Best Dream

Well, I think it must be the best dream I ever had . . .

I was a new student at Warmbergs Wizarding Academy. Not a decrepit and forbidding castle like Hogwarts, but rather a bustling campus with a higgledy piggledy collection of low buildings linked by cloisters and quadrangles. Even though the night was chilly as I followed the Professor through the graveyard the nervous anticipation of joining a school halfway through a term stopped me from feeling the cold.

"Do graveyards worry you?" she asked, as a specter swooped around one of the larger tombstones.

"No, but forests at night are a different story"

We entered a refectory full of chatting students of all ages, and I has trouble keeping up and nearly lost sight of my guide. We weren't stopping to eat, but headed for a corridor on the far side of the room past the serving hatch. Beyond that was a sports hall, and a fencing club lesson was in progress.

"Excuse me, Professor? I'd quite like to join this club. I've been learning rapier for a while now and I like the speed and control of the blade that you get with it."

I swished my rapier through a couple of moulinets to demonstrate.

"It's £21 per term, but you'll need to speak to Professor Liza Tarbuck about joining up. Hurry up, we must attend your sorting interview"

She led me into a small office, the desk overflowing with papers weighted down by a skull serving as a makeshift paperweight, and presented me with a piece of parchment. It was a questionnaire of sorts, and as I filled it in the colours swirled through red, yellow and green. A man I'd not noticed before was sitting in a chair in the corner of the room.

"Slytherin would be a good choice for you. I think you'd be interested in my physics class"

The parchment displayed illustrations in the style of Leonardo da Vinci for a brief moment, before swirling to blue.

"Ravenclaw for you, I think" said an oriental woman in a dark blue silk dress.

"That's fine by me, but I'd like to go back to the rapier class for a while before I find my room."

......

I woke from this most lucid of dreams to a brilliantly clear day and a crisp bracing walk in the woods to clear my head. I have no idea what the dream means, but it was a remarkable experience.