TV reivew: True Stories: Dangerous dreams

I don't know about you, but death isn't something I generally like to think about. It's just too extreme and unknowable and frightening to contemplate, like a giant Ebola virus/white shark hybrid or another series of Noel's HQ.

And I say this as someone who smokes cigarettes – or the Devil's Panpipes, if you prefer – packets of which are legally required to exclaim THESE WILL KILL YOU. They even have scary pictures on them now, with favourites including a man with a massive tumour on his neck and a corpse in a morgue.

We addicts just ignore them.

Unless they invent fag packets which, when opened, project a 3D hologram of me dropping dead as Chopin's Funeral March blasts in surround sound, I doubt I'll heed the message. Even then I'd probably just look vaguely impressed and spark up another.

Because, as stated in True Stories: Dangerous Dreams, what really separates humankind from the animals isn't merely that we bury our dead, but that we have an amazing gift for self-deception. We all know we'll die, but we don't think about it because, well, life's too short.

But what if you were confronted with premonitions of your own death, in a dream, delivered by a deceased loved one? You'd probably just ignore it, right? Creepy, yes, but nothing to trouble a rational mind. But what if a previous premonition had actually come true? Would you take it seriously then? That's exactly what happened to Scottish film-maker Amy Hardie, whose experiences were recounted in this intimate, haunting documentary.

A happily married wife and mother, Hardie enjoyed an idyllic life in the Dumfries countryside. One night, she was awoken by a dream in which her horse told her to grab her camera and come outside, as he was about to expire. Dedicated film-maker that she is, Hardie did just that. Sure enough, the horse was dead.

A director of science documentaries, with no belief in the afterlife, Hardy dismissed it as weird, inexplicable coincidence. But not long after she was visited in a dream by her late partner, who told her she would die within the year. Understandably shaken, she elected to film what could've been her final days, ostensibly as a document for her children (the youngest of whom she tactfully kept in the dark).

She grew more disturbed when diagnosed with fibrosis of the lungs. This was too much: dreams have no bearing on reality, surely? They aren't harbingers of doom. But a visit to an eminent neuroscientist suggested that subliminal signals from the real world can often only be accessed while dreaming. Perhaps she'd noticed that her horse was old and ill, but hadn't fully processed it?

As for her death omen, she decided the only way to vanquish it was if a Brazilian shaman altered her neural passageways. How she did this, I have no idea, but following an eerily hallucinogenic sequence – a recording of Hardie's epiphany accompanied by impressionistic imagery, like a Jim Morrison poem directed by a ghost – she made a remarkable physical recovery.

This provocative rumination on coming to terms with the mysteries of life, death and the subconscious ended on a surprisingly positive note: embrace life, don't worry, it's fine.

Good. Time for a cigarette.

True Stories: Dangerous Dreams

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