand!" After his spiritual connectedness increased he accepted his fate and scaled down the day job - ironically, in the logic-based world of computers and websites - to give more time to dream analysis and teaching.
What are the most common dreams reported to him? His website (which he says has a preponderance of hits from the US) lists main categories of dreams about animals, flying, losing teeth, and sex.
Having sex in a dream, it could either be a relief or a disappointment to know, indicates a need for the dreamer to get in touch with the opposite gender side of their character.
Even a straight person dreaming about sex with someone of their own gender could mean they have been repressing that "basic"' side of them.
"A very common dream for people living in Dublin is being asked to jump in the Liffey - the Liffey meaning life, in this instance, and the dream indicating a fear of taking on some big challenge," Sheridan says. There are plenty of dreams about restaurants and mealtimes, and by now the reader should know what five-letter word beginning with C that is all about.
He says he does get people at his workshops who claim they never dream. Why are they there? "Well, they are aware of something blocking them.
"Everybody does dream, and you will always find that once you start asking people can actually remember a thing or two, and then that will lead on and in the end you have a whole War and Peace of a dream."
War and peace . . . and of course, the colon.
Michael Sheridan runs a website, www.dream-analysis.com, to which users are invited to send their dreams. His next six-week course starts on September 28th. Telephone (01) 493.3344.