30-April-2007: I had a dream that I was riding a magnificent white horse and a semi-psychopathic guy called Mark Rowley, who I used to know in waking life when I was a teenager, was riding beside me on a bicycle and pulling stupid stunts. At one point he pulled a wheelie and rode off down the street without looking, then came past me a few minutes later with his head stuck inside someone’s car window where he’d smashed it, laughing like an idiot. The car owners were really annoyed with him but he wouldn’t stop laughing, or remove himself from their broken window. They eventually kicked him out of the window and drove away. It later transpired that the car owner was a younger member of an infamous gangster family (only in my dream) called the McGuires, and they were really angry with me for being friends with such an idiot. I think because Mark was a psychopath they were afraid to do anything to him, so they transferred their anger towards me. The rest of the dream involved me riding around on my white horse and people reminding me, ad nauseum, that the McGuires were after me. When they eventually caught up with me, having trapped me inside a house using a futuristic, two-legged robot tank thing, they persuaded me to plant a bomb in an office building for them to appease their anger. I couldn’t really say no because they said they would murder all my family, but I wondered if it might be okay if I warned the office building people before the bomb went off. The bomb never did go off in the end and I was sent to the office to discover which of their undercover staff had grassed them up (the McGuires) to the police.
29-April-2007: I had a dream that I was in a restaurant opposite Clifford’s Tower in York, England. I was rescuing bits of camera and photography paraphernalia, I had accidentally thrown away, from a bin inside the restaurant instead of eating food. As I left the restaurant someone pointed out a whole High Elf scene made from Warhammer that I’d left at a table about a year ago, but I told them the restaurant had decided to keep it because it looks nice and I was happy to leave it there.
28-April-2007: I had a dream that I went on a very long, and slow, train ride with some lesbian friends I never met before in waking life. The train’s route went all around the area of East Anglia, Norfolk and Suffolk in England, and eventually ended up in Evesham in Essex. Evesham is nowhere near Essex in waking life and, to complicate things further, from the farmhouse we arrived at we could see Cambridge (also not in Essex but closer than Evesham) only about a mile away at the bottom of a hill.
27-April-2007: I had a dream that I went to New York with my wife, Marcia, and we were in an apartment waiting for her brother-in-law, Bill, to come home. There was a woman there who I assumed was Marcia’s sister, Julie, but when I asked her she said she was Bill’s secretary. At that moment we saw a guy through the window descending from the sky with a parachute, then appear to land on the roof of our building. Bill came home then, I told him about the guy on the roof and he led me, enthusiastically, up some steps so we could go and check it out. I was pleased that Bill, on this our first meeting, seemed an interesting guy and wanted to do what I would have done if someone landed on my roof back home, i.e. go up there and take a look.
26-April-2007: I had a dream that I was with Marcia, my wife, in the countryside somewhere in America. There were lots of other people that were like my followers or admirers. One person who was sometimes a girl and sometimes this guy I haven’t seen since I was a child, called Stewart Edwards, kept wanting to kiss me. I finally relented but it didn’t feel right at all, like kissing a brother or sister, and I told them so which they didn’t seem to mind. I went and kissed Marcia after that and it felt perfect, just right. After this a girl who was a Terry Pratchett fan wanted to kiss me also, so I kissed her as well which was nicer than the first person but not as nice as Marcia still. Later the Pratchett fan girl drew a picture with me at the front and everyone else around me on the farm where we were all staying. I worried for a moment that she might develop a fixation with me.
My attention was drawn away from the girl with the picture to a group of people trying to rescue a pig caught in some turbulent water where two rivers joined. I went to look and skipped and jumped over some steppingstones, then nimbly crossed a water-gate to get across one of the rivers, thinking that I must look very cool to the girls who were watching me. Another guy from my childhood, Jason Carlton, was watching the pig struggle in the water and I went to talk to him about it. After a while we decided the pig would be fine and I looked around and took in the scenery, which was fantastic. The two rivers joined each other at right angles and the combined river tumbled over a low, but violent, waterfall then widened into a lazy ribbon of silver that glittered in the sunshine as it cut it’s way trough a wide, green pasture with snow-topped mountains on the right. I had been there all day but this was the first time I noticed how beautiful the scenery was, and I realised that I might be falling in love with the place and might find it impossible to go home to England. I decided to fly around in the scenery, following the combined river through the pastureland, flying a few feet above it, then gliding up to the top of a mountain. I found Marcia near the top talking to a Spanish guy with a guitar. I made my own guitar appear and started playing, but it sounded really odd because it was full of snow. I shook my guitar and snow began to fall out from the sound hole and the three of us laughed joyfully.
25-April-2007: I had a dream that a TV station did a music-hall dance routine every morning when they came on air. I was bored with the act, that I was supposed to take part in, and went outside in an unknown town for a walk. As I walked the streets of what looked like an old Swiss town I realised I was Frasier Crane, the psychiatrist character from the American TV show ‘Frasier’, and started chatting to a gorgeous Chinese girl. She said that she could do nothing for me apart from cause me lots of physical pain. I replied, as Frasier, that I really enjoyed physical pain so she started nipping my arms really hard and Frasier/I became sexually excited.
24-April-2007: I don’t recall how I go t there exactly, but I was in an alternate world six times removed from this one. Killer robots were chasing me and a group of people and I was trying to lead them back to our world, which involved seeking out invisible talking gateways to other dimensions and riding down tubes that interconnected realities.
23-April-2007: I had a dream that I took a bus to town and there was a dodgy-looking sale of flat screen TVs in an otherwise vacant store, like one of those temporary things that are never seen again the next day. Lots of people were buying these huge TVs really cheaply, and guys were regularly offloading more stock from the back of a truck parked outside. I felt sure the police would come along any moment and arrest them all, but no one else seemed to care, they just kept buying the TVs. I walked away and went around the corner to a Subway sandwich bar to eat. As I was in there I thought about the TVs and decided that perhaps they weren’t so dodgy after all, but when I went back to the store the guy had completely sold out and all he had left were some old chairs.
22-April-2007: I had a dream that I was sitting on a bus in York, England, and listening to two women talk about daffodils. One woman, a tourist, was asking the other if we still get the beautiful daffodils on the grass in front of the city walls, and the other told her that we do not, which was a blatant lie as you could see them on the grass through the bus windows. I told the tourist to turn around and she saw the daffodils, then started talking to me about them instead.
21-April-2007: I had a dream that my friends, Neil Kay and Jenny Sharp, had gone on a trip to Scotland and I, with my wife/ex-wife, was supposed to go and meet them. I was afraid to go and meet them because I haven’t driven to Scotland before, and they were staying on an island where you had to take an hour long ferry journey to get to it. It was the ferry journey I was most afraid of, the fact that I would have to rely on the ferries to get back to the mainland if I wanted to return home. Neil kept calling me on his phone to see off I had set off yet and I told him I was waiting for Marcia, my wife, to get home from work, at about 4PM. At some point in the dream I decided I was going to go to the island and meet my friends anyway, despite being afraid, and got in a big yellow Land Rover with Masayo, my ex wife, and prepared to go. Before we even started the engine though this senile old man, trying to park his car, crashed into and scraped the whole front of our Land Rover while his passenger looked at us in a horrified and apologetic manner. I got out to look at the damage and saw that our lights were destroyed and the engine was exposed with bits of wires hanging out. I was quite relieved because it meant we couldn’t go to Scotland.
20-April-2007: I had a dream that thousands of people were living in a huge building where there was no way to get outside. Most people didn’t feel trapped as they had been living in there all their lives. I followed someone down a stairwell for a long time and ended up in an underground parking lot, like the ones people always seem to go to in crappy action movies. I realised that cars must come in and out and that we, my friends and I, could all escape to the outside. All the vehicles we saw were military jeeps and troop carriers, so we dressed up as soldiers and I pretended to be a general in a jeep while my friends followed in an APC and we all drove out through some gates.
19-April-2007: I had a dream that I was taking all kinds of physical and mental aptitude tests so that I could join the RAF (Royal Air Force). I was doing pretty well at it though only wanted to join so I could learn how to fly my helicopter better, in a lot of my dreams I have a helicopter that I can’t quite get to fly properly, but the guy kept talking about other benefits of being in the RAF that I wasn’t interested in – such as cheap housing.
18-April-2007: I had a dream about the set of an Australian soap opera called Neighbours. I went to visit Ramsay Street, where the show takes place, and discovered that the houses didn’t have real people in them at all, like the documentaries say, but the actual people from the show live in the houses and behave just like they do on TV. Marcia, my wife, played with a young girl called Summer, and I practiced kung fu fighting with Dillon and his brother Stingray.
17-April-2007: I had another dream about the Low Moor. This time I came across an old shed and went inside to discover some guy selling old, classic cars from the 1960s and 70s. I wanted to buy an orange BMW from him and turn it into a hotrod.
16-April-2007: I had a dream that a huge iron bridge was being built over a road near a place called the Low Moor, near where I live in waking life. The bridge was built to connect up with a high walkway, which appears in some of my dreams, leading into the middle of town.
15-April-2007: I had a dream that I was reading an article in a newspaper about the decline of posh-speaking people in England.
14-April-2007: I have two friends called Ché and Carl Sanderson in waking life. In last night’s dream I was carrying a “Sanderson Document” around with me everywhere. I didn’t see what was inside the document but it was somehow important that I get it to Louise, Carl and Ché’s mother.
13-April-2007: I had a dream that I was with a weird guy (he’s not so bad really) I know in waking life called Darryl Leavy. We were watching flying saucers and I was feeling uncontrollably sleepy. I later woke up, still in the dream, to find Darryl and my brother laughing at me because I had aluminium foil stuck up my arse.
12-April-2007: I had a dream that I was in a submarine that had sank to the bottom of the sea with no way of getting back to the surface. A group of us were standing under the main hatch and debating who should go outside first and try to swim to a nearby underwater base.
11-April-2007: In the UK there is a TV sitcom, called Green Wing, set in a hospital. It’s a bit like the US Scrubs only much more bizarre. In last night’s dream I dreamed that the two main doctors were examining a beautiful Chinese woman, pretending to be professional whenever she was listening and looking, but ogling her breasts and backside when she was not – giving her points out of ten for different aspects of her body.
10-April-2007: I had a dream that I was with an autistic boy that I care for in waking life, and some other kid I never met before was somehow left in my care too. The new boy was really odd, like he was an alien or something, and had no sense of what was dangerous and what was okay to do. The new boy ran off up a pathway that led to the edge of a high cliff with a river at the bottom. He was messing around at the edge and making ready to leap off into the water, thinking it was the same as leaping from a kitchen table at home, and I told him not to do it because it was a very long way down. The new kid was making the autistic boy a little excitable with his display at the edge of the cliff and, when he actually did jump and land face down in the water, the autistic boy nearly jumped too but I grabbed him.
I was very frustrated because I wanted to leap from the cliff and rescue the kid, but I couldn’t leave the autistic boy up there in danger, so we had to walk all the way back down the path to the bottom and find our way to the river. When we got to the new boy he had died, his bones were broken but I think he had drowned. I called an ambulance and tried to resuscitate the boy but it was no use. I was dreading telling the boy’s mother that he was dead, and angry that I’d been made to care for two special needs children at the same time.
9-April-2007: I had a dream that I invented a pen and paper game for three people where each person has a copy of the same grid everyone has and each person has three players, stick men, that can move along the grid pattern by whatever number is rolled with dice. There is a ball on the grid and you must get one of your players to reach the ball and take it to a goal on one of the four sides. The other players can take the ball from you by rolling a high enough number to intercept your grid reference and carry the ball away. Players may also opt to not move and attempt to shoot one of their opponent’s players dead on a roll of 5 or 6. I was playing the game with my friend Maja Obradovic and a guy called Electic-Man (Ben) from the Terry Pratchett Board.
8-April-2007: I had a dream that I was on the top floor of a double-decker bus with about twenty women, who were apparently all my friends, sitting right at the back. The bus had a large video screen and was kitted out like it was made for special passengers. It occurred to me that if the bus crashed I would be the last person to get to the stairs because everyone else was in front of me, but then I noticed the window behind me was an emergency exit.
7-April-2007: I had a dream that Marcia and I were trying to board a train to London. The train was slightly odd because it had a ticket dispenser attached to it, so you bought your tickets as you boarded the train instead of from a ticket office. As I was buying my ticket the train guard was hassling me, saying that the door I was standing at was for the first class passenger coach only, which was kind of irritating me because we were buying first class tickets.
6-April-2007: I had a dream that I was in the middle of York, England, where I live, trying to lock my bicycle to a specially made bike parking frame. In waking life there are lots of bicycles in York so I was quite surprised in the dream that this bike parking frame was empty, full of spaces, until I discovered that the parking frame was too large to fit any kind of lock around it. In the dream I was trying to fit a padlock around a steel tube that was way too big for it to go around, but as I woke up I realised that I should have put the chain that came with the padlock around the tube and not the lock itself.
5-April-2007: I had a dream that I was in an Italian-style courtyard with a little chessboard inlaid into the floor-tiles. I was trying to play a game of something with someone that wasn’t chess, with flattened globe-shaped pieces – black for one player and white for the other. I couldn’t figure out how to play the game and we were being distracted by water seeping in from beneath the tiles. After a while the water was a couple of feet deep and I said, “I wonder if it’s deep enough for us to have our own swimming pool?” after which I tested to see if the water was deep enough to swim in, then noticed other people were already swimming in the water and treating the courtyard like a public bath.
4-April-2007: I can’t really remember the substance of the dream, but it had something to do with the invention of under-bra padding – a new addition to women’s bras that pushes their breasts up higher.
3-April-2007: In waking life a spoke to this guy called Bob Addy, who’s a bit of a simpleton but nice all the same, on the phone for the first time in about fifteen years. In last night’s dream he was hanging around outside the house, next to a yellow Mustang car, and talking to someone about me. I was hiding begin a curtain trying to hear what he was saying.
2-April-2007: I had a dream that my friend Maja Obradovic came to visit and my other friend Carl Sanderson wanted to see her, but Maja said she didn’t want to go and see Carl because she couldn’t be bothered with all the hassle – she just wanted to go and see our other friends Neil Kay and Jenny Sharp instead.
1-April-2007: I had a dream that I was with my stepfather in Singapore, only it looked more like Hong Kong with a lot of extra Britishness. We were commenting on all these red telephone boxes that were on all the streets, like there used to be in England, and lots of red London buses – none of which are seen in the real Singapore or Hong Kong. There were even London bussed being tugged down the river on their way to a scrap yard.