31-March-2007: I had a dream about a desert where I dug a hole and found a broken water pipe made from wood about five feet down in the sand. I knew if I could repair the pipe some people I could see in the distance would be connected up with water from a nearby pool.
30-March-2007: I had a dream about a market stall that was run by a young Chinese guy selling sci fi-related books and comics. He had the full collection of Aliens Versus Predator books and we were discussing the stories and the characters together, with me telling him how my friend Benji had given them all to me to read a couple of years ago.
29-March-2007: I had a dream that I was playing a three way arcade computer game with my friends Neil Kay and Dave Smiley. It was a space battle game, quite complicated, where Neil and Dave were on the same side with fast little battleships. My ship was the starship Enterprise, from Star Trek The Next Generation, and I kept using its shields and warp capabilities to dodge their attacks. It sounds like a very defensive dream with my friends attacking me, but it was actually a lot of fun.
28-March-2007: I had a dream that I was a fairly hysterical woman who worked with a bunch of other highly-strung women in a New York City office building. My boss was looking at a report that I’d written and complaining that there was hardly anything in it, and asked a colleague why my report was so bare when I normally wrote such extensive and detailed reports. Nearly all the girls listening were embarrassed but someone spoke up, telling her that the report was so spars because most of it was about, my boss, her and her lesbian lover and it had been edited so as not to upset her. Later on the night of the same day we were all in a nightclub together and arguing about the report when I started crying and pleading for forgiveness, then put an umbrella up to stop the club’s lights from hurting my eyes and walked out on my own.
27-March-2007: I had a dream that myself and a woman I’ve never met were dressed in old-fashioned clothing and climbing up through square wooden tubes in a museum. We were trying to find a way out but all the tubes just led us higher and higher until we were in the attic and there was no further to go. We found some round tubes that seemed to head back down again, but we thought they looked too dangerous to use because there was a coal chute over the top of the entrance that seemed like it might release tonnes of coal down the tube at any moment. I suggested we throw a hand grenade down the tube to block it up, in case anyone tried climbing it from below and got buried in coal, but we decided not to, which was rather lucky as someone climbed out soon afterwards and I would have blown them up.
26-March-2007: I had a dream that my office had another office inside it, with people from a company working in it. I sort of worked for the company as a freelancer, but they still had to follow some of my rules because their office was inside mine, though I think they saw me as a sort of figurehead, token ruler because their business was much larger than mine.
25-March-2007: I had a dream that I was a cyborg (robot-human thing) and that I’d just finished working for a government agency and was told I could go home via a huge silver spaceship in the sky. I didn’t think my job had been very important so I was quite surprised when I noticed people following me to see where I would go when I left. I was walking through a busy building, like an airport, and as I noticed a man and a woman following me all these old computer programs, designed for counter-espionage, started kicking in and telling me how to avoid them. I seemed to turn this way and that, duck through doors and leap down stairwells, without really knowing what I was going to do next but, at the same time, being aware that it was all part of the program. I did get away from my pursuers and got a shuttle to the silver leviathan in the sky, where I fully expected to be taken home. When I got to the big ship though all these doctors in lab coats directed me to a “clean room” and switched my body off so I couldn’t move. After this they started pulling bits off me to get to inspection panels and data ports, which really hurt so I had to order my brain to shut down nerve endings in areas where the doctors pulled bits off. One of the worst bits, that I hated the most, was when they peeled one of my eyes off and tapped on the glass underneath so I could see the metal tool they were tapping with as if I was right behind the glass, which itself was like the glass of a computer scanner with a light going up and down. The tapping sound was really loud inside my head. The bit that made me the most squeamish, even though I had deactivated the nerves, was when someone poked a spike into the end of my left index finger and forced it all the way up my hand to plug into a data retriever. After this they sent me home, which was a small seaside town where everyone was pleased to see their guardian cyborg return.
24-March-2007: I had a dream that my mother was crying, she was really upset about something, and my four year old niece, Eva, was laughing at her and mimicking the noise of crying without understanding what crying actually was.
23-March-2007: I had a dream that I was being shown around a village called Dunnington where some of my friends used to live when I was a kid. It was a woman who showed me around but I never spoke to her or saw her. She showed me the house where Simon Osborne used to live, on Spring Bank Avenue, and Mark Gosling on Water Lane. I remembered in the dream how I first went to their houses and laughed at how ironic their street names were because their nicknames at school were Frog (or Frogspawn (because it sounded like Osborne)) and Goose (for obvious reasons).
22-March-2007: I had a dream that I wrote to Patrick Moore, a famous British astronomer, asking him what the consequences would be for the Earth if we got rid of the Moon.
21-March-2007: I had a movie type dream where I didn’t appear to play much part in it. Eddie Murphy was starring and he’d inherited a huge house that had previously been run by upper-class snobs who, as the dream progressed, were trying to convince Eddie that he didn’t belong there. Eddie didn’t help matters when he invited a friend to come and live with him and his friend lit a celebratory bonfire inside the house in a large room overlooking the grounds, and they both danced around it while drinking champagne. As in the movies, Eddie settled down eventually in the dream then rehired the cook that had been fired by the wicked ex-tenant of the house, and the cook immediately set about extinguishing the bonfire in the back room then went out to buy food for the kitchen.
20-March-2007: I had a dream that I went to visit Reading University, in England, with a friend called Peter Rankin, who I think actually went to that university in waking life. Peter was trying to remember some codes (from when he was a student) to speak to a woman guarding an entrance so we could get right inside the university, beyond where tourists were allowed to wander. Peter couldn’t remember the right codes, but somehow managed to blag our way in anyway. I was expecting to be taken on a grand tour of the campus but Pete’s only reason for being there was to get to a canteen at the centre that served really good food. Later we met up with a huge Spanish woman that was one of Peter’s ex-student friends from Reading and I kept speaking to her in Spanish and laughing.
19-March-2007: I had a dream I was with my friend Neil Kay, standing on a train station platform high up in the clouds and watching the London skyline. I made a comment on how close together the famous London landmarks appeared from up there as we watched steam trains chugging through the sky to invisible stations in the clouds. Neil got bored after a while and ran across the tracks and down some subway steps. I was with two other friends then, Grace and Clay Garner, and we followed Neil down the steps and found him in a much larger than life British Museum looking at a shark exhibit.
18-March-2007: I had a dream that I was in a gang of foolish hijackers on a plane. I actually missed the plane I was supposed to be on and grabbed hold of the front most undercarriage instead, deliberately stopping it from raising so my friends (who’d already stolen the plane) would think something was wrong with it then land – so I could get on the plane myself. The gang leader was really pissed off that he’d had to return to the airfield, but didn’t seem to mind as much when I told him it was me fooling around with the landing gear that had caused the malfunction.
17-March-2007: I had a dream that I was in the Chinese army in a war against America. I think it was more of a war game than a proper war. I had a sub machine gun that fired water, fireworks or bullets and was demonstrating how the water was so pressurised that one could destroy armoured vehicles with it. Later I was asked to man a Semtex (plastic explosive, squashy stuff) launcher where I had to look into a big scope to see my target, which in this case was a large water silo that I’d been instructed to destroy by firing a big glob of Semtex so that it would stick to the metal sides. The Semtex had a remote detonator inside that we could set off when I hit the target properly.
16-March-2007: I had a dream that I was talking to an old woman who said she’d always wanted to see Jupiter up close, so I called the Mothership (in Russian so it sounded cool) to come down to Earth. I told the woman that a ship was coming to pick us up and to watch the sky for a descending, black dot. We saw a few black dots first that were just birds, but the Mothership did eventually appear through the clouds and grow into a larger black blob as it fell through the sky, finally slowing and landing gently on the ground in front of us. The Mothership landed in the shape of a large black diving bell, then opened sliding doors to unfold a complicated ramp, which all seemed very impressive. However, after we boarded for our space flight it just floated around, no more than a hundred metres up in the air, like a helium balloon.
15-March-2007: I had a dream that Walmgate Bar, the southern gate of the walls around York where I live, was dripping water from a filthy toilet that doesn’t exist in waking life.
14-March-2007: I had a dream that I was in the seaside town of Whitby, North Yorkshire, England. I caught a bus that was supposed to travel across the North York Moors but when it got to the top of the moors, up a steep, winding road, the bus’s engine failed and we rolled all the way back down again to Whitby. As we rolled back down the hill I clung to the seat in front, thinking that the bus would be smashed up and we would all die. Regardless of the fear I went through on the bus, when it was fixed I boarded again and took the journey across the moors.
13-March-2007: I had a dream that I was working in an unusual office where no one would tell me what my job was supposed to be, but I had a feeling it was something mysterious. A woman told me that I must get a tube train to Morden, which I only know as being the last southern stop on the Northern Line of the London Underground in waking life. I made all the arrangements to get to Morden then the woman told me she was only joking, that I should make some coffee instead.
12-March-2007: I had a dream that I was running naked, with a duvet wrapped around me, through a posh English college.
11-March-2007: I had a dream that I went to meet a friend called David Smiley at a new swimming pool. When I got there he had already gone inside to swim but I was having difficulty with a new ticket system, and arguing with staff over how stupid they were for not telling people that they’d changed the rules regarding ticket sales.
10-March-2007: I had a dream that I was in a very dark and smoky nightclub with some friends, waiting for a popular band to play. When the band arrived it turned out to be one where I knew the performers and I told my friends, who didn’t believe me until I shouted to a female singer and she called me over to join in with their performance. The band was the Hip Hop group called De La Soul and I played a guitar and operated a drum machine. [I think there is a connection with this dream and the one from the night before. I have suffered from a little-known condition called Derealization, where nothing feels quite real, since I was a teenager. When I first started feeling this way De La Soul were in the charts with a song about the meaning of life that used to really freak me out because of how I was feeling.]
9-March-2007: I had a dream that I was a robot that looked totally human, apart from I could do odd things like skim across the surface of water. I was trying to impress some women with my water-skimming technique on a lake in a park for most of the dream. Later I was outside a cinema crying, telling passers by that I was just like an ordinary person.
8-March-2007: I had a dream that when I looked at the River Ouse, the main river in York where I live, I saw it as it was two hundred years ago. The river was half frozen and people were walking on it for fun, dressed in the period clothing of their time. I had a digital camera with me so I took a picture of the scene from Lendal Bridge.
7-March-2007: I was dreaming about eating lots of wriggly bugs, stuffing them into my mouth like Chinese fried noodles. Once my mouth was full I realised the bugs were disgusting and spat them all out, apart from one grasshopper type thing that got stuck to my lip and wouldn’t fall out. I eventually got the thing off and it dropped to the crawling mass on the floor that had been in my mouth. After that I showed my friends a new helicopter that I’d bought and took them for a ride in it.
6-March-2007: I had a dream that I found a bottle of pills that were supposed to be for Maja, an old friend I haven’t seen in years. The lid was broken so it had a triangular hole in it and I thought the pills might be spoiled, but figured I might keep them anyway as they were some kind of tranquilliser. I found another bottle of pills that said “Vitamins for Children and Adults up to Age 63” on the label, with some smaller text that said “Vitamins for Really Old People Also Available”.
5-March-2007: I had a dream that I owned my own little airline company, which I wanted to fly me from Hove, in the south of England, to the little town of Portslade only a mile or so down the road. Later, in a different dream, I was a spy playing a kind of live sport where other spies hunted me down and I had to see how long I could stay free in the outside world before they caught me. At some point in the dream I was hiding behind a fence, because I’d just seen my waking life friend, Neil Kay, drive past in a car and knew they were hunting me down. They acted like they hadn’t seen me so I wouldn’t be spooked, but sent some guy I didn’t know to come and approach me. As the guy approached I was fiddling around with a shotgun and sort of accidentally/on purpose blew his head off when he ran at me. After this I ran away through some houses and across people’s gardens and over hedges and fences. Neil and another guy in the car with him eventually caught me up. Neil stood back, being the more experienced agent in this dream, and watched the novice run at me with handcuffs only to receive a huge punch in the face from me that knocked him out. After this I was riding back to HQ with Neil in the car and telling him how in last week’s game I had even managed to acquire my own airline company.
4-March-2007: I had a dream where I kept bigging up the virtues of eating porridge.
3-March-2007: I had a dream that I was taking an odd class run by a TV presenter from a British show called Top Gear. He told three girls to do something and they said they didn’t have to do it, whatever it was, under new laws to do with women’s rights. Richard Hammond, our teacher, didn’t bother to argue with them, he simply told them to get out of his classroom and to go and see Jeremy Clarkson (another presenter from Top Gear).
2-March-2007: I was dreaming about lots of saucy kanoodling with my wife, Marcia.
1-March-2007: I was dreaming about York horse racing track. At the Knavesmire in York, England, where there was a huge party with thousands of people. My friend Neil Kay went running of up a hill and I borrowed somebody’s bike to follow him and ended up on a tropical beach, still riding the bike in between sunbathers and occasionally riding in the ocean. I then found myself inside an almost totally enclosed red and white sphere that hung from the end of a thin tube hundreds of feet up in the air. An actor called Shane Richie (who was playing a deranged loony in my dream) was in there with me. The sphere had been designed by him as a place to go to cause relief from his agoraphobia. The only opening in the sphere was above my head and I could only just reach my arm through, which I did and asked someone to pull me out, but they couldn’t because it was too small an opening. I thought that I should be scared, being claustrophobic and stuck inside a sweaty plastic sphere with a madman who was happily relaxing in his comfort zone, but I calmed down and figured the other guy would have to get out somehow eventually. Later I walked through the streets of Cambridge with Shane, while his adoring fans were kept at least 20 feet away at all times, and we chatted amicably.