But instead of dogs every creature in the teeming park is a pangolin, the alarming species implicated in passing the virus to humans.

Suddenly, instead, the animals in the compound are breeding pairs of every species on Earth (I am the male in a breeding pair of newspaper journalists, a perilously endangered species).

We are queueing to go aboard what one imagines is Noah's strangely white-painted, multi-storied ark. It has just docked at its wharf here in the landlocked ACT.

But wait! Horror! This is a vessel part Noah's Ark/part toxic Ruby Princess! To go aboard it is surely to die! My journo consort and I flee for our lives.

The Lone Ranger (wearing a white anti-virus face mask) gallops up to save us. He is riding Phar Lap.

We leap up behind him on his steed's broad, Raiders' green back and gallop off to the haven of controversial pop-up coronavirus emergency hospital in Garran.

But (horror!) its doors are shuttered, the facility closed by authority of the suburb's Chief NIMBY. What is to become of us?

Then I wake in fright (for as readers will have sensed this was all a dream), my agitated heart hammering noisily against my ribs.

Yes, with coronavirus knotting everyone's neurological knickers it comes as no surprise that there is suddenly the much-reported phenomenon of pandemic dreaming.

Always a vivid dreamer myself I am paying rapt online attention to the phenomenon.

There is everything from sober pieces quoting "dream experts" (see for example National Geographic's The Pandemic Is Giving People Vivid, Unusual Dreams. Here's Why , to pop-up archives to which we are all invited to contribute our pandemic dreams.

In her National Geographic piece Rebecca Renner notes that "many people around the world say they are experiencing a new phenomenon: coronavirus pandemic dreams".

"At least five research teams at institutions across multiple countries are collecting examples ... and one of their findings so far is that pandemic dreams are being coloured by stress, isolation, and changes in sleep patterns - a swirl of negative emotions that set them apart from typical dreaming.

"'We normally use REM sleep and dreams to handle intense emotions, particularly negative emotions," says Patrick McNamara an associate professor of neurology at Boston University School of Medicine.

"Obviously, this pandemic is producing a lot of stress and anxiety."

"During our dream states, stress sends the brain ... neurobiological signals and reactions that produce dreams," according to McNamara.

"Though these processes happen nightly," Ms Renner continues. Most people don't typically remember their dreams.Living through the coronavirus pandemic might be changing that due to heightened stress, influencing the content of dreams and allowing some dreamers to remember more of them."

But your columnist has always been a vivid dream-rememberer.

And although the reported dream with which I opened today's column is partially fictitious (for example in the real dream our masked rescuer was actually Jacinda Ardern, not the Lone Ranger), it was a truthful report of the forms pandemic dreams take.

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Rebecca Renner notes that "multiple studies have shown that our waking activities create a slide reel of memories that influence the content of our dreams. Emotions carried over from the day can influence what we dream about ..."

This is why in my reported dream one finds references to things that are looming large, now, in one's everyday waking thoughts. There is the terrible virus, the monstrous Ruby Princess (its ghastliness refreshed in the mind by Monday's night's Four Corners), the dash of Raiders' green triggered by this week's deliriously awaited resumption of rugby league. Every day I go to the dreamed-of dog park.

Every day I see the pop-up coronavirus emergency hospital which, agitating NIMBYs, has popped up on my local oval. No wonder, then, that Jacinda and Phar Lap took me (and my breeding partner) there.

Dreams are fascinatingly, inexplicably strange.

There is always the nagging thought that dreams may be reality (whatever reality is) and reality only our dreams.

And so if you do something uncharacteristically shocking-shameful in a dream (like voting Liberal in an election or saying something unkind to someone you love) then the shame of it may stay with the waking you.

It has never happened to me (thank goodness!) but a favourite poet has a poem about how she dreamed of having adulterous sex with a married office colleague at the office (someone she had never consciously thought of in that way) and how awkward it had become for her to mix with him at work, pretending nothing had happened when of course it had.

Nightmarish as they can be right now (when they are pandemic dreams) there is an eerie magic about our dreaming that we should never take our dreams for granted.

And so I commend to you, as a guard against that happening, the wondrous poem The First Dream by Billy Collins, in which he imagines how magic/bewildering it must have been to be the first man and the first woman to have a dream.

Columnists must beware of repeating themselves. Haven't I recommended this poem to readers before? Or have I only dreamed of doing that?