28-February-2005: I had a dream that I was with my ex housemate Ian, I drove him in my car across York in England, he directed me to the area where his friend Alex lives (only in this dream) which turned out to be somewhere I’ve never seen before. I told him that I’d lived here nearly all my life and I’ve never seen this part of York before, it looked more like Leeds or Bradford. I didn’t believe that it was part of York and asked him to show me where the rest of the town was, if that’s where we were. He took me around a corner and there was Lendal Bridge, a familiar York landmark; they’d added a whole new part of York while I’d been away for a few years and I never noticed. It was a new ‘flamboyant’ quarter with a fluffy purple train that takes you there from the old town. It had it’s own separate, transvestite mayor who’d designed the whole thing in the style of a Belgian town with huge purple and pink artificial flowers everywhere; the train to the Flamboyant District was a monorail, the rail was made of gold and had purple brushes that constantly swept it clean. I took the train with my friends to a theme park called Camp David, it was built on ancient Roman ruins and, unlike the usual York way with ruins where they get archaeologists in, the TV mayor made the ruins into an airsoft combat arena – the guns had spaghetti for ammo and I kept firing strings of the stuff at this young boy and getting on his nerves, he was on my team and we lost because of my fooling around, but nobody cared (apart from the boy) because it was too much fun. Before I went to sleep I was watching an episode of South Park all about Big Gay Al.
27-February-2005: I dreamt that I was at an old fashioned holiday camp in England with a guy called Tim Wheeler who I went to school with when I was a child. We went on a bumper/dodgem car ride, we were nearly adults but there were lots of kids in there too. We had some fun bumping into each other and the smaller kids, until I got carried away and used telepathy to make my car more powerful and bumped Tim’s car right off the platform in a shower of sparks and smoke. Later I was with my fiancé, Marcia, and we met our friends, Neil and Jenny, they were off to a junkyard near a town called Pickering to find some stuff to make a work of art, I could have gone with them but my phobias stopped me from being in Jenny’s car, I asked them to get me some junk if there was anything interesting that they thought I could make something with – I wondered if Marcia and I might go there ourselves in our own car later in the day.
26-February-2005: I was dreaming about a conversation, some guy was telling me all about Nick Leeson and how he pretty much destroyed Bearings Bank in England during the 1990s; we were making a documentary and visiting his old classmates from school, most of them said they didn’t think he was smart enough to rip off a bank to the sum of billions of dollars, though one girl said he was really good with numbers. We also went to the trading office where he worked from in London before he moved to the Far East, instead of a huge bank of computers there was just one old lady on a little computer with a flat screen monitor, there was a similar vacant computer next to her. She told us how everything had changed, they didn’t need dozens of computers any more to trade in stocks and shares, she could almost do the whole thing herself on this one computer. I asked her where the shares came from when she bought them, were they direct from the companies or was she buying them off different share holders, personally or randomly? She didn’t understand the question at first but later decided I was a genius and offered me a job working with her in London, starting right away.
25-February-2005: I dreamt that I was taking some kind of class in a school that was in my bedroom. During a recess a woman came in to plug her new Spanish class, I was considering signing up for the class when I realized I could make my text book fly around her head and come back to me like a boomerang – this is something that often happens to me if I’ve fallen asleep into a lucid dream whilst reading, so I knew then that I was asleep and started fooling around with the Spanish teacher knowing that none of it was real.
24-February-2005: I had a dream in the middle of York, England, where I was arguing/conversing about the merits of USA’s Disney over Tokyo’s and that of Paris France, with a couple of people I’ve never met. It was a long discussion that spanned the sociological structure of Japan and France and how America’s happy-go-lucky attitude and sense of fun is perfect for a Disney theme park, but Japan’s and France’s are not. Something along the lines of the French taking themselves far too seriously to just let go and enjoy the simple pleasures of a Disney theme park, and the Japanese being way too subtle and reserved to even understand what Disney was all about in the first place – explaining that even though some of the Japanese themselves enjoyed Tokyo Disney, the place was a soulless morgue through the eyes of a Western visitor that lacked the very essence of what Disney is all about. I don’t know why I had this dream, I can’t stand theme parks, but I have been to Tokyo Disney.
23-February-2005: I dreamed that I was a teenager again and on a mission to overthrow the corrupt local government. For a while I was in a park gathering supporters and playing the comedian to a group of young French school children who were on an organized trip to York in England. I kept going around the park rallying supporters then going back to the French girls and saying silly things in French with an outrageous accent and making them laugh a lot; I finished up sneaking under a table they were all sitting around and saying, ‘grotte de nez’, which they found a bit strange at first but started laughing as I walked away. I finished rallying supporters and had quite a large gathering down by the river, one of the French girls came to join our revolution as did a large African elephant – everyone made way for us as we marched through the streets of York, as if it was or God-given right to be there. I had a kind of destiny transmitter radar that told us which direction to go to find all the things we needed; we went to a small village outside York called Wheldrake and began searching buildings for revolutionary supplies – bombs and guns and food. My friend Mark was my second in command and I was a bit worried about looting Wheldrake because it is the place where he grew up, but he didn’t seem to be bothered in the least, not even when I ordered the elephant to destroy the buildings we had already searched. Mark’s brother came to see what we were doing searching inside a farm building, I thought he was going to be a problem but he joined in and helped us when he heard we were going to go back into York and attack the town hall – York does not have a town hall in waking life.
22-February-2005: I had a nice dream where my brother and I were playing with a huge kite, the kind that looks like a parachute and lifts you off the ground if the wind is fast enough. My brother was a little afraid to let the kite take him too high and kept using the hand controls, pulling them sharply downward, to make him come back to earth every time he got swept up into the air. I took my turn and held the controls high above my head which allowed me to be swept up by the wind; I got caught in a thermal that swept me around the edge of a small woods on the Knavesmire in York, England, where we were – the air current pushed me along very quickly but I enjoyed it and was only a little frightened; the current was swirling around the woods in a circle so that I was able to land pretty much where I’d started from. I handed the kite to my sister-in-law and she made a show of working out the controls then disappeared around the woods on foot; she sold the kite to another women that was waiting on the other side, she made out that the meeting was spontaneous and that the woman had begged her to sell the kite, which she did for a measly 10 English pounds. I was upset because I wanted to own the kite myself, it was very good fun flying with it, and my brother was upset that his wife had sold it for 10 pounds when it was worth about 3000 pounds – I think the three of us had found the kite somewhere earlier in the dream.
21-February-2005: I dreamt that Marcia and I moved back to America in the future and she had her old job back, only this time she was the boss and I was learning her old job on computers. I was only there for two weeks on a kind of work experience thing, I was kind of bluffing my way through but didn’t think it mattered as I wasn’t getting paid – but one day this guy came along and said that everyone had gotten used to me and they’d like me to stay, this was great because it meant I had a real job in America and we’d have more money, but it was also kind of scary because I didn’t have the slightest clue what I was supposed to be doing when everyone else thought I was an expert.
20-February-2005: I had a dream that was set in the future, I was moving to America with my wife Marcia; nearly everything was packed and shipped, the rest of the family had gone ahead to the airport before me and left me to finish up in the house, but there were still loads of boxes and a table to move and I was left all alone to do the job, it was all too heavy for me. I had a conversation with an old guy from next door on the best way to get the stuff to the airport but in the end I decided to put transporter tags on all the boxes and get the Mothership to beam them across to the new house in America when I got there and placed a beacon… I woke up before I got to the airport.
19-February-2005: I was dreaming about living in a house I’ve never seen before, it was quite modern and surrounded by thin, leafy trees. A family of badgers decided to come and live with me, then another family of badgers, then yet another until every room in the house was jam-packed with badgers snuffling around the floor, tables and raised surfaces. Some people wanted to help me get rid of the badgers but I refused, I liked having the badgers in the house; they were sort of delinquent badgers and I was running a halfway house for them in the hope of reintroducing them to normal badger society. Once particular badger was an extremely difficult case; he kept jumping on all the other badgers and making dog and cat sounds, he was pretty much shunned by the others but I worked hard on getting him to fit in and get along in life like a badger should.
18-February-2005: I dreamt that I was at the gym trying to remember the combination code for my locker; I was really tired and dizzy and kept falling asleep and banging my head on the locker door, I gave up on the locker and tried to drive my car home so I could go to sleep but decided it was too dangerous as I swerved along the street. I got out and started walking, when I made it back to my home my niece and mother were there waiting for me, to have a chat, so I couldn’t go straight off to sleep.
17-February-2005: I had a dream that my childhood back yard was being patrolled by a black giant, hundreds of feet tall. The giant wasn’t bothering me but it was attacking other people that lived next door and the present owners of the house. I went to the very back of the yard to look for an underground bunker that exists in some of my dreams and climbed down inside to get away from all the fuss with the black giant. The inside of the bunker was deserted, it is normally busy with people working at computer and video screens, and it looked run down. I found an exit in the bunker that opened into an old warehouse near York train station in England, people could come in and out of the ex-secret bunker whenever they wanted.
16-February-2005: I dreamt I was been harassed by my friend Benji, but he couldn’t catch me because I kept flying off into the air – he kept trying to pull me down and telling me to stop it.
15-February-2005: I had a dream about these chairs that you could sit in and be propelled into the sky above the clouds and float gently back down to earth; it was the latest extreme sport, like sky diving only with armchairs. The idea was to get the chair to leap as high as possible before it started descending so you had the maximum amount of time in the air. I told Marcia, my fiancé, that I was going to try for a really huge leap and go for one whole hour descending in the chair; Marcia decided to give it a go too. We thought that we were the only ones interested in the new sport, but once we were in the air we saw radar blips on our armrests’ readout, there were hundreds of other people doing the same thing as us.
14-February-2005: I had a dream that work called me and they wanted me to go and see an autistic boy that I stopped seeing 6 months ago; the family had moved to a new house so I spent a bit of time searching for them, when I did get to their house everyone was stood outside crying and wearing black, the mother was waving me away, the boy’s dad told me that he had been killed that morning – he said, ‘He was playing in the front yard with a nail gun when the silly bugger shot himself in the face,’ which I thought was a bit of an odd way to describe your son’s death. There were lots of working-class people drinking cheap champagne and being drunk, I ran off before anyone decided I should stay and join in; I should have been upset that the boy had died but all I could think of was how cool it was that I don’t have to work and that I can go home early.
13-February-2005: I dreamt that I time traveled to the early 1980s and joined a school basketball team; I went around prophesizing about how computers would become millions of times more powerful than they are now (in 1982) and showed people my cell phone which had simple computer games on it that were a thousand times better than anything anyone had ever seen in 1982… I woke up thinking that cell phones would be useless in 1982 because they didn’t have the cell networks set up then.
12-February-2005: I had a dream where my friend Neil was trying to go off with a girl that wasn’t his girlfriend, Jenny. We were at a party or something and he was chatting up this girl with long dark hair, they went off together but I wasn’t sure if he actually did anything with her or not. The dream shifted to the next morning at Neil’s house, which used to be my house, and the same girl was with him eating breakfast; Jenny wasn’t there like she should be, she was away working or something, I wanted to ask Neil where Jenny was but I didn’t want to drop him in it with this other girl, which made me feel angry towards Neil for putting me in this position, having to lie around this girl and inevitably be deceitful towards his girlfriend Jenny.
11-February-2005: I dreamt that I had a check for 15 thousand dollars that needed to be spent on clothes; I wanted to buy a real nice expensive shirt made from silk or something, I was in a clothes store and I showed the woman my check and she got all excited about the sale possibilities, but a male manager intervened. He brought lots of boxes of what he said were their finest shirts, they said Tesco’s Finest on the boxes, but they were all just ordinary shirts – purple, red, white or yellow, but ordinary; the most expensive was only $36, I was hoping to spend like $500 on a shirt just because I never owned one so expensive before. I lost interest in the clothes store and ended up being chased down wooden tunnels, with wooden cogwheels, by an evil leprechaun.
10-February-2005: I had a dream that I was testing motorcycles and working for a TV station, can’t remember much other than riding big old American bikes up and down a street.
9-February-2005: I was in someone else’s house with a friend called Carly, he was completely naked and attempting to create sophisticated graphic art with a big lump of white chalk on a blackboard, he wasn’t doing very well.
8-February-2005: There was a dream I can’t quite remember where I was in a house near the church in last night’s dream; I think I lived there with other people and it was a bit of a mess, I think it was also set in the 1970s, though I was only a bit younger than I am now.
7-February-2005: I dreamt I was eating butterfly cakes outside Fulford church in York, England. People kept going inside the church and coming out with pints of beer, I saw my friend Steve inside near the alter buying a pint of beer, it all seemed very wrong to me. I saw a guy called Chris that I went to university with sitting on the front pew, praying. He was looking at a big brass golden eagle the was used as a lectern, I went and sat with him and told him how they used to make us come here and sit for hours every Easter and listen to sermons, they seemed to last such a long time when I was 6, but I still sort of missed them.
6-February-2005: I dreamt that I was naked from the top down in a room with Sean Easton, a kid I went to school with; I was wearing a t-shirt on top but he wanted me to do something where I’d have to stand up and expose myself. It was nothing complicated, just something on a high table where I’d have to stretch to do it, but I was all self-conscious about getting up because I had no pants on.
5-February-2005: I dreamt that I was sort of taking care of a woman I haven’t met before, possibly it was my job; she was in the hospital undergoing tests and the doctors discovered that she needed one of her kidneys removed. I can’t remember what it was but she had been through so much in the recent past, and that day, so I intervened when the doctors wanted to start cutting her open right there – she needed some breathing space before she was put to sleep for the operation, some time to gather her thoughts.
4-February-2005: I started out dreaming about an Australian soap opera called Neighbours, there’s this middle-aged couple called Carl and Susan that are going through a divorce in the waking life show, I dreamt that Carl was moving back in with Susan and they were making up, I was happy for them. I later found myself being part of an ocean-diving film crew looking for an interesting reef to start a new TV documentary; we were using some Italian divers to find the best reefs because, apparently in this dream, Italians are the best at finding coral reefs.
3-February-2005: I had a dream that I was travelling along an old road between York in England and a place called Knaresborough, ancient market town in North Yorkshire; I was riding a four-wheeled bicycle that had four seats behind me with four people sitting in them. It didn’t bother me at all that I was the one doing all the work while they sat their chatting, it was as if it were my job to be a kind of cycling taxi driver.
2-February-2005: I was dreaming about a countryside in an alternate reality, it’s very familiar in my dreams and only exists in my dreams, residing behind the waking life village of Heslington in York, England. I’ve been there many times before but keep forgetting about it until I go there again. Last night I was dreaming about walking down the familiar green, rolling hills that slope towards the river, which also only exists in my dreams – but is sort of where the River Derwent should be. I was on a little hiking/rambling trip with Rolph Harris and a friend called Dave; we came to an ancient wall jutting out of the hillside and I began walking along it, where I first encountered the wall it was almost level with the grass; but as I got farther along, the grass became farther down so that the wall was getting higher. I noticed and said I better get down now because I’m in danger of hurting myself, Rolph laughed like I’d told a hugely funny joke. There was a feeling that I was a lot further away from home than I was comfortable with, yet I knew I should be okay because I’d been there before, a familiar old women in a fish and chip shop sold me some southern fried chicken, it was really cheap and very large, the sort of portion one might expect from country folk.
1-February-2005: I had a beautiful dream where I was walking along Fulford Main Street, where I grew up, in the sunshine and holding hands with Marcia. It was just like a warm summer’s day even though it was supposed to be near my birthday in February. People kept remarking on how hot it was for February. It was our last day together before Marcia had to go away again, it was kind of sad but kind of happy at the same time, because it was to be the last occasion that Marcia would have to leave me, the next time we met was going to be forever.