Mrs Potts, however, couldn't make it.

My brain has been working very strangely recently. Trying to fill it with revision notes is yet to have any kind of effect on remembering anything to do with multisensory perception, unfortunately, but most of the rest of the things that I pour into it end up scurrying around for ages and generally making a nuisance of themselves.

This became particularly apparent early this morning, when I dreamt that I had woken up. Dreams like this are confusing at the best of times - it didn't help that my room was apparently now located in the house of one of my friends at Oxford. Given that I have never been to this person's house, my brain was working quite hard to construct it - for some reason all it could come up with was a very complicated brass shower unit. Because of the strange way in which one simply accepts the bizarre in dreams - particularly if it seems absolutely clear that it's not a dream - I didn't find it surprising that almost immediately I was apparently entering what seemed like a warehouse with several of the cast from Order Of The Stick, one of whom was being played by the aforementioned friend from university.

Nor did it seem weird that there was someone else in this warehouse, who looked oddly like this friend, but who I'd never seen before. She apparently knew me, though, and it was barely a couple of minutes before we were performing the entire ballroom scene from Beauty and the Beast. Except that clearly neither of us knew how to dance, and I didn't look much like the Beast.

Look, it was a dream, all right? These things tend to happen. Just to put the icing on the cake, it then turned out that this warehouse was about to be used for an OICCU event, and was rapidly filling up with people I vaguely knew, none of whom seemed to be bothered that there were two complete strangers waltzing around singing "Tale As Old As Time" very loudly. Luckily, it was at about this point that I actually woke up, which was the cue for several minutes in which I tried to work out what on earth had just been going on inside my brain.

Someone else whose brain works strangely is Simon Thomas, who has a new blog up called Stuck In A Book. Simon reads more books every month than I do in a year, probably (he is an English student, after all), so it's the perfect place to go if you want to feel at all literary. Or if you want to see his cartoons, which seem to be appearing on most of his posts. Either way, it's a lovely place to go and be informed.

All of which brings me to what I was going to say from the start of this post, which is that I've now installed a stat counter on this site. (The same one that Simon uses, if you were wondering how I'd got from there to here.) It will install a small cookie onto your computer so that I can see who's been visiting, and whether they've been here before - it doesn't collect any personally identifiable information, but if you'd rather not let it install, that's fine. If you're using Firefox, you can block it by going to Tools -> Options... -> Privacy -> Exceptions... and entering http://philonoism.blogspot.com into the Address bar. IE has a similar procedure, but I use it so rarely that I'm not sure exactly how it works. I'll post any interesting bits of data from the stats here as and when they turn up. Provided I don't wake up again in the next few minutes, of course.