Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has woken up this morning after what he says was a bizarre dream that seemed to last three years, in which his Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard toppled him as Leader of the Labor Party, leading to a prolonged and messy civil war that destabilized the Government and threw it into political disarray.

“Woah,” Rudd reportedly said to himself as he got out of bed this morning. “Therese, I just had the strangest dream.”

Rudd said that his dream was “incredibly vivid” and he could have sworn it was real, though in retrospect it now seemed obvious it wasn’t.

“It was just one of those dreams where there’s all this sort of crazy stuff going on, but you just accept it as normal,” explained Rudd. “There were these ongoing monotonous strings of recurring events. For example, after Julia toppled me, I would just challenge for the leadership again and again, and I’d do this over and over and lose every time, and yet somehow I was able to keep doing it.”

Having woken up from his dream, Rudd is now back where he left off when he went to sleep, gearing up to face the Coalition and its leader Tony Abbott in an imminent federal election. But some in his inner circle are questioning whether he should have recounted his dream to the public, as his opponents now appear set to use it against him.

“Is it really healthy for the Prime Minister of Australia to be having bizarre, whacked-out dreams that are so detached from reality that they call into question his current frame of reference?” asked Tony Abbott in a speech this morning. “Dreams in which his party willfully, willfully eats itself out from the inside? In which a disgraced backbench former Prime Minister is able to challenge for the leadership not once, but four times? In which senior ministers of the Government repeatedly and viciously attack a man who they later reinstate as their standard-bearer?

“These are not the dreams of a Labor Party Prime Minister. These are the dreams of a Liberal opposition.”

Rudd said he was just pleased to learn that his experience had been a dream, because if it hadn’t been, it would’ve been “ridiculous” and “very bad.”