I am very bad at remembering my dreams: I would have been a poor patient for Dr Freud. But I know that as a little boy most of my dreams were rather frightening, even if I can’t recall them in detail. An oft-repeated dream involved a monstrous apparition that would rush down from the sky into my bedroom and be about to attack me or gobble me up, when I would suddenly leap awake, much relieved that nothing unpleasant had happened.