31-August-2008: I had a dream about the pros and cons of liposuction (probably due to the vast amounts of food I’m eating on board the Queen Mary 2).
30-August-2008: While I was actually on a ship going to America I had a dream that I was on a ship going to America in a huge storm. The captain didn’t think the ship would make it all the way to New York City so he extended some wheels and pulled the ship up on land somewhere north of Boston. The place we landed at was a strange seaside town full of carnival folk with fairground rides painted gold and red.
29-August-2008: I had a dream that I chopped someone’s foot off so they would lose a superhuman power and that they spent the rest of my dream plotting to get their power back.
28-August-2008: I had a dream that I was discussing the complications of higher mathematics and how the complexity increases as reality alters.
27-August-2008: I had a dream that I was in the audience of a TV show called The Wright Stuff (probably because in waking life they phoned me to see if I would be interested in talking about dreams on their show, but never got back to me after I said okay and the show had been on that day with the topic of dreams with someone else talking about it). When the ad break came a female producer walked up to me and said they wanted to talk about my clothes in the second half and that the things I write are really funny.
26-August-2008: I dreamed that I used a special scanner on my friend, Ché Sanderson, to check if he had peritonitis.
25-August-2008: I had a dream that I was watching a motor race at a circuit near an airport in Hull, England. It was important that I watch the race because I was supposed to race the winner immediately after the finish.
24-August-2008: I had a dream that my wife Marcia had a fluffy little beard.
23-August-2008: I had a dream that I came across a family of magic monkey people, like a hidden tribe in a forest by a river in an alternate universe version of York where I live in waking life. I went to the camp of the magic monkey people, who had a caravan like gypsies, and became friends with them until modern-world scientist tracked me down and found them. We all took refuge from the scientist in the gypsy caravan and a woman tried to get in through a window but was stopped by a parrot that pecked out one of her eyes.
22-August-2008: I had a dream that I was swimming in a river with a blind man, telling him what I could see on the riverbank.
21-August-2008: I had a dream that I was a soldier training on an army base, my comrades were supposed to hunt my group down using tanks and on foot. I managed to evade the ‘enemy’ so well that they forgot about me and I was still lurking around the base, undetected, weeks after the training was over.
20-August-2008: I had a dream that I was part of a murder mystery by the Hudson River in New York City. I’d already seen everything in a dream about a year ago and kept telling everyone what was going to happen next.
19-August-2008: I had a dream that I went to America by ship, which I am going to do in waking life next week, but could only remember boarding the QM2 at Southampton and suddenly arriving at New York. After some investigation it turned out that we were abducted by government flying saucers, that watch over ships in the ocean, to stop people being abducted by alien flying saucers. An alien saucer had come down to our ship only to find it empty. I was disappointed about missing all the food and dancing lessons.
18-August-2008: Just this year I’ve started dreaming about a house in some mountains somewhere. In last night’s dream I went to the mountain house with all of my friends and family and told them I had some special new wine that “cures everything that ails you”. Everyone was eager to try my new red wine, and was even surprised that it took away aches and pains (and even cancer for one person), but they were even more shocked that it cured emotional hang-ups and addictions too. I was very pleased myself because drinking the wine, ironically, cured my mother of her addiction to alcohol and she no longer drank any more after her first sip. I remember thinking that I’d deliberately made my medicine into wine because I would never get my mother to take it otherwise.
17-August-2008: I had a dream that I was on the grounds of York University playing a live version of the computer game Battlefield 2 with my friends Carl and Ché Sanderson and lots of other people. The game was great and I thought I could play all night as it started to get dark, but Carl and Ché interrupted play to announce it was time to go to the pub for a drink.
16-August-2008: I had a dream that I was on a bus where half of the passengers were young school girls and the other half, about 30 people, were all my friend Ché Sanderson. One of the girls wanted to kiss me but I tried to stop her because she was too young, all the while the 30 Chés were grinning at me from around the bus.
15-August-2008: I had a dream that I was in a laboratory with my foot aching, and that I used a little scanner, which oozed white liquid, to try and figure out why. The scanner was really meant for fixing very small creatures like frogs and mice, so wasn’t much use on a human, but I hoped I could use it to gather information to enter into a computer in the laboratory. However the computer proved to be far too primitive to interact with my futuristic chemical technology so I contacted Catface and had it send me a proper full-sized scanner for humans that would analyse and fix my foot on its own.
14-August-2008: I had a dream that I was in a trailer home with a fellow writer, Chris Geeson, as a hurricane was blowing outside. For some reason I was terrified of the hurricane and dare not watch, but Chris was eagerly looking on, with his nose up against a window, as the hurricane increased in power and knocked down trees and houses. Even when our trailer was itself pushed across a field by the wind, Chris watched the destruction outside with gleeful interest while I looked the other way. However, just when I thought we must be doomed after a nearby barn collapsed, the trailer moved under its own power along some rails and took us to safety in a protected valley.
13-August-2008: I had a dream about a talking kangaroo that was giving birth. The kangaroo explained the life cycle and birthing process of kangaroos while the joey was being born and climbing up its mother’s fir into the pouch.
12-August-2008: I had a dream that I’d been drinking all afternoon in a country pub with my friends Neil Kay and Jenny Sharp. They were both worried because they’d been told they had to go to a farmhouse and pick up a massive stash of illegal drugs. I was suggesting that we all simply run away and that they don’t pick up the drugs, but Neil was sure this gangster would come and get them, which would be far worse than being caught by the police. My friends Dave Smiley and Steve Lockie-Bloore also turned up at the pub, by which time Neil was almost totally wasted but snapped out of it when Jenny said it was time for them to go. Neil and Jenny drove away in a large pick-up truck and Steve, Dave and myself carried on drinking for a while until the owner threw us out, saying it was a family pub and he didn’t want any trouble, especially from Neil who he seemed to know all about. After a while loads of police cars showed up, someone had tipped them off about something big going down, and shortly afterwards Neil and Jenny came along the road towards the pub but I ran out to intercept them and warn them about the police, so they drove off to town and I fell asleep, drunk, with some sheep in a field.
11-August-2008: In York, where I live, the city has medieval walls surrounding it. In last night’s dream I was in the Victorian era, having travelled back in time with some students I was teaching, to show them how the railway used to go inside the city walls instead of staying outside, like they do now. However, in this dream, as well as going within the city walls, steam trains were on the city walls too.
10-August-2008: I had a dream that I was at a ring store testing all my fingers with those ring-size checking tools. I tried every loop on the chain and none of them fitted any of my fingers properly.
9-August-2008: I had a dream that I was walking through a Council Estate, like a Project in America, in some English city I never saw before. I emerged from the estate and found myself in a field surrounded by trailers, caravans, gypsies and carnival folk. They we very mean to me and pushed me around as I walked through their camp and, when I came out the other side, I realized that one of them had stolen my laptop that I had been carrying in a bag over my shoulder. After this I decided not to be weak and went back with super kung fu powers and beat them all up, but found that my laptop had already been taken to pieces and sold as spare parts.
8-August-2008: I had a dream that my friend, Ruth Frost, had a baby in a pushchair and was also pregnant. She asked me to walk her home so we walked together for a while though a town I’ve never seen before. When we got to her house she left me standing at the garden gate. I wasn’t allowed to go any further than that, so I turned away and left as soon as Ruth was inside her house.
7-August-2008: I had a dream that I was heading for Jamaica and started talking to a woman at the airport. We were about to get in a elevator to the Gate when the woman panicked and said she couldn’t do it, she was claustrophobic, so I said I would walk her along a different route to avoid the elevator. However, the woman had a completely different idea, she wasn’t even going to get on the plane and led me to a white bench where we both sat with fantasy author Terry Pratchett. The bench was a new form of transport that drifted gently over the ocean and we were going to go all the way to Jamaica on it. As we flew to Jamaica on the bench, Terry Pratchett, the woman and myself, I wanted to talk to Terry (as we’d been in a movie together in waking life) and ask him how he was doing, but I was afraid of upsetting him because of his recent illness – thinking that people probably keep asking him how he’s feeling every day and that he would be sick if it – so we all just sat there, floating to Jamaica.
6-August-2008: In waking life I used to go to Japan for weeks at a time and, even though I was there a lot, the layout of Tokyo was always a bit of a mystery to me, more so than any other city I’ve ever been to. In last night’s dream I was high up outside a train station at the top of a hill, overlooking Tokyo. I could see right across the city to Tokyo Tower and Tokyo Bay and the whole layout made perfect sense, totally unlike reality. I could see a road that I’d been lost on in other dreams, and realized that it circled the city and that last time I was lost on it I had walked almost all the way around the city when I thought I was walking in a straight line. In the earlier dream, I discovered, if I’d only walked a few more yards I would have found myself back at Tokyo Cathedral – another place that only exists in my dreams – and figured out that I’d been walking around a massive circle.
5-August-2008: A few years ago in waking life I used to live in Brighton, on the south coast of England, and every now and then I dream about living in a flat there that doesn’t exist in the real Brighton. In last night’s dream I was leaning out of my fantasy top floor flat with a rocket launcher and firing missiles off down the street at night, like they were fireworks, for fun. I knew it would frighten people, but I wanted the loud noise of the rockets hurtling along the street to excite them.
4-August-2008: I had a dream that I was gathering information to hold an eco conference.
3-August-2008: I had a dream I was in a downhill homemade go-kart race with a bunch of science boffins and a disabled guy, who was the only person behind me in the race until he overtook me at the halfway point. The hill levelled out at the halfway point to give everyone a rest and time to reconsider their designs before they continued on for the final stretch. I was considering attaching larger wheels when I woke up.
2-August-2008: I had a dream about electric paper, the next evolutionary step in computer screens where the display behaves much like paper in that holding it up to the light makes it easier to read, the same as printed paper, with no glare. I talked about how amazing it will be when we have full colour moving images on these electric paper screens, like reading a graphic novel with all the pictures portraying live action.
1-August-2008: I had a dream that I was with two friends, Roma Oxford and Chris Geeson, at a shack in the middle of a forest for our writers’ group meeting. However, we couldn’t concentrate on our meeting because another group was sharing the shack with us and conducting a very loud meeting about something totally different.