31-August-2004: Dreamt about telling my mother to stop being dishonest about herself so that she can be happy, not sure if she was listening.
30-August-2004: I dreamt I was at a swimming pool I’ve never seen before; my friend Dave was standing in the middle with a big jug of purple-brown liquid, a cocktail or something. I wasn’t sure it was alcoholic or not till he called it his ‘early morning brew’ and grinned drunkenly. He said he wasn’t drunk but he was, I told him to stay away from me, I didn’t want a drunken person following me around the pool; my grandfather’s ghost appeared to me and said, ‘Now you be nice to Dave.’
29-August-2004: I seemed to have lots of dreams in lots of different time periods; in every one of them Marcia (my girlfriend) appeared as a kind of nymph, I’d wonder who she was (knowing I know her) for a few seconds then, as she floated through the air towards me, I’d remember that we were both fairy folk going from one life to another but always meeting. The places we met were totally random; one time I was chasing someone up to a rooftop in Brooklyn, New York and she was there at the top. Another time it was just after the turn of the 20th Century; I was at a party in a field where we were all experimenting with the new invention of aircraft, flying our planes around the field. One guy won a race in his plane and it made someone angry; the angry person laughed and crashed his car into the plane when it landed and shoved it into a ditch saying, ‘Ha, the aeroplane will never be better than the motorcar!’ in a fashion not dissimilar to Toad from Wind in the Willows. It was after this that we were all having a picnic on the grass when Marcia came floating in; this time she had dark skin (she always looked a bit different each time) but I knew who she was straight away, I’d seen it happen dozens of times before in other dreams by now, and we started singing one continuous note together that made golden light shine around us both. An old woman asked us if we weren’t supposed to be invisible when we did that sort of thing, I told her that we were invisible, that they could only see us because we wanted them to. I told them if they walk around the corner and come back, we’d be completely invisible; as soon as they were around the corner we disappeared into the next dream where we found ourselves together on a boat off the south coast of England in the 1990s, we could see Litchfield cathedral. There was a fairy folk elder on the boat with us who said, ‘The only reason you disappeared like that and came here was so you didn’t have to help them tidy up their picnic,’ and shook his head, he was right.
28-August-2004: I had a dream that England was celebrating a holiday called India Day (doesn’t exist) and I was with some people that were supposed to spend all day in a cooking competition, making Indian food. I was panicking because I didn’t know any recipes and thought we only had a few minutes before the finish, but a friend called Jenny pointed out that it was only 9am and the food didn’t need to be ready until night. I started frying samosas, pakoras and chapatis in a heated wheelbarrow in my childhood back garden; kind of strange but they looked really nice. I went inside for a while and my stepfather, who I haven’t seen in waking life for a decade, was watching TV with my mother; it was a show about Indian living in England with a close-up of a family. The father was arguing with the mother about something that I couldn’t hear; he was holding a piece of paper like a gas bill perhaps… My stepfather was saying to my mother, ‘Well at least their kids aren’t all out taking drugs, high on Ecstasy every weekend like some families these days…’ I butted in and said, ‘Yeah, and at least the father isn’t trying to strangle his stepson to death.’ Which was kind of a conversation stopper; my stepfather walked quickly out of the room and I heared him begin to cry. My mother said, ‘Oh, this is interesting; I’d really like to see his reaction to that!’ and went out of the room after my stepfather. I thought she was going to make him feel really bad about it but I heard her saying something like, ‘Oh come on, calm down it’s not that bad.’
27-August-2004: I dreamt I went back in time to the early 1980s, I saw my friend Pete walking along his street, it was kind of funny because he looked like a girl in those days, now he’s six and a half feet tall, a bit flabby with a huge beard. I walked along down Grant’s Avenue and some kids were talking about me behind my back; they were saying that they bet my pubes (pubic hair) were square, meaning they were cut into a square pattern or something? They thought I’d be embarrassed but I turned around and said, ‘What difference does it make if they are square, or any other shape?’ They went all shy and ran off. There was a bit of a traffic jam blocking the end of the street so I flew over the top of them; I found that whenever I opened my mouth I could make a police car’s siren sound, so I had a little fun spooking the drivers and making them all get out of the way because they thought a police car was coming.
26-August-2004: I dreamt I was in the back garden of the house where I grew up with a group of people I don’t know; we heard a loud plane fly overhead and looked up and saw it wasn’t a plane but a ICBM (Intercontinental Ballistic Missile) instead, I hoped it wasn’t going to stop any time soon but it dropped out of the sky less than a mile away. It was really odd because most nuclear weapons detonate in the sky above their target, this one was on a four minute delay after hitting the ground. I tried to get everyone into my car so I could drive as fast as possible for four minute, everyone was being too relaxed and lazy about climbing in, so much so that I had to shout at them. We only made it halfway up the street before the atomic flash lit up the sky behind us; I rushed everyone into the basement of the mansion on my old street and hoped for the best. The bomb wasn’t so bad after all and didn’t do much damage; it was part of a new design range of atomic weapons that didn’t do much initial physical damage but spread radiation everywhere. People kept walking outside thinking it was all right, then getting sick from radiation poisoning. The mansion house was turned into a hospital; I told the doctor about my mothership and how I could have it send me an antidote for radiation (he laughed at me), I told him how the implement could be beamed through a tiny hole in the roof and floors of the mansion so we didn’t have to go outside. I telepathically called for the mothership and, for the first time ever, I had to imagine it coming out of the sky instead of actually seeing it appear through the clouds. I told the doctor it would be here very soon but he ignored me until the whole house vibrated because of the ship hovering above the roof. I got the antidote and healed everyone and told Catface to go and destroy all the other atomic weapons; just before I woke up I was pondering the idea of letting Earth know the secrets of cold fusion.
25-August-2004: I think I’d just got married to my girlfriend and we found ourselves living in a house with loads of relatives I’ve never seen before, plus my granddad who died a few years ago. We had a sink/wash basin in our room and kids kept coming in to wash their hands in it; it was quite frustrating being disturbed all the time because the room next door had a sink for washing hands and that was empty. I said I bet if we move into that room everyone will start coming into there to wash their hands instead; it was sort of a frustrating dream but quite funny at the same time.
24-August-2004: I had a dream I was a printer again; I’d printed off 500 leaflets for a new client that I thought looked perfect, but as I was packing them away I noticed that black ink had bled along the leading edge of every sheet. As I was pondering on whether to throw them away and start again or trim the ends off them all making them neater but smaller than ordered, two actors were performing a play across the street. The whole dream was out in the street, printing press and all. The actor’s play was called the ‘8 o’clock play’, or at least they said ‘8 o’clock’ just about every other word. The actors were a man and a woman, both English but speaking with American accents; the dialogue went something like, ‘Soon be 8 o’clock; 8 o’clock would be a good time to meet Betsy, she’s always been fond of 8 o’clock. I like the sound of 8 o’clock, the way 8 o’clock comes around twice a day; like it never far away from 8 o’clock.’… and so on.
23-August-2004: The old playing field from my childhood school was being used as an army training site in this dream; when I was a kid I got into trouble for breaking some of the windows on the old canteen which looked like a WWII prison hut, there was a helicopter left unattended and I wondered if I’d be able to sneak onboard and operate the chaingun and break the windows again. I managed to cause quite a lot of damage and think I may have shot someone too; I found that the flight controls to the helicopter seemed surprisingly simple and had the engine started before anyone noticed me, I was in the air and away before they could do anything. I kept hearing reports telepathically from the army HQ; they thought I was a top spy, I must be to know how to operate their state-of-the-art helicopter. They thought only a very high-ranking operative would know how to fly it; I thought it was pretty primitive and ditched it in some trees only half a mile away and covered it in branches and leaves. The army, police and other officials never thought to look for it so close to the site; they were convinced I’d be halfway to Tblisi by the time they got a search going, they couldn’t see the chopper on radar because it had stealth capabilities so they had no idea it was only half a mile down the road in some trees collecting leaves. The helicopter stayed there through the whole dream, I rode a brown horse instead.
22-August-2004: I dreamt that I had a little sister, but I think she was really a representation of my brother; or perhaps a female half of myself or something. We were in the house where I grew up and my stepfather was bullying us really badly, it was nighttime and I was getting really sick of it and kept hitting him to no effect. He pinned my little sister (who doesn’t actually exist in waking life) down on the floor by her arms as if he was playing a game but she hated it; I was hitting him on the back with a heavy old leather boot, but he was too manic to notice. My mother said I was overreacting. When he let go of my little sister she tried to giggle a bit to try and show she wasn’t afraid, but I knew she was. I started talking into a fluffy toy like it was a two-way radio, as if I was telling the cops to move in and arrest my stepfather. My mother thought I was being silly until the police rushed in with a female social worker who insisted talking to us all individually. My little sister and I were the only ones that weren’t shocked that the social worker and police thought that my stepfather had a problem; my mother seemed to think it was normal for the father to pin his child down on the floor till she cried. The social worker had seen the whole thing and other incidents via a videotape and secret camera I’d installed earlier the same morning; the social worker told my mum how my sister and I had phoned the police early in the morning and how they had given me the surveillance equipment to install. While my little sister was being asked question my stepfather turned to the hidden camera, not knowing it was there, and said, ‘Stupid fucking social workers, they’ll never make anything stick; I’ll do what I like to my kids in my own home,’ which did nothing to help his case. He even tried to punch me as he was handcuffed and dragged out of the house.
21-August-2004: I dreamed I was lining up to take part in a race around an assault course; we were going around two at a time. My housemate and his ex-girlfriend Sarah were in front of me; Sarah couldn’t be bothered to wait for the contestants in front of her to get around the course and darted off on her own, she passed the other two in front and came back to the start saying, ‘That was just a practice run.’ A female official came up to her and said she’d have to add 20 seconds onto her time for her little stunt. Sarah thought this decision was outrageous but everyone agreed with me when I said if Michael Schumacher (F1 racing driver) was on a qualifying lap and Eddie Irvine decided to shoot around past him he would expect to be penalised… Sarah still wasn’t happy, so I told her that she’d probably win anyway even with the extra 20 seconds because the other two were going so slowly.
20-August-2004: I dreamed I was involved in some kind of crime or robbery/heist etc. I was part of a gang of 6 people involved, we had all done different jobs and none of us knew what the others’ jobs were. My job was to sit with the briefcase full of money in a car while a driver drove me to France; everyone’s name was inscribed onto the case and it could not be opened until we were all there, still some of the others were suspicious of me and my driver because we were driving off with the loot. The driver was so nervous when it was time to leave that he couldn’t get the keys in the car, so I volunteered to swap jobs with him; he was now holding the case and I was the driver. I wasn’t nervous at all and enjoyed speeding down the British streets heading for the south coast. We stopped off on the way to take part in our final French lesson (we’d been attending for months); my co-worker was very nervous and wanted to leave, I told him to act naturally, no one would ever suspect that the criminals would stop off for a French class during their escape!
19-August-2004: I had a dream that I was in a local pub/bar in Fulford, York where I grew up. I had a full pint of beer in front of me that I wasn’t drinking, a guy called Billy Wilkes was sat opposite me (he had been the school bully when I was a kid, but never bothered me); he said or did something that annoyed me and I poured my full glass of beer over his head and ran off outside. When I got to the street outside I was going to fly away, but I changed my mind when I saw Billy coming out after me and decided to fight him. It wasn’t like a real fight as such, more like one of those silly Hollywood fights where one of the combatants is an alien or robot with super-strength. I kept hurling Billy through the air so that he crashed into walls and parked cars, he couldn’t hurt me at all. Masayo (ex wife) appeared in a doorway with some other people who started deriding us for fighting in the street; we both (Billy and I) decided they were far more irritating than we were to each other and stopped fighting, Billy ran past the group in the doorway and up some stairs into their house. He came back down laughing after causing some kind of psychological paradox within their household. Masayo and the rest went back inside to figure out why all the children upstairs were crying, what it was that Billy had said to them. Billy and I went to play golf after that.
18-August-2004: The dream was set in Spain where a scientist had discovered some ultra microscopic organisms that were responsible for all types of cancer. They were like little green monster bugs smaller than atoms that maliciously caused cancer with intent to be cruel. I adapted a green medical laser that I use to cure people in some dreams so that it could seek out the ultra-microscopic creatures and destroy them. I could scan someone’s body with a wide green beam of light that only showed the malicious creatures, them zap them from existence.
17-August-2004: There seemed to be a lot of birthday cards to sign and someone was secretly storing cannabis in my bedroom; I wanted to get rid of it and tell them to take it somewhere else but I was afraid touch the stuff in case I got some residue on my hands that showed up in forensic tests.
16-August-2004: I dreamt I was visiting a house with my girlfriend; in the dream the house was supposed to be familiar but it doesn’t exist in waking life and it didn’t seem right in the dream either. All the rooms in the house had different groups of people in them; my friend Neil was in a downstairs room when Marcia and I went in to say hello, Neil started examining Marcia’s right arm like he was an alien who’d never seen an arm before. I assumed he was on drugs and deliberately trying to act weird. I sat with Neil for a while and he was chatting about the days when we used to live in this house together, I didn’t know what he was talking about; we had lived in a house together but it was not this house. I went to look for Marcia who had wandered off upstairs; I found her in a room talking to a woman and told her we could go now if she liked, she got up immediately and we left. When we got to the street outside Marcia was irritated because of the woman; she told me that she had the woman what she thought happened after we died and the woman had said, ‘Oh, not very much really,’ which annoyed Marcia a lot for some reason.
15-August-2004: I dreamed I was in a futuristic Olympic skiing competition; all the hills were a chequerboard pattern, the surface was more slippery than snow so that we (the contestants) went a lot faster than expected.
14-August-2004: A dream about organizing things into boxes and pigeonholes?
13-August-2004: I kept dreaming that there was a small fire underneath my toenail on the big toe of my left foot; I thought I might have spilled some burning cigarette ash under there or something, so I scraped out the black ashes and forgot about it. After about 30 minutes my toe was smoking again, so I scraped it out again; this happened about four times until a scrapped it out properly and found that there was a huge hole going right down my big toe to the bones of my foot.
12-August-2004: Something strange was happening in a sci-fi type dream; I was in some kind of competition, maybe a futuristic Olympics or something, but I was really just biding my time to find a clue to where our spaceship was. By ‘our’ I mean myself and my people who were intermingled with the Earth humans in the dream. There were other humans (not from Earth or our planet) that were trying to stop us or complicate things somehow; they always flew off before the end of the games, which was being held in different dimensions simultaneously. My people were skipping between dimensions and recording where the other humans were flying away to, in order to gain clues to get our ship back. We tracked several parties of the other humans in several dimensions; they all went to different star systems and it seemed impossible to see a pattern at first until someone noticed that they all sent a secret communication craft to Barnard’s Star (the second closest star system to the Earth’s sun), before heading off in different directions. We decided to fly to Barnard’s Star and search for clues there.
11-August-2004: Again didn’t sleep much, too excited; but I did dream about a new public swimming pool I’ve never seen before in York. It had all kinds of strange waterslides and fast-slowing streams; one of the streams had a whirlpool in the middle that you could float over and spin around really fast, which was fun.
10-August-2004: I went to meet my girlfriend at the airport in the morning so I was too excited to sleep; did drift off now and again to the sound of booming jet engines.
9-August-2004: I dreamed I had some new sandals, brown ones, that I went water-skiing on; there was no boat involved, just me skiing down the river Ouse in York England on my sandals.
8-August-2004: I dreamt I was in Copmanthorpe, a small village near York in England; I had a fast white motorbike that I was going to ride home but I couldn’t find my helmet, I ended up walking with two Chinese people, a boy and a girl. I went into a store to buy some beer but the guy inside wouldn’t sell it to me; I wanted two cans of Miller but he said they were left over from Christmas so I couldn’t have them. I said he was being stupid and stubborn, gave a pleading look to his son stood next to him but he just shrugged. I went outside and used my phone to call the head office to buy the store, then went back in and took the two beers for free and told the man he had to be out by the end of tomorrow. I carried on walking home after that and the Chinese girl kept coming and holding hands with me; this sort of made me uncomfortable because I have a girlfriend and the Chinese girl’s boyfriend was walking right behind us. She kept getting more touchy and giggly until we stopped by a river, she kissed me in a really friendly way and said (with her actions rather than words) you can be whatever you want to be; then my mother leaned into the picture and said, ‘Yeah, psycho vive psycho reve.’ The Chinese girl looked at me and said, ‘Your mum’s right, psycho vive psycho reve!’ And I told her she must be mad to agree with my mother. As I’ve thought about the Chinese girl through the day after waking, I’m pretty sure she was Kukuchili (not Chinese but eastern oriental anyway), a sort of guardian spirit telling me I was doing everything right.
7-August-2004: I was supposed to meet the loveliest person in my life at the airport but something had gone wrong in this dream; I’d somehow missed her and found myself in the wrong place surrounded by strangers, it was so disappointing that I couldn’t see her but I sort of knew that she was there somewhere. I could almost feel her smiling at me then noticed her just sitting on a green metal airport bench; she’d been watching me looking lost in the middle of the crowd and wondering how long it would take me to see her. I was so happy then when I saw her smiling at me, she was all dressed in white like a hospital doctor or a nurse but smarter; she was lit up like an angel by sunlight coming through windows next to her, reflecting off her clothes and smiling face.
6-August-2004: I dreamed I was on a training course learning to be a steeple jack; the first part was fairly easy where we had to climb a twenty-foot-high ladder then slide back down again. The next step was a lot different, we had to climb to the top of a 300-foot-high chimney… the teacher was advising not to look down with your left eye and never to use your right eye to watch your line on the way up. I got to the top then realized how high I was and couldn’t move; I really wanted to look down but knew I’d be stuck for real if I saw how high I was. I closed my eyes really tight, held my breath, and slid back down the ladder till I touched the ground; there were hundreds of spectators that clapped like I was a hero, I was so relieved to be back on the ground and decided I didn’t want to finish the course.
5-August-2004: An epic dream that was a battle between mankind and machines; it began with automated tanks and robots attacking the last city on Earth with rockets and cannons, there was an electromagnetic shield-wall keeping them out but it failed and they rumbled into the city over the ruined stonework. I was walled up inside a huge room, maybe a town hall, with about twenty other people; we were the last surviving fighters of humankind, the robots didn’t know we existed. I had a rocket launcher that could fire five rounds before it need reloading; as the robot tanks rounded a corner and headed for the door we were all facing I fired my rockets at them. I was using a strange magical chant that kept materializing ammo inside my rocket launcher so that it never needed reloading. A woman was being pinned down by a grey robot, a bit like the rolling ones on Star Wars, and she was firing a machinegun at it point blank in the face to no effect; I fired a rocket near it to get it’s attention, we weren’t supposed to have any more explosives, it came for me instead since I posed a greater danger than the machinegun and I blew it to pieces. Other people had dynamite and landmines they’d been hording in secret and used them to destroy all the other tanks; we won that battle but had to go on the run in the countryside after that and be constantly hunted by the machines. We met some teenagers swimming in an old swimming pool, they didn’t know about the war and were somehow isolated from all the bad things that had happened. They were a group of young boys and girls in love with each other and having a good time. They were going to die pretty soon if they didn’t come with us; they wanted to stay and swim until me and Anthony did some levitating and flying around them in circles, they thought it was ‘cool’ and wanted to come with us to learn. There was an underground system of buildings that still housed the social elite of mankind; they travelled around on underground Shinkansen (bullet trains) but were totally under the influence of the robots. They thought of us as dirty people that wanted to ruin everything for everyone; their police force was always looking for us, we had false papers we used when travelling on their Shinkansen and I always got questioned going through a kind of passport control at the stations. They wanted to know everything; where I lived, where I grew up, where I was going today, where I would be tomorrow… they were suspicious because I didn’t show up on their computer records, which wasn’t a crime as such, but it was extremely odd.
4-August-2004: Again a dream in Spain, I was pretending to be poor when, in actual fact, I was one of the richest people on the planet. No one in my hotel knew who I was so I wasn’t getting the usual fawning attention I was accustomed too (in this dream); it all got a bit much when Pete, my maths teacher friend, met me at the front desk and they’d cleaned and ironed all his clothes for him. When I asked if my clothes had been given the same treatment the staff laughed at me and opened a louver door and revealed my scraggly clothes from the day before, still covered in sand and seawater.
3-August-2004: I had a dream set in Spain, somewhere near the sea. My brother had a helicopter, the kind that lands on water on fat skids, and said I could fly it. When I went to get the helicopter it was only a few inches tall, that was okay because all I had to do was shrink myself. After that I found a note that said I needed to fill the skids up with rocks and sand for ballast, otherwise it wouldn’t fly properly. I was pretty sure that sounded wrong but it was my brother’s helicopter so I felled up the skids with sand and rocks, and I flew it away just fine.
2-August-2004: My brother was a teenager again; apart from in this dream he was being really annoying, even worse than normal, and constantly bothering everyone. Some people thought he was high on drugs but I thought he had ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder); my mum thought this was ridiculous. This was my mum from the 1980s though when no one had heard of ADHD where we lived. I used a device I often carry with me in dreams to scan my brother’s brain; I knew exactly what I was looking for, sure enough there it was. There was a spherical area in his brain about the size of a golf ball that wasn’t getting enough oxygen to it; I didn’t want to give my brother Ritalin (wasn’t even sure it had been invented then) so I programmed my scanner to flood oxygen into the lacking area of his brain. He was okay for a while, calm and relaxed, but the symptoms soon returned as the oxygen seeped away from the area. I knew I could fix the problem but we ended up in a car chase before I had time to look into it.
1-August-2004: I dreamt I was cycling somewhere in the south of England; somewhere I’ve never seen before, I noticed all the signposts had slightly different sounding names than the ones further north and figured it must be the Norman influence on local speech and dialect. I stopped for a rest, thinking I’d gone a bit too far, and walked into some woods. I was thinking it looked like the kind of place that might have a lake in the middle; somewhere I could take my clothes of and go for a cooling swim. I found a lake with a wooded island in the middle; the trees on the island had a halo of rainbows and colourful twinkling stars, like something out of a fairy story… I really wanted to go and tell someone I’d found a magical place when I woke up.