Our dreams are, apparently, particularly vivid during lockdown. Which is where dream books might come in, a kind of pre-Freudian dictionary of what things signified in dreams to help you make sense of them. My grandmother, like many servants in the early twentieth century, had one, imposingly entitled Zadkiel’s Dream Book and Fortune Teller.

I found it the other day, just as I remembered it, a stout brown Victorian volume, with every sign of use, and my grandmother’s name firmly inscribed in the flyleaf. On the page where it denotes the meaning of the colour you are wearing in a dream, a great red arrow points to the line saying “if in scarlet you are in great danger of sickness and heavy crosses”; a useful rectangle full of numbers called Sibley’s Magic Tablet (you close your eyes and stab at the table with a pin, reciting the words, “Guide my hand, O my ruling Planet”) had been pierced with any number of pins to establish the character of a future spouse; and there were ticks beside the passage denoting Lucky Days (“the day of the week on which the person was born is sure to be the best to begin any business but not to complete it”). Handy, that. There are charms to tell the future involving plants and incantations, plus terrifically complicated guides to reading palms and tea leaves.