31-July-2008: I had a dream that I, with a group of humans, was preparing for a big tai chi battle with a host of demons. As everyone was limbering up I started showing off some kung fu moves and leaping up to the rafters in the hall we were in, trying to make the demons nervous through demonstrating my uber skills.
30-July-2008: I had a dream that I was with a small family on the run from the police. The police kept calling me on a mobile phone, ostensibly to talk me out of running away but really to keep tracing my phone signal to track where we were. Unknown to them though I had hacked into the phone system so that the results of our transmissions were always skewed to make it appear as if we were hundreds of miles away from where we were.
29-July-2008: I had a dream that a woman called Jackie from a British soap opera called Hollyoaks was watching jump from wall to wall to railing to fences and back to walls again. After she watched me for a few minutes she said I should be a famous Parkour practitioner.
28-July-2008: I had a dream that I was trying to find a bus to a place called Selby, but all I could find was buses going lots of other places instead.
27-July-2008: I had a dream that I was in a department store somewhere in America and a black woman was complaining about having to pay 89 cents for some fries when a poster outside said they were supposed to be 55 cents. A guy, working at what looked like a perfume counter, selling the fries said the extra was sales tax and that he could do nothing about it. I joined in the argument, saying it was disgraceful to lure people in like that then stick the tax on after they made their order. The woman thought so too and walked away without the fries, which had gone cold anyway, and I said, “ha, now you have no money at all for your stupid fries”.
26-July-2008: I had a dream that I was with two friends, Roma Oxford and Helen Foreman, on a bus arguing about who should be the ‘team leader’ of our writing group. Each of us were arguing that it should be ourselves.
25-July-2008: I had a dream that I was in London walking down an alleyway when I found myself amongst a gang of young skinheads handing out leaflets. I thought they must be members of the National Front (racist fascists) or some kind of Neo Nazis and that they might beat me up if I didn’t be nice to them and take a leaflet, so I smiled and took one. However, when I looked at the leaflet it had nothing to do with fascists or anything bad at all, but was advertising a group that called themselves The Squishy Forehead Society – there was a picture of some guy squishing the skin on his forehead into funny shapes.
24-July-2008: I had a dream that I was kissing a newly found half sister.
23-July-2008: I had a dream that a character from Neighbours, an Australian soap opera, called Billy Kennedy was unconscious on the living-room floor in a house. I tried to revive him with some smelling salts but he remained comatose, so I thought he was dying. I tried to ring for an ambulance but some stupid Australian guy at the station wouldn’t send out an ambulance without me answering all kinds of silly questions that had nothing to do with the situation. Then, after I’d answered all his dumb questions, he said they were very busy and that an ambulance couldn’t be sent for at least two hours. I had to call a taxi instead and take Billy to hospital myself.
22-July-2008: I had a dream that I was in a computer game called Battlefield 2, planting claymores (booby trap mines) at the top of a building site. I wondered if I should have spent extra money to buy more mines, then remembered that the mines are free in Battlefield 2.
21-July-2008: I had a dream that I was on a 125 high speed train, which are only used in the UK in waking life, in Tokyo, Japan, where it was being used as an everyday commuter train as it was slow by their standards at only 125 mile per hour. I was on the train by mistake with my brother and this foolish friend called Bobby Addy, heading off in the wrong direction to some unknown destination. I was worried because we were supposed to be somewhere else and I didn’t know when the train was going to stop next, in a few miles or hundreds of miles away in another city. The train stopped after 20 minutes and I jumped off quickly, but Bobby Addy simply grinned like an idiot and wouldn’t get off, and my brother had fallen asleep in his seat. In the dream it seemed as though I was taking a huge risk, like the train was evil and might lock me inside, when I got back on the train to wake up my brother and drag him off the train. We made it back off the train and we both watched Bobby Addy grinning like a fool from inside the demon 125 as it pulled away from the station.
20-July-2008: I had a dream that my life was being watched by a live studio audience via television in a different universe. As the audience watched, and I narrated, a man drove a white van, with me trapped inside the back, and crashed into a hole full of water. A TV presenter in the other universe joked with the audience that I must be all right because I was narrating the show. I changed into another version of myself and rescued myself from the sunken van, unconscious from drowning. I contacted Catface and asked it to beam some medical software to a device I wore on my wrist, which I then used to resuscitate myself to accompanying cheers from the live audience in the other universe.
19-July-2008: I had a dream that I was taking part in a live puzzle game and obstacle course for two teams, Romans and Greeks. I chose to join the Greeks even though I really wanted to join the Romans, which is sort of what I do in waking life – if I feel like I want to go a certain route or make a certain choice of two options, I often deliberately take the choice I didn’t want to take to spite myself and see what will happen. In the end we won and it was decided that Greeks were much better at having fun and parties than the Romans.
18-July-2008: I had a dream that my friend Ché Sanderson had bought a house on Curzon Terrace, a street where I used to live as an art student with another friend called Kathryn, and that he had the tiniest back yard I have ever seen – like three feet square.
17-July-2008: I had a dream that my friend, Neil Kay, and I stole a motorbike to get away from a robbery at a science lab.
16-July-2008: I had a dream I was with a group of people I don’t know, walking down the street where I lived as a child. It was springtime and I had bionic powers which I used to leap up into the trees and bring down cherry and apple blossom, then explained to the group how the whole world was my garden.
15-July-2008: I had a dream that I was living at my childhood home, but as I am now, with Marcia and that we were moving. We didn’t know where we were moving to because it was up to the house to decide, which moved by itself as we watched through the bedroom window at the front to see where it would take us. At one point our house waded across a river, but I was hoping the house would stop in the middle and be carried away by the water.
14-July-2008: I had a dream that my wife, Marcia, had evolved from dogs, that she looked human but had dog-like behaviour. When it was time to eat Marcia would eat her food from a bowl on the kitchen floor, with her backside stuck up in the air and waving about, which I thought was really sexy.
13-July-2008: I had a dream that I was in a dark field, with high-tech buildings surrounding it, when a troop of government soldiers/scientists appeared in trucks and said they needed to disinfect the ground around where I stood. They put on space suits and started spraying the ground, but as they got closer I noticed that I was feeling very sleepy and realised they were actually trying to gas and capture me so I ran off into a high-tech housing estate.
12-July-2008: I had a dream that I could fly and that it was dark and snowing in the middle of York where I live. The snow was getting pretty bad so I decided to fly home, but as I rose from the ground a really angry chef came after me and insisted I fly back to his restaurant some 30 miles away to clean his cutlery.
11-July-2008: I had a dream that I was living next to a Victorian jailhouse that had an old pub next door where tourists went drinking, deliberately getting drunk and loud so they could be locked in the jailhouse overnight in order to experience a Victorian jail.
10-July-2008: I had a dream that a friend called Chris Bacon was living in an attic that had a huge old painting on one wall. The painting had various holes where you could look through and see people taking drama lessons in a stage school below. I had a lot of fun making stupid noises to distract the students, who had no idea where the sounds were coming from.
9-July-2008: I had a dream I was at my old high school’s swimming pool listening to a lecture on creating an audio and visual image using only the power or speech.
8-July-2008: I had a dream that I was going underground with two companions to blow something up. Unfortunately we triggered an alarm and I had to tell my companions to crawl into an air vent, that I was too large to fit in, and go ahead without me while I distract the guards and lead them above ground. When I got to the city above, somewhere like Chicago in the future, I found my old boss Bob Scrace form Fulprint. I told Bob about the revised plan, as he seemed to be in on it, and we went back to my grandmother’s house that I haven’t been to in waking life since I was 7 years old. When we got there it was full of freedom fighter types, all brandishing guns and bleeping grenades.
7-July-2008: I had a dream that I was at a market stall somewhere in the middle of Thailand after I had jumped from a slow train with my mother and brother. The stall was near the tracks in a tiny blip of a village, selling silks and other colourful fabrics. My mother and brother were surprised when I spoke to the stall keeper in Thai and asked him how to get to the nearest large town. We walked off in the direction he showed us, even though it was a hundred miles away, and later found ourselves in the ruins of an ancient city with Buddhist carvings everywhere.
6-July-2008: I had a dream that I was playing indoor football at school until my old teacher, Mrs Kellett, interrupted me with her bizarre outbursts of anger like she really hated me, even though she’d never actually spoken more than a few words to me in her life. It occurred to me in the dream that she may have some kind of bipolar disorder. A replacement head of year teacher was been inaugurated that day and I went into her office to speak to her about the evil Mrs Kellet and her even more evil colleague Mr Gutierrez, but found her hiding behind a filing cabinet. I told her not to be nervous and to watch out for the two bad teachers, to pay particular attention to Gutierrez who only preys on children when he’s sure no one else is around, but is friendly to them when people are watching. The new teacher didn’t really believe me, but I hoped I created at least a seed of curiosity so that she might try sneakily following Gutierrez sometime and see him being mean to the students when they’re on their own.
5-July-2008: I had a dream that I was with the brother of a disabled guy I used to care for, called Thomas, in a town called Brighton on the south coast of England where I used to live. Thomas had never been to Brighton before and needed to be there to attend a science fair. His mother thought he wouldn’t get there on his own so I had agreed to go with him. The highlight of the day was when Thom said he was tired and wanted to rest so I said I’d call for the car to come and pick is up, when it arrived Thom was amazed to see that my car came on its own with no driver – that I had spoken to my car on the phone and told it to come and collect us.
4-July-2008: I had a dream about a fairy called Fox á Lou Lou who was telling me that a male fairy had contracted the HIV virus in Fairyland, which was meant to be impossible. I went with Fox á Lou Lou to get a HIV test and it turned out she was infected also, so I said she would have to stay in Fairyland where, even though the virus could not be cured, it would have no effect. It was sad that the people of Fairyland could also be infected with the AIDS virus.
3-July-2008: I had a dream that my friend Peter Rankin was taking care of a retarded foster child.
2-July-2008: I had a dream that I was at school as a child going on a trip to America from England. The plane was scheduled to fly via France and we had to travel on a train from the south of England all the way up to Leeds in the north, before we could catch another train south again to London and get our plane. When we got to Leeds it was nothing like the modern station it is in waking life, but rather a very old fashioned Victorian affair, like a museum, with steam trains and tourists’ cafés. We waited hours for our train to leave before we decided it wasn’t going anywhere, that it was just part of a museum set.
1-July-2008: I had a dream that I was at a high school, as a teenager, following a group of girls across a field who had a bubble making machine. For some reason, other than they were girls, it was somehow cool that I was following them and their bubble machine.