Agent Provocateur

1st September 2006

Miss Spent Youth "Where do you go to, my lovely, when you're alone in your bed? Please tell me the thoughts that surround you, I want to look inside your head. Yes I doooo." Cue accordion solo. (I'm sorry, but I'm a total sucker for rags to riches ballads.) The words of Peter Sarstedt's 1966 chart-topping single fairly accurately describe how many of us feel about Kate Moss. What flights of fantasy lurk behind that sphinx smile and tousled mane? Are her dreams richer, raunchier and far more recherché than those of wee mortals? Where do the night goblins take her?

So it's apt that Moss plays enigmatic Miss X, who recounts her dreams in Agent Provocateur's stunning new series of sultry short films. The director Mike Figgis has clearly had fun imagining what fantastical scenarios might seize the nation's favourite minx while she slumbers. In one scene she rises from a chalk outline of her body, like a victim from a crime scene, and climbs a grand stairway in an empty house. The sound of a muffled bass-line draws her inexorably towards a long hallway with many bedroom doors: potent symbols of erotic choice. Suddenly a Japanese woman exits one door and says smiling, "It's OK to go in now," directing Miss X towards a door marked 26 and then... Not telling you; I suggest you watch the films for yourself. The surreal intensity of Figgis's dream sequences emphasises that while asleep, as in real life, Miss X remains the ultimate object of desire.

It's not surprising that Figgis has looked to sleep for inspiration. Dreams are messages from our subconscious and sleep is the ultimate medium of revelation. The most potent dreams are fantasies given the verisimilitude of cinema - none more so than the erotic ones. In medieval times people found the power of such dreams so sacrilegious and disturbing they imagined demons were having sex with them while they slept. A female fiend given to raping sleeping men was known as a succubus, while her woman-molesting male counterpart was termed an incubus. And even in recent times a number of people possessed by febrile imaginations have claimed that aliens abducted them while they slept and used them as sexual playthings. I suspect such claims spring from the undeniable fact that some dreams seem more real than our waking hours. I have had sex in my dreams that is far more vivid than some drunken encounters from my single days.

Loath though I am to boast, I'm good at sleep. It's a medium I relish. If uninterrupted, I can easily spend a whole day slumbering. I have never once in my life bounced out of bed, eager and alert; the lure of sleep exerts too powerful a gravitational force upon me. I often worry that the twilight zone of my dreamscape is too alluring to be rivalled by real life. In my dreams I fly, I breathe underwater, I change shape, age and sex, I am possessed of superhuman powers, I revisit my old haunts and speak to my dead mother. And every now and then I have a dream of such erotic intensity that the force of feeling can jolt me awake. But I've often found myself abashed at the strange choices made by my meddlesome subconscious. While asleep I've made love to my first boss, a female colleague, Mel Gibson (I casually addressed him as "Mel" in the dream), Ted Hughes, a Hawaiian surfer, an anorexic girl I loathed at college, two members of the Household Cavalry who had taken me into a stable to show me their dashing steeds (you don't need to be Jung to see the symbolism in that), and a sexy old boyfriend who was simultaneously engaged in seducing Helen Mirren. The people who walk into your dreams from real life are far more disconcerting sexual partners than the strangers dredged from the depths of your subconscious. Often they are people to whom you have previously had absolutely no conscious degree of attraction. Afterwards you can feel a little confused. I have blushed crimson when encountering acquaintances that I've been intimate with in my dreams. My red-face quota was highest when I was pregnant. As my conscious desire for sex decreased (I wasn't one of those blooming, libidinous mothers-to-be), my sleep-time liaisons became ever more ardent. It felt as though my dreams had double the intensity because deep inside my belly another being slumbered.

And yet one of the sternest rules of modern etiquette is: thou shalt not talk about thy dreams, for thou shalt realise that they art boring unto the point of coma to other mortals. But are they really that dreary? Mostly, I find other people's dreams absolutely riveting because they betray so much about the dreamer. I have long remembered a boyfriend from my student days waking me up and saying that he had just had a dream where he was having kinky sex with his mother when he suddenly heard a little scratching sound coming from a wardrobe in the corner of the room. When he got up and opened the door he found a little, bald, naked man crouched in the corner masturbating - Freud would've had a field day. Fortunately, the AP films starring gorgeous Miss X will be somewhat less twisted and considerably more sensual than that particular vision.