28-February-2007: I had a dream that I woke up in a forest, next to a lake, somewhere in Scotland – right outside a tent where my friends Neil Kay and Jenny Sharpe had stayed the night. In waking life they travel to Scotland a lot but I’ve never been with them. In the dream I was surprised at how beautiful the countryside was and later joined Neil fishing in the lake. I was a little shocked that Jenny was making sandwiches for Neil with what looked like real meat (they are vegetarians in waking life), though Jenny said it wasn’t it seemed obvious that it was to me.
27-February-2007: I had a dream that I went to San Francisco with my wife, Marcia, and got a bit lost walking through a horribly greasy café run by rough middle-aged woman from Yorkshire in England.
26-February-2007: I had a dream that I went by train to the city of Newcastle Upon Tyne, in northern England, but when I returned it was a few days earlier than when I’d set off, and I knew everything that was going to happen for the next few days – though the upcoming events where all taken from a British TV soap opera called Hollyoaks.
25-February-2007: I had a dream that I was one of the crew from the Battlestar Galactica, from the old 1970s/80s version of the TV show by the same name. We, two of us, were on Earth riding our jet bike things when a motorcycle cop pulled us over for questioning. We shot the cop with a stun-gun then escaped to a fashion show where others of our kind were shrinking because of something in the Earth’s air. Another of the crew from BG was blurting out racist remarks about Asian people so I reprimanded him. After this myself and the original person who rode the bike with me followed the trail of an old Roman road back in time to 3553BC and found a church where the first ever Christian ceremony was taking place, despite it being over 3000 years too early, and being conducted by a drunken priest.
24-February-2007: I had a dream that my ex-wife, Masayo, had come to talk to me about something, like she needed someone to talk to about something that had upset her. I wasn’t really sure if I should talk to her or not after she’d upset me so much when she left years ago. I asked her for a her phone number so I could talk to her that way instead, but she wouldn’t give it to me, which made me suspicious that she was up to no good. My friend Mark couldn’t believe that I was even talking to her and kept telling Masayo to fuck off and leave me alone.
23-February-2007: I had a dream that I was talking about gas bills with two friends, Neil Kay and Jenny Sharp, then later on another friends called Peter Ranking had a gas fire turned up to full.
22-February-2007: I had a dream that I was with a group of people that found a fox who like me more than anyone else.
21-February-2007: I had a dream that I went to Scarborough on the train with Marcia, my wife. Scarborough is a seaside town in Yorkshire about forty miles from where we live. I haven’t been there on a train since I was a child in waking life and I’ve been meaning to make the journey for a while now. In the dream the track was odd and twisting, at one point it was very weak as it stretched across a ravine with no support and nearly collapsed as our train crossed. I thought that it would probably break on the return journey, but I woke up soon after arriving at Scarborough station, which looked more like a London Underground station than its real life self.
20-February-2007: I had a dream that I was driving around a strange town in a hovering army tank, blowing up buildings that I didn’t like. Someone had half built a really cheap-looking church from breeze-blocks, with no proper bricks on the outside – the whole flimsy structure collapsed with one shot, very satisfying.
19-February-2007: I had a little dream where I was trying to get up a street on a bicycle and two yellow buses (there aren’t really many yellow buses in the UK where I live) blocked my path, pulling right up in front of me and taking up the whole road on both sides. I called one of the drivers an idiot then took a side road to get around them.
18-February-2007: When I was younger in waking life my grandparent used to live in a house on a street called Newton Terrace, so that old house has always been referred to as Newton Terrace in my family and has also been synonymous with mystery for me – because it is place from my early childhood that I don’t remember much about, and because the bits I do remember have ghosts in them. I always look back at it as a place that was haunted, and the place with some of my earliest memories attached. In last night’s dream we had bought the house and were planning to live there, which has happened in a few dreams before. I discovered that the house had a cellar and expected it to be really spooky when I went down the stairs, but discovered that it was well lit. The walls were painted white and a little window let lots of light in from outside. In fact, as I explored, the whole house had a lighter feel to it than ever before, there didn’t seem to be any shadows and dark corners like there usually is in my dreams of Newton Terrace.
17-Feruary-2007: I dreamt that I was shopping for an Irish Whistle with my friend Mark . I was searching for a particular flute, it had to be green and in the key of C.
16-Februrary-2007: I had a dream that I had a tooth cavity that was so large, like a bucket or well, that I thought it would collect water every time I took a drink.
15-February-2007: I was dreaming about learning and teaching kung fu moves to defend against paedophilic creatures from another planet.
14-February-2007: I had a dream that an old psycho friend called Mark Rowley said he was going to fight me and another old friend called Philip Morrel, Moz, said he would help him. I said to Moz, “I’m a bit surprised that you want to fight me” and he asked me why, and I replied “because you were always more reasonable than that, from what I remember, more likely to stop fights than join in with them”. He said that I was right, that he wasn’t going to fight me after all, then Mark lost interest and went away. After that we found a secret farm and pub on some private land, where I trained a horse to sit and stand as if it were a dog.
13-February-2007: I had a dream about a TV documentary set in America. An English man was travelling through all the states of America with Americans from all the different states, all with their own accents. The man was trying to learn better the details of each state by being told things about it from the different points of view of the people with him. Just before I woke up the man spoke a line quite loudly, like it was a preview piece for a particular episode that was an ad for the show in a commercial break, “Someone’s missing; Somebody is missing, I thought, but just couldn’t put my finger on it, then I realised – it’s little Northern Marcia. As he said this there was a sort of Southern States guitar riff in the background.
12-February-2007: I had a dream that I was travelling on a bus between Rotterdam and Amsterdam in the Netherlands. I looked out of a window and saw my friend, Ché Sanderson, on his way to a campsite to be in the dream I had the night before – only he was on a motorbike instead of driving a sports car.
11-Februray-2007: I had a dream that my friend, Ché Sanderson, was on a campsite near Amsterdam (in the Netherlands) with me. He had a sports car and an insanely high-tech tent that required a deep hole in front to anchor thick steel guy ropes attached with metal loops and carabiners, the little clips that rock climbers use.
10-February-2007: I had a dream that I volunteered to take experimental drugs. After I’d taken them I had a great dependency to be near a particular plant, it looked a bit like a cannabis plant only it wasn’t. Also it was just this one particular plant I had to be near, not any plant of the same variety. At one point someone threw the plant out of a window and I had to jump out after it just to be near, like it was part of my soul and connected to me – it caused me pain to be more than a few feet away from it.
9-February-2007: I had a dream that I boarded a little steam train driven by a jolly fat old lady. The train had no coaches and all its passengers, when it had them, sat on a wooden bench behind the driver/engineer. I talked to the old lady for while, as we chugged through the countryside, asking her about her lifetime driving trains. The train was going through the real life places of Settle and Carlisle, then on to a place called Pooksipeake that only existed in my dream.
8-February-2007: I had a dream that I was with an autistic boy called William, who I work with in waking life, when a small cruise missile flew over our heads and crashed into the city about a mile away and exploded. I took William into a leisure centre just in time to avoid the blast from the small scale atomic explosion – that is small scale as atomic explosions go, but still pretty devastating for our medieval town. William was unusually cooperative and seemed to sense that staying with me was a good idea. The shockwave passed our building, breaking windows but now destroying it, and we waited for the second return shockwave that atomics create by causing a vacuum to appear which refills rapidly after the initial blast. I was fairly confident the building would hold, which it did but only just. I called William’s parents, who are a different autistic boy’s parents in waking life, and they were very relieved that their son was okay. After that it occurred to me that my mother might be dead and I had a gut wrenching feeling, then wondered what I would do to retaliate if she really was dead, being someone who is not usually interested in people’s wars. As I woke up, still half asleep, it also occurred to me that Marcia, working in the middle of town, could well be dead also and I had a grim vision of picking over the ruins of our city.
7-February-2007: In waking life I’ve been working on a website where people can make their own home pages called UHPs. In last night’s dream I was surprised to discover that some of the bus stops in my hometown were hooked into the UHPs from the website that I’d been designing.
6-February-2007: I dreamed I was in a semi-famous man’s house, like he was a minor celebrity or something but I’d never seen him before, and it was full of curious antique mechanical marvels – clockwork instruments and measuring devices. I found his things fairly interesting, and he thought I wanted to steal them, but I just wanted to get out of his house and go home, which proved rather difficult because I couldn’t find a proper exit – all the doors seemed to lead back inside his house again. I did eventually get out and found that I was in Oxford by the river with no means of getting home. There was a house next to the river where the owners were throwing a high-class party for film directors and such who had arrived in fancy boats. Some of the boats had little dinghies attached so I swam in the river, on the other side of the boats from the bank where they couldn’t see me, and stole one of their little dinghies to get home in. The lady of the house saw me take the boat but couldn’t stop me, she was rather angry that some scruffy urchin had been near her home. Later in the dream I was a woman and I came back to the lady’s house with her boat on a trailer attached to the back of a Land Rover. She was going to call the police when she heard that I came back, but changed her mind when she saw I was a woman, wearing green Wellington boots and driving an old Land Rover (like many English aristocracy) and invited me into her home to show me her paintings.
5-February-2007: I had another alcohol-related dream, but this time with a friend called Mark and his estranged wife, Chiemi. We were riding on a bus together through the countryside and I was about to drink some beer with Mark, something I haven’t done for a long time, and Chiemi was going to drink wine. Mark poured a little too much wine into Chiemi’s glass so he tipped some of it out into my beer, thinking I wouldn’t mind because I never used bother about mixing drinks a few years ago in waking life. I was kind of afraid to drink the beer in the first place, seeing as it had been so long since I last had a drink, but I was totally dead set against the idea now there was wine in there too. So, when the bus pulled up at an isolated Stop in the middle of the North York Moors, I encouraged Mark and Chiemi to get off with me and run around in the heather instead of drinking.
4-February-2007: I had a dream that a sort of psycho bully from my past, called Mark Rowley, was trying to get me to have a drink with him and get very drunk, only it was one of those dreams where it wasn’t really me but someone else representing me while I watched it playing out. I came into the dream later as a second ‘me’ and had a fight with Mark, demanding to know why he would want to get the other guy drunk. The other ‘me’ had a reason why he couldn’t drink at all, like it might kill him or something, and Mark knew this but thought it would be funny to see what happened, which made me very angry. The whole dream took place in a humid jungle on the side of a mountain, near a hut made of bamboo where the other ‘me’ was hiding from Mark so he wouldn’t have to drink any alcohol.
3-February-2007: I had a dream that I went to look at the flat where I used to live, in Brighton on the south coast of England. I was surprised to see that Maja, the person I lived with at the time, was still living there (she told me she moved ages ago in waking life) and that it all looked exactly the same after eleven years. A relative of Mister Allanach, the original landlord who died of cancer when I still lived there, still owned the flat and was discussing the rent with Maja and her new lodger, a young girl. In the dream Marcia, my wife, was working in London (about 60 miles away) and I wondered if I could talk her though how to get to Brighton from her work by train, then wondered again if she would refer that I came to London to pick her up. I asked her when I woke up and, of course, she said “come to London and pick me up!”
2-February-2007: I had a dream that I was organising a game of hide and seek on the top of a grassy hill with some friends I never met in waking life. We were all adults but revelling in the joy of running around like children, yet taking the rules of the game a bit too seriously to be proper children.
1-February-2007: I had a dream that my friend, Mark , and I were herding a flock of sheep down the inside of an embankment while an American tourist watched from above, asking us if we knew what we were doing and if we were allowed to be doing what we were doing. Mark laughed at him and told him that we lived “’round these parts’ in his best rural accent, after which the guy left us alone to herd our sheep. After that Mark and I met some other people in farm buildings where we joined in with an ethnic drumming session.