I recently inflicted a cliched dream account on those of you who chanced to read it (and more recently an astronomical dream about an analemma, except that I didn't know that word until someone "interpreted" the dream).

So here's a dream nobody is likely to have had. I dreamt it last week, after hearing that Dan Brown has written a sequel to The Da Vinci Code.

I was a character in the book. It was about an expedition to Mars. In a large garden shed. The shed had landed, and somebody had opened the door so we were able to look out at its red, rock-strewn landscape.

Everybody in the shed was wearing ordinary clothes. I turned to another crewman (the SF writer Stephen Baxter) and said, "I suppose we're wearing invisible spacesuits." Dan Brown (who was also part of the crew) apologetically said, "I wanted to go further afield with this one." I said, "Yes, but you could still have given everyone spacesuits!"

The scene then changed to another part of Mars, where a race of waist-high warriors (who were not at all cute or Ewok-like) went on the march with spears, intending to destroy the shedload of invaders.

I hope Dan Brown's actual book is better than this...