I dreamed that my name is Ton and I am a very influential person like a teacher or a government official. A father comes to me and asks for help in manipulating his son's grades or influencing a school to accept him. I agree to make the phone call.

We go downstairs to an office with a door which is a mosquito mesh in a wooden frame (such doors were commonplace in houses before air conditioning in Thailand) and it's a sort of a messy office with a desk, some clutter, and an old woman in a dirty earthy-green dress standing watch. Actually it's not so much a dress as a blend of a khaki uniform and a phanung (a cloth wrap worn in former times) I pick up the phone (an old black dial phone) and speak very charmingly about a different subject to someone.

Then I think about who to call to help out the father who has come to me. As I am about to phone again, the old woman who has been very dour suddenly smiles and brings me a plate on which there are four pieces of pork, cut into round flat bite-sized pieces and arranged on a small plate. "You were so charming on the phone," she says. "Have this pork."

But when I pick up the phone she moves the plate so that it is just out of reach. I tell the man he should have some too. I start to dial. I wake up.

Looking at the clothes and technology of the dream it appears to be set in the 1950s or early 1960s ... during my childhood.