31-May-2007: I had a dream that I was in spy school with someone I used to work with in waking life called Jane Kitt. My speciality was reading and writing any language.
30-May-2007: I had a dream that I was locked inside a puzzle, a classroom with glass walls and no doorway to get out, which is what I had to figure a way to do. After a bit of searching I found some old cans of house paint leaned up against a glass wall, I threw some petrol on them and a Zippo cigarette lighter and blew up the side of the building. I made it out of the puzzle but someone pointed out to me that there was actually a door behind the paint cans that I blew up.
29-May-2007: I had a dream that I was riding on an Icelandic fishing boat/ice breaker to the North Pole with Michael Palin.
28-May-2007: I had a dream that I was watching a movie about a woman in a wheelchair. She was being pushed along a hospital corridor and complaining that she didn’t have her own room, saying she wished that one day she would be rich enough to have her own room. She is then wheeled into an empty room with a bed and told that it belongs to her, which makes her quite excited until it dawns on her that she must be really sick for the doctors to grant her a private room. She leaves the room in search of a doctor to see if her suspicions are true then returns to me, no longer watching the movie but properly inside the story, and says she has cancer of the tummy button. Everyone is worried apart from me because I remembered how the dream ends as soon as she, now Marcia my wife, announced that she had cancer. I saw the end of the dream earlier in the night where Marcia had undergone some chemotherapy and beaten cancer and we go off home feeling happy… meanwhile, as a sort of aside or subplot dream, I’m with some space aliens by the River Foss in York, where we live in waking life, who use their noses to locate people – they were trying to sniff out Marcia’s wheelchair and tummy button cancer and the start of the dream where she’s complaining about having to share a room in the hospital.
27-May-2007: I had a dream that I was standing in a large, open square with skyscrapers all around, possibly in Dallas or Denver. I was telling some people about how I could give them a ride in my helicopter and they thought I was making it up, because I looked too scruffy to own a helicopter. I called my chauffeur/pilot to come and land, which he was reluctant to do in the middle of a city but agreed anyway, very irritably, when I ordered him to do so. When he eventually arrived it was obvious why he was reluctant to land in the town square, it was not the type of helicopter that rich people normally own, like a Bell Ranger or something, but a huge Sea King helicopter like the coast guard or navy use to rescue people from the ocean. He caused quite a stir, felling a couple of small trees, landing that monster in the middle of the city.
26-May-2007: I had a dream that myself, my brother and mother were running away to a place called Haxby to get away from my stepdad (brother’s real dad). Haxby is just a village outside York where I live in waking life, but in this dream and a few others it was a place of wonder and suburban heaven where everything is wonderful and everyone is nice to each other. In this dream the three of us were waiting for a long time at a bus stop to get to Haxby before I realised that the Haxby bus was not coming to our stop. I had an argument with a bus driver about why they keep moving the stops around; they had changed the Haxby stop which meant we had to walk all the way back into town, towards the man we were escaping from, to get the bus from it’s new stop.
25-May-2007: I had a sort of ghost story dream that played like a movie twice over. The second time around I knew when the evil ghost was going to come to the house and try to murder me, a small boy, so I ran away down an old muddy road in the rain to get away before it got there.
24-May-2007: I had a dream that a family of London gangsters were helping me repaint my red Volvo that someone has scratched in waking life.
23-May-2007: I had a dream that I was on the same moorland as the night before, sans shed, looking at the sky, which was completely covered in newspapers apart from one area, about 10 feet wide, where the paper was torn and you could see lots of stars and planets. My friend Neil Kay was looking around the ground and I told him to look at the sky through the hole and remarked how amazing it must look if you were tripping on LSD.
22-May-2007: I had a dream that I was in a bed, in a shed in the middle of some moors, with a hippy girl, sharing the experience of being in bed with someone of the opposite sex without anything sexual taking place.
21-May-2007: I dreamed that I knitted a pink hand warmer and that a Japanese girl came up to me with her boyfriend and asked if I could make one for her too.
20-May-2007: I had a dream that I was at a university I’ve never seen before, walking behind three girls who were talking about how cool some Polish guy was.
19-May-2007: I had a dream that I went to see my old kung fu teacher, Geoff Rennison, who was supervising a new martial arts course at Burnholme Community College in York, England. I was a little disappointed by the class, however, which included having to play games of football and various other sports unrelated to martial arts.
18-May-2007: I was dreaming about flying very low, with my arms outstretched, over hundreds of geese. Some of them hissed at me and tried to bite, while others simply watched me fly over them.
17-May-2007: I had a dream that my friend, Mark , was supposed to be working with me as a spy, but he had turned renegade and I was sent to hunt him down and capture him. I found Mark living in a wooden hut next to a river and tried to sneak up on him, but some fools in helicopters came and spooked him and he escaped.
16-May-2007: I had a dream that a friend I haven’t seen in a long time, called Lewis Evans, kept showing me his penis and teasing me with it (it made me uncomfortable to see it for some reason), and my brother was encouraging him to keep on provoking me in the same manner.
15-May-2007: I had a dream that a man was trying to sell my granddad’s house (now my mother’s in waking life) in York, England, and said he needed my keys to our flat in London, for what purpose I cannot remember.
14-May-2007: I had a dream that an old man, who was a scientist, and his daughter were demonstrating how they sleep in the boot (trunk) of their yellow car when they go out camping together.
13-May-2007: I had a dream about a friendly human-rat thing that kept running back and forth along a wooden pole in front of me.
12-May-2007: I had a dream that I made a perfect striking match, like you start fires with, that was about ten times bigger than an ordinary match. I carried it around with me and everyone was impressed at the craftwork gone into my match. At some point I accidentally snapped the match in two and everyone watching, including me, thought I should have been really disappointed, but I simply threw it away like it was an ordinary match and didn’t care.
11-May-2007: I had a dream that I was with a friend called Peter Rankin, he was trying to sell some rare, antique lottery tickets at a place called Aladdin’s Cave in York, England. The man said he would pay £20 for them but Peter said there were four sets of ten and each of the sets was worth £20 so, I thought, the man should be offering at least £40. As I thought this a young, scruffy teenager stole Peter’s bicycle, which was parked outside, and I spent the rest of the dream chasing him all over town trying to get it back.
10-May-2007: I had a dream that I was with the writing group I meet up with every week in waking life, searching for a café so we could have some tea and a chat. As we searched some quaint little alleyways in York, England, I came across a friend called Rachel Daggett, who is the girlfriend of another friend I’ve known for years called Carl Sanderson, standing by some steps and crying. I asked her what was wrong and she told me that Paul Lazenby, another friend, had said something really horrible to her. I told her to forget about it, that he does it all the time to everyone, which he does (or used to do) in waking life, then walked her to a café where I thought the writing group had headed. As we walked to the café I became fascinated with Rachel’s left shoulder, which was visible because her top had slipped down on that side, and told her how nice it looked. I think I kissed her later too.
9-May-2007: I had a dream that I was telling my friends, Neil Kay and Steve Lockie-Bloore, about the dream I had the previous night with Mitsuko and the teleporters and how I thought it would make a great story. However, before I got halfway through my telling, Neil and Steve became bored and started talking amongst themselves about something else.
8-May-2007: I had a dream that started out as an Anime (Japanese cartoon) with a woman called Mitsuko waking up in a prison cell with no memory. The door to the cell had fallen off so Mitsuko went outside to look and discovered the prison was empty and in ruins. She started to run along a wrecked corridor, which was difficult because her feet were tied together by a loose chain, and eventually tripped and slid off down a collapsed wall to a lower level where a galaxy-like whirlpool sucked her down and she disappeared. After a brief time falling through purple, electro-magnetic plasma, Mitsuko emerged from another whirlpool and fell from the ceiling of a warehouse, landing roughly on a concrete floor next to a man (me) who was trying to remove chains around his ankles.
At this point I was still seeing the dream as a movie from Mitsuko’s point of view, watching myself offer to help her with her own chains. Mitsuko and myself helped each other remove our chains then ducked behind a crate to avoid what we thought might be a prison guard, though neither of us could remember how we got to be in prison in the first place. The man did actually spot us but didn’t seem to care. Nevertheless, we were paranoid that he would run for the authorities as soon as he was out of sight, so we bolted for the same door we’d seen him enter and came out onto a busy shopping street in an unknown town, and the dream switched from Anime to live action, and I became me in the dream instead of Mitsuko.
We wandered along the street for a while trying to figure out where we were. An old lady was rattling a charity box and we went to talk to her. She said she was raising money to destroy the last remaining church in town, which she pointed to across the street – then continued with a little chant “destroy your church, we’re here to destroy your church…” and we both laughed hysterically. We passed a few more charity workers who were also collecting to destroy churches, saying things like: “tearing down the churches for the good of the people” or simply “dismantle the churches”, which we found highly amusing.
We also noticed that all the cars were old, like from the 1980s or earlier, which was confusing because all the newspapers we’d seen in our investigations to discover our whereabouts had said the year was 2039. We discovered later in the dream that the government had removed taxes on all combustion engine cars made before 1990 in an effort to use up the last of Earth’s oil as quickly as possible to improve the health of the planet. None of this really mattered to us, we remembered we were belonged two hundred years or so in the future and we were trying to figure out a way to get back. We had electronic-type curfew tags on our ankles and were somehow convinced if we could remove them safely we would be returned to our own time and place in the universe, wherever that might be, so we spent a lot of the dream looking for a teleporter, which we were sure, in these primitive times, would not be able to transport the curfew tags and would leave them behind and set us free.
Finding a teleporter, however, proved to be very difficult. It seemed the local council could not afford the $60,000 it cost to install even one public teleporter booth on the town’s streets. We hijacked a car, a little early eighties Italian bubble car, from some teenagers and drove out to the countryside to look for a farm, for we knew a farmer must at least have an agricultural teleporter to send his produce to far away markets.
7-May-2007: I had a dream that a character from Neighbours, an Australian TV soap opera, called Zack was at the Thames Flood Barrier in London, England – marvelling at its engineering qualities.
6-May-2007: I had a dream that I was in the back garden of the house where I grew up. A friend called Steve Lockie-Bloore was playing his guitar and singing really loudly on purpose to get my attention. Steve wanted me to get my new guitar so he had have a go with it, but I’d left it in another reality so we had to go inside the house where I pressed a button to open a gateway to the other reality. After I’d done that Steve was more interested in traveling to the other world than playing my guitar, so I showed him how I didn’t need to use the button, that was only a gimmick really, and that I could travel to the other universe at any time by kneeling down, putting one hand up in prayer and saying “Niev arney”, which I demonstrated and instantly disappeared. When I returned I told Steve that he could hold onto the hood of my jacket to go with me, which he did and we both went to the other world. The alternate world looked exactly the same as this one, only all the cars on the streets went by with no one driving them, and all the people were merely replicas of their real counterparts in the other reality – they had no thoughts or feelings but still walked around the same places as their real selves were doing in the real world. We found that we could break windows, push people down stairs and do all kinds of things that would normally attract attention, or get us arrested, without anyone even looking at us. There was no sense of caring in this world, but it was a good place to stash things because no one would ever think of stealing anything.
2-May-2007: I had a dream that I was looking through an old cupboard at my granddad’s house, like he’d only just died recently instead of eight years ago like in waking life. A friend called Peter Rankin was there with me going through stuff that had apparently been mine when I was younger. We found some coloured pencils or crayons and Peter snapped them up, hoping to keep them, but I felt a pang in my stomach like I really needed them, or loved them, and had to take them off him, which he was a bit upset about. Some people from my waking life writing group were also there, reading Rupert Bear books that had also, apparently, belonged to me when I was younger. One of the writing group, Angelika, found an unusual needle with black cotton threaded into it and another, called Karen, took it from her and used it to stitch up a rip in the spine on a Rupert Bear book.
1-May-2007: I had a dream that Marcia and I wanted to meet my first wife, Maja, and I thought it would be easier, less awkward, if we did it in an alternate reality. So we crossed through an invisible barrier that took us to a slightly different version of Earth where all the people seemed the same, then went to see Maja in what looked like a slightly altered version of Brussels in Belgium. Maja was living in an apartment with a husband or boyfriend and she looked slightly different to how she does in our reality. The way she behaved towards me was odd too, like she was uncomfortable with us being there at the same time as her husband, like there was something mysterious between us that I couldn’t guess at because it didn’t happen in our reality, but at the same time she didn’t want us to leave either – she really wanted to tell us something.