28-February-2006: I dreamt there was a ginger-haired Goth type girl that wanted to go out with my brother, but he turned her down. I walked her across town to the train station and tried to make her feel better and she started to get to like me and wanted to hold hands. She was a bit overweight but I thought she was a bit sexy and was semi-wondering if it would be okay to mess around with her in a place that wasn’t exactly real – I wasn’t sure I was dreaming but I think I sort of sensed that it wasn’t the same as waking life. I was thinking about her in this was when I saw a little photo of a politician on a poster shaking his head at me and saying, “No, no, no, no, no…” So I told the girl that I had to leave her and go back home to my wife.
27-February-2006: I had a dream that I was at the end of a university degree and everyone was fooling around, partying etc. There was something about a printing press and me trying to show off that I knew how to operate it, but being too scared in case I messed some of the controls up so Terry Musgrove (a printer I used to work with when I was a teenager) would be annoyed at me. Later in the same dream there was a fire inside a church and it seemed there was no way for everyone to get out, but I discovered how to open a secret door at the back and let everyone out.
26-February-2006: I dreamt that I offered Bill Wilks, the school bully from my childhood, a lift home in my car. I was also dreaming about my stepfather, in his house, and my brother. I was saying to my brother that we should go home – meaning that the house my stepfather was in was not home and wanting him (stepfather) to feel bad about it.
25-February-2006: I spent the whole night obsessing about website design because of a new site I’m messing around with that uses a code called asp, or Active Server Pages. All my dreams were about asp, every time I woke up I thought about asp.
24-February-2006: I was dreaming about myself and a group of friends getting deliberately lost in the Yorkshire countryside of England. We’d made a pact to never be part of the modern world again. I got lost from my friends in the moors and found some naked ramblers crossing a stream, an old man was having trouble getting across the water and onto a sloping rock at the other side. I showed off that my three-wheeled bicycle could float on water as I sped along the stream and onto dry land further upriver. I walked to the top of the rock and helped the old, naked man climb up then chatted with the whole group and followed them into the city of Leeds. We all went to a recording studio and I happened to have a demo on me for them to listen to, I knew they’d love it because it was fantastic. I played the demo and they hated it, but it was the wrong song – a ‘crappy rappy’ (quote from dream) song that my ex flatmate from years ago, Darryl Levy had written. My song came up next, a kind of new wave Samba that everyone loved and danced to. I mentally apologised to my friends saying that I always unavoidably gravitated towards civilization.
23-February-2006: I had a dream that I could call up Satan and the End of Days with two special matches from a matchbox. I sort of sung an enchantment or dark song while holding aloft two lit matches from the box and Hell would start to rise from the earth, shaking the ground and turning everything to darkness, very powerful indeed. Someone later didn’t think I could do it so I struck the matches to show them but it didn’t work, I thought I’d lost my powers but noticed the sun shining through a hole in the clouds and remembered I had to wait until there was no sun shining. I called up the chaos of Hell once more and let it run a little further than the first time, till it seemed the whole world would end for sure. Then I decided that ending the world was a rubbish idea and did some kind of magic that vanquished Hell, chaos and all evil forever – returning light to the Earth.
22-February-2006: I had a dream that a friend called Carly Hillery gave me a glove or gauntlet that had special mind reading gel inside it. The gauntlet had a red and a green light on the wrist that you could make come on and off just by thinking about it. I said to Carly that it was a waste of technology to do something so meaningless as switching a light on and off so later, when he set fire to a newspaper in the house, I used the glove to make a rain cloud over his head to drench him and the burning paper.
21-February-2006: I had a dream set in an old mansion house owned by a Professor Slocombe. Marcia (my wife) and I were discussing his old piano with him while I ate cucumber sandwiches and members of the Terry Pratchett Message Board hung around in an adjacent room.
20-February-2006: I dreamt I was in a real life version of an Australian TV soap called Neighbours. A character called Lou was telling me, a policeman, all about his new business selling chalk, and how he was so excited about it. He was so pleased that people had such enthusiasm for buying chalk, even though it was all crushed up in plastic bags. Of course he was unwittingly selling cocaine and I had to arrest him. The dream episode of Neighbours ended with the entire cast of characters admitting to being up to something illegal or slightly dodgy.
19-February-2006: I had another dream with my friend Neil Kay in it. This time we, and all our friends, were living in an around a large mansion house that I never saw before. Neil and I were up very early in the morning to set up an exhibition of some paintings and other artwork Neil had made. He had about a hundred paintings that were all the same size on rectangular wooden panels. Neil was painstakingly gluing areas of a temporary wall on which he was going to attach his panels. I got a little tin out of my pocket and showed Neil that I had an imp inside and said if I let it out it could stick his panels up in seconds. I don’t think Neil believed me, he couldn’t see the little creature and neither could anyone else, so I told him to stand back and not worry if it looked like his painting were flying all over the place at first. I let the imp out and told it to create an exhibit from the painted panel and it got to work immediately. There was a blur and chaos of wood, paint, glue and wall for a few seconds then sheet fell back and revealed Neil’s paintings beautifully arranged in a symmetrical fashion along a pure white wall. We went to tell his girlfriend all about it after loads of people came and said how wonderful it all looked, but Jenny said I was too early when I went to her room to explain. Neil stayed outside looking through the window as if he didn’t want to talk to Jenny, then went back to his exhibition and pulled it to pieces – he said he wanted the exhibition to be all his own work.
18-February-2006: I was dreaming about these huge spiders, not monster huge but slightly larger than any spiders on Earth. One of the people in the dream used a vacuum cleaner to suck them up and spent most of the dream carrying the spiders around in the machine and wondering if they were still alive in there. We drove up the coast in a town called Brighton in England and found my friend Neil. I told him all about a computer game I had where you get your legs chopped off and these zombies crawl up to you and puke acid in your face. The conversation naturally turned to the spiders in the vacuum cleaner. The girl who owned the machine pressed a button that made it blow instead of suck, and we watched as these hideous creatures oozed from the end of the nozzle – stretching their creepy legs as they emerged into the sunlight. Some of the creatures weren’t spiders at all but large, furry slug or caterpillar type things.
17-February-2006: I dreamt that I was a young boy delivering newspapers. A bus driver was convinced that I was the same person that had harassed him earlier in the dream and he was following me around my route. He kept asking the people at the houses where I delivered the newspapers about me, wanting to know if I was the person who attacked his bus, and they kept saying how it couldn’t be me because I was somewhere else, or I was too good to do something like that. Of course they didn’t know it was me that did the things the bus driver thought I had, I was just trying to befuddle his old mind into thinking it wasn’t.
16-February-2006: I had a sort of recurring dream set in an alternate version of York in England, where the River Ouse comes to an end, as if it were a man-made canal, in a village called Bishopthorpe. I was trying to find an easy way to get to the other side of the river without having to walk all the way into town when I suddenly remembered a bridge as if it had been there all along but had gone unnoticed. The bridge was covered in trees and it came out in the centre of town where the river looked all old fashioned with sandy banks, like it was still medieval times before the artificial concrete river banks were made.
15-February-2006: I had a dream about a shopping mall somewhere in Japan, possibly a Tokyo suburb. The manager of the shopping mall was showing me around, describing all their latest gadgets and features that made his shopping mall stand out from the rest.
14-February-2006: I dreamt that I was helping two brothers or friends pull of some kind of cunning plan. I kept showing the younger brother/friend how to use a bubble in the Mothership to travel through time and find better ways to complete their scheme. I always showed the younger of the two because I knew no one would believe him if he said anything about the Mothership’s secrets, i.e. that it’s a space ship and has a time teleporter onboard. I still allowed the younger one to see all this though because I wanted to help the two of them – I knew the younger one would show the older one what he had learnt as if he had thought of it himself, rather than seeing someone else do it in the future.
13-February-2006: I dreamt something about running along a street outside York Minster in England with a bunch of people laughing like Homer Simpson laughs sometimes, like a little school girl – that’s what I thought in the dream. We were laughing because we were planning a daring prank, though I have no idea what the prank was or who we were targeting as the victim.
12-February-2006: My dreams were overrun by nerdy role players, the type that play Dungeons and Dragon with dice – something I’ve done myself a few times. This dream was all about player stats and who could do what to whom, with this or that magical or physical ability.
11-February-2006: I had a dream that I was reading a newspaper called the Guardian, which is ordinarily a British paper but in this dream I kept noticing it said The Brooklyn Guardian on the banner and reminding me that I was in America. I think Marcia and I were visiting her parents and I was supposed to be looking through the newspaper and pretending that we live there. The whole dream was outside in the sunshine, possibly in front of a university, there was an odd little street stall that sold everything in British pounds and pence and I thought to myself, what a stupid idea. I couldn’t remember how we got to America, but I was thinking we could just stay there forever and get someone to forward all our stuff from England, sort of because I was scared to go on the plane. It sprang to mind though that people would have to go through all our personal stuff to pack it up and ship it, so we’d have to go back and do it ourselves.
10-February-2006: I had a kind of nightmare where I was being driven around my home town by my mother and none of the streets and buildings were in the right place. We’d drive along a familiar street then turn a corner into a street that doesn’t exist, or should be in another place across town. It doesn’t sound all that frightening, but it was more of a nightmare than anything with monsters or ghosts in it. I did adapt inside the dream eventually, getting used to odd building being where they shouldn’t be and whole new waterfront developments along the riverside – half recognising my town and half seeing it for the first time. Some of it was very beautiful, in particular there was a large fountain in a square with exotic birds bathing in it and flying around the jets of water.
9-February-2006: I dreamt that I was with my friend Paul in London, England. We were travelling around on the London buses, I was taking Paul out away from his mother to give her a rest. Paul is paraplegic in waking life, but in this dream he kept getting out of his wheelchair and hobbling to the front of the bus to talk to the driver. He does this sort of thing a lot in my dreams, running around and talking to people – neither of which he can do in waking life.
8-February-2006: I had an adventure dream full of exotic shades of blue, purple and red. I was by the ocean with a girl and a boy and there was a beachhead/cliff type outcropping in the distance where I was convinced great adventures abound. My two companions agreed to go with me so I took their hands and we flew through the air and over the sea. We arrived at a town that I hadn’t expected to be there, full of people being busy and vibrant, and I found the start of a motorcar race where the entrance fee was 80 English pence. The motor race ended at the beachhead we wanted to go to so I suggested we all enter the race. We put our names down but the race wasn’t due to start for another two days so we wandered around the Bavarianesque town in search of entertainment. Everything went fuzzy soon after that and I woke up.
7-February-2006: I was dreaming about a pub that I never saw before. I was trying to drink Guinness with my friends Ché and Carl but found it very difficult, not because of the drink mainly but because of the size of the glass. It was a normal pint glass but it just seemed like too much liquid to have to drink.
There was a group of Chinese people sitting at the next table and I started talking to them in Cantonese. One of them was in a bad temper about something and I relayed the information to my friends. Later in the dream we were walking home to the house that Ché and Carl’s dad built in waking life.
On the way down Saint Oswald’s road we found three of the Chinese people from the pub lying dead in the grass by the path. I telepathically knew that the police had been called and told Ché and Carl to run back up the street with me then turn around and pretend we were just arriving as the police cars approached. I was sure that Ché and Carl would be blamed for the murders if they found us with the bodies.
We got to the top of the street and the designated place to turn around and head back down, but Ché panicked and ran off up the main road. Carl and I decided to let him go and saunter back down Saint Oswald’s like I planned just as the police came around the corner. We were just approaching the place where the Chinese people lay and a police car when I asked, “I wonder what happened to Ché?”
Just then Ché came leaping through a hedge with a policewoman chasing him. Ché ran into the house and the policewoman followed. At this point Carl became frantic and started crying, I told him there was no way Ché would be sent to prison for killing the Chinese people but he wouldn’t listen. I assured him that everything would be fine even if they did think he was guilty. I didn’t tell Carl but I was intending to use the Mothership to fly Ché and Carl off to another planet if Ché was convicted. I woke up thinking how odd it was to see Carl crying, he’s one of the only people I know never to have done this since I met him about 18 years ago.
6-February-2006: I dreamt that I was driving down the street in my car when an army helicopter flew really low overhead. The pilot flew his plane in and out of traffic, a few feet from the ground, then landed on the pavement outside a frozen food store called Iceland. Many people were impressed at first, but the pilot spent ages in Iceland getting is groceries and they started to get impatient – the tail of the helicopter was sticking out into the road and holding up traffic. I went inside the store to see what he was doing and found him at the back of a long queue. I shouted hurtful names at him and told him he was a moron for landing his helicopter in the middle of the pavement and blocking people’s right of way. When he came outside he was crying and I said I could help him.
5-February-2006: I dreamt that I was in a large room with a banquet table in the middle ages. I was talking to the Devil and I somehow knew that he was going to set everyone in the room on fire by the end of the dream. I tried to make friends with him and talked to him as if I were agreeing with his notion of a Devil-ruled world in the hope that he wouldn’t burn me to death at the end of the dream. There was something about some green poison at the back of the room that I was hoping to get my hands on so I could kill myself and not have to suffer at the hands of the Devil.
4-February-2006: I was dreaming about London and that I worked in a sort of English version of the Whitehouse, which doesn’t exist in waking life. I was trying to get everyone to exit the building at the rear calmly, as the front was being invaded by hordes of hungry zombies.
3-February-2006: I was dreaming about living in the house I grew up in, only I think I was on my own. I had a friendly Cylon (they are normally evil) from the 1970s sci fi show 
Battlestar Galactica that I kept in the back garden shed. The Cylon was always alert and guarding against intruders, it had a memory log of all my friends and relatives and would stop anyone who came to the house who didn’t have an entry in its log.
2-February-2006: I dreamt that I was walking along a street called Bishopthorpe Road in York, England, with a friend called Carl Sanderson. In waking life it’s not a really busy street and it’s out of town a little way, but in this dream is was buzzing with people and there was an entrance to a subway that doesn’t exist in waking life. A man brandishing an assault rifle appeared in the crowd and started shooting people. He wasn’t spraying bullets on full automatic like a maniac, but methodically picking people off one at a time. Carl and I wanted to run away and take cover, but when the gunman went down the steps to the subway and we heard more shots we seemed drawn to the noise somehow. I said to Carl, “There’s a sort of macabre curiosity with this isn’t there?” He nodded slightly as we walked towards the subway entrance, but we both stopped as people came running outside panicking and screaming and more shots were heard. We turned an ran at this point and I started climbing a wall to try and get to the roof so I could take the guy out with my laser rifle, only Carl had turned into a different friend called Sean Suckling who I haven’t seen in years and started dragging at my leg to pull me down. He was doing it to annoy me and I told him to let go and swore at him, I wanted to get to the roof before the guy came out and started shooting people on the street again. Sean eventually let go and I got to the roof, as I woke up I was lining up the shot at the top of the subway steps.
1-February-2006: When I was younger there used to be a shopping arcade, a sort of miniature shopping mall, with a dozen or so stores in the middle of town called Davey Gate Arcade. The arcade is no longer there but I often dream that it is. Last night I was in the arcade and it was full of modern clothes and electrical stores. I snuck in there at night and switched off the security alarms for the main arcade and went around the individual stores to see if they had alarms of their own. There was an element of time travel involved because I remember wondering if they had sophisticated burglar alarms in those days, at the time the arcade was still there.