Note, Julia rotated the page while painting the dream, because of the dream's disjointed narrative structure. The painting is hence displayed below twice, so as to show it rotated.  

My husband has spilt some wine or whiskey on a surface. He didn't pick up the bottle and so I need to collect up all the golden liquid. I'm then going on a retreat with my friend Zoe, she hadn't been invited, and we're both going to Brighton for the day. I take a wrong turn and there's a traffic jam ahead looking like a spaghetti junction, down a hill, only resembling an Italian village. We decide to turn around and go swimming in the mixed pond at Hampstead. I'm then showing slides on a big screen of a retreat last year. The slides show a dramatic sea with realistic waves and a boat.  Zoe is talking and obsessively smoking, she wants to join our group at the retreat, I don't want her to but don't object. Alex takes stuff to the boat and I'm proud of him. I'm next in a bed and a man is next to me and gives me a small kiss and he says we will meet again at the pond for a swim. I am then at home and there's building work going on. I'm in a chair and my mother is lying down on a bed. I have to have an operation: There is no more anaesthetic and no glass eyes. A man reaches and takes out my left eye, leaving a long, crude, diagonal scar in its place. I'm crying but my mother says not to cry and just talks about what she's been doing. I'm thinking that she is a narcissist because she's telling me not to cry. I get cross and I shout but I can't get the words out, I want to say that she's a narcissist. Alex has then bought me a leather passport holder, I know this and I’m curious he hasn’t given it to me. I'm then near my daughter's school in Camden, passing by a tube train stop named library 22. I cycle through a pedestrianised town square and bump into her teacher, Miss Law. She's with other teachers setting up an event. I go to Gail's, the cake shop, to bring her something but nothing is left except two muffins and a cheesecake. I wake up feeling very nauseous.

I am having to return from a holiday with my husband because the holiday destination has become dangerous. The place has dark colours, blacks and maroons. I am then on the plane, which is calm. After flying back to the UK we go to my childhood hometown. I realise we can't go to what was my parents' home and instead go the house of a family that my family knew at the time. I break in at the back of the house as we need to charge our phones. The son in that family comes to the house. There is going to be a party in the garden and I recognise my old friend Johnny Two Hats, but he is not friendly. I then need to fight people in the garden ninja style and realise that I am on my own in doing this. A lion then appears and I have to fight the lion. I try to lock it in the house but people keep letting it out, but not on purpose, just when they are opening the doors to go in. I then have to fight the lion in a cage, like in Mixed Martial Arts.   

This dream salon was part of an afternoon of talks and presentations for World Sleep Day at the Cardiff University Brain Imaging Centre, hosted by NaPS, the Neuroscience and Psychology of Sleep Lab. The schedule for the day is here. NaPS researchers gave a talk on how sleep processes memories, and the sleep lab methods that are used to study this. Mark Blagrove then gave a talk on what role dreams might play in this within-sleep processing, contrasting this with our proposal that dream-sharing has an empathy-eliciting and group bonding effect, and that this effect may have led to dream content having evolved across human history in parallel with the evolution of story telling.   

A film made by Cardiff University of Mark Blagrove's talk, the telling and discussion of the above dream, Julia painting the dream, and Julia explaining the composition of the painting, followed by a speeded-up film of the painting process, can be seen here.