31-May-2005: I was in a dream version of London, England; a place I’ve been to before many times, it’s a lot like the real London but with some areas that do not exist in waking life. I was with my mother for a bit but she was annoying me so I left her behind; I found myself listening to the worst rock band I’ve ever seen, they were playing to some students in a closed down record store.
30-May-2005: I dreamt about a music store in the middle of the English countryside; the store sold computers and my mother was going to buy one of them. An assistant explained to her what the computer she was looking at could do, told her it had a Chiltern CPU and could handle musical inputs from a whole host of instruments at the same time, it was a computer for music professionals and recording studios – something my mother knows nothing about. She asked me if I thought she should buy it and I told her that she should not, that it was ten times the cost of a home PC and would be mostly useless to her. She asked my brother, who knows nearly nothing about computers, if she should buy it and he said that she should with no reasons to back up his opinion. My mother bought the computer and I got really upset, I told her that she never listens to my honest advice and always listens to my brother’s phoney advice and ends up poorer for it. I ran away from them and found myself on roller boots, skating through the streets of a large city I’ve never seen before outside of my dreams. I eventually skated all the way back home to York, England; I was skating over Castle Mills Bridge at night and there was a guy playing reggae music on the other side of the street – I got caught up in the rhythm and realised that I could make a kind of hip hop DJ scratching noise by scraping the stoppers of my roller boots on the road.
29-May-2005: I dreamt that I was with Benji, from the dream message board, in Russia. I was teaching him how to say please and thank you, and how to ask how much something costs. We were at a train station in the snow and I was going to leave him there; there didn’t seem anything wrong in leaving Benji in Russia, he was perfectly happy about it – he just wanted to know how to say a few things. He drove me a bit nuts at the station saying he couldn’t work out how to buy a Coke from a vending machine because all the writing was in Russian, it didn’t matter because all the drinks were visible through the glass, they all said the price on them and they all had the relevant number to type into the keypad. They were exactly the same as they are everywhere else in the world, but he still insisted it was too difficult.
28-May-2005: I woke up in the morning, then fell back to a half sleep where I found myself considering the long term formation of large river deltas – two of them in particular; the river Humber in England and the Mississippi River in the States.
27-May-2005: I had a dream about flying a space shuttle to the Moon with my fiancé, Marcia. I’m certain the dream was fascinating at the time, but I can’t remember any of the details other than we were bound for the Moon.
26-May-2005: I had a dream with a guy called Anthony Alison in it, he was a friend of mine up until I was about ten years old. I was staying overnight at his house, like we were kids again, sleeping in his bed. The bed was outside in his back yard, when the sun came up in the morning there was a huge hillside vista and a valley in the distance with people partaking in a medieval fair. The bed we were in was moving up and down, like it was on train tracks, along the garden, I got out of bed and flew down to the valley to see what was going on.
25-May-2005: I dreamt that I was in my childhood house, lots of the floors had holes in them (again); I was trying to tell my mother that it was dangerous, that my brother’s daughter might fall through the holes. My stepfather was trying to interrupt me and I kept telling him to ‘shut the fuck up’ in a really aggressive manner, I think I was hoping that he would start a fight with me so I could use my dream-super powers to beat the crap out of him.
24-May-2005: I dreamt that I was being harassed by a little fluffy grey gerbil, some kid that owned it kept letting it out of its cage and, for some reason, I was afraid of the little creature. I dreamt within the dream that I went to sleep and the gerbil climbed up by ass, or at least I was paranoid that it had; I kept thinking I could feel its tail sticking out of my backside. I had the story of Lemmiwinks from South Park, the TV show, in my head the whole time.
23-May-2005: I had a dream that I was working at my first full-time job again as a printer, I was trying to tell my boss that I’d lived for years into the future, that all this had happened to me in the past. He didn’t believe me, of course, so I had to keep telling him about stuff that hadn’t happened yet. I started running into problems as glitches started appearing, mostly because I was affecting events in ways that hadn’t been done the first time around. I kept using a special watch to transport myself back to the future to check if everything was the same; it wasn’t. The changes to the future were subtle at first, but they soon became monumental; the entire world was changing its appearance, even the weather was different and strange birds were getting more and more noisy every instance that I leapt forward through time. By the end of the dream the birds were acting crazy and pecking at my head whenever I appeared in the future.
22-May:2005: My fiancés sister kept showing up at the local airport, having flown four thousand miles, just to see if her sister was okay, then flying straight back home again.
21-May-2005: I had a freaky circus dream where I was part of an offbeat team of entertainers who used goats and a tiger in their act; we spent all our time travelling the globe, using a goat to pull a sledge that went across the water – the goat could swim underwater for ages, pulling us along at 20 knots at least; when we were on land the tiger did all the leg work.
20-May-2005: I was in a dream where my friend Neil was trying to explain to my fiance, Marcia, how Dave (another friend) had freaked him out once when they were watching a movie together and eating magic mushrooms. Everytime there was lightning in the movie Dave prodded Neil in the back and made him jump; Marcia kept thinking he was talking about a Lord of the Rings movie, I knew he wasn’t and Neil couldn’t remember which movie it was.
19-May-2005: I was dreaming in the morning after I’d fallen back to sleep again; my friend Neil and I found a hole near the city walls in York, England. It was a very deep hole that went all the way down to Hell, Beelzebub was living at the bottom of it and we kept teasing him out of the hole and running away.
18-May-2005: I dreamt that I was a prisoner of war in Nazi Germany, it was near the end of the war but our German captors were being steadfast about holding on to us, though a girl I’d been with earlier had escaped. Our guards were getting us to line up along a street, some people tried to make a run for it but were shot or stabbed. I wasn’t going to try and escape but a bus came by between me and my guard and he lost site of me. I got on the bus and pretended I was a German citizen, I could speak German very well and even got an old lady to pay my fare saying I didn’t have any change. The bus drove away and my guard went running off across a field, thinking I’d fled that way. After a short bus ride, I saw the girl I’d lost earlier and told the driver to stop and got off. We started talking in English, I had to warn he to keep it down, and I got rid of any signs I’d been a prisoner. The two of us ended up getting a legitimate paid job with a German officer, he took us to a ball bearing factory where we were to salvage bearings from old tanks. The girl kept shouting phrases in German, the only ones she knew, to try and make herself look more fitting – everyone thoughs she was nuts when she kept shouting, “Wie viel Uhr ist es?”, a sort of old fashioned way of asking the time.
17-May-2005: I had a dream that I was polishing a street called Broadway, not the one in New York, near where I grew up. I was making it all shiny like a polished wooden floor. After about half a mile of street polishing it started raining, but I went on polishing for another twenty minutes before I thought, what the Hell am I doing?
16-May-2005: I dreamt that I was in the attic of a house I’ve never seen before with someone I can’t remember, the floor of the attic was all weak and dodgy with holes everywhere – it was a real balancing act to stay up there without putting my foot through the floor, the other person did put their foot through the floor – then the whole roof collapsed due poor workmanship, it was held up by a stack of breeze blocks that were not in any way cemented together. I went with the other person to a hardware store and got some strong cement to rebuild the roof of the house. Later I was demonstrating how I could run right around the world in less than 5 seconds.
15-May-2005: I dreamt it was my wedding day, I was being really relaxed about the whole thing until it was time for me to start getting dressed, it was then that I realized I’d forgotten to buy my outfit for my wedding – all I could find was a pair of black socks and some very futuristic running shoes with silver clasps.
14-May-2005: I had another dream about Transdniestria, this time I was telling my old boss, Bob Scrase, all about the little country but he wasn’t listening to me, he kept diverting the conversation back to some lovely new, white toilets he’d just bought for his female staff.
13-May-2005: I had a whole dream about website templates, linking files and making a new site about a small Eastern European country called Transdniestria.
12-May-2005: I had a fantastic dream where Marcia and I were part of the space shuttle programme, we were both astronauts. Our commander introduced us (and the other astronauts) to a couple of high ranking medical officers that were in charge of our safety, and making sure we got our suits on properly. The medical officers were trained to sleep all the time and be ready in an instant when the launch alarm went off – the alarm was triggered by the astronauts starting to suit up. They did a demonstration with a medic pretending to be asleep and me coming in and putting on a space suit; an alarm went off underneath the medic’s pillow and he was up and helping me into my suit before I could get my arms in. The suit felt claustrophobic at first and I wondered if I would be able to handle it, but I got around my fears by wearing it all the time. I also wondered if Marcia’s thin arms would be okay inside the space suit, but she seemed to take to the new clothing a lot easier than I did. A guy I went to school with as a child, called Paul Marriot, made a comment about Marcia arms being so skinny; Marcia pushed his sleeves up and said that his arms were very skinny for a man and that he should mind his own business. The complex we were in was a kind of shopping mall full of astronauts and astronaut’s fans seeking autographs; I went to a fast-food place to buy drinks a lot because they were the only thing I could handle with my un-helmeted space suit on, the gloves were too thick to manipulate a coffee mug but the fast-food drinks had a straw that I could suck. I think I signed my autograph for someone. Just before our scheduled launch I gave Marcia a watch type device that could transport her brainwaves to the Mothership during the lift-off, then transport them back into her head once she was in space so she wouldn’t have to suffer the stresses of g-force. I intended to do the same. When we were sitting in the shuttle cabin Marcia thought she might give the brainwave transfer a miss and give herself the full launch experience. I had already transferred to the Mothership but, operating my body by remote control, I gave her an understanding nod. However, Marcia changed her mind after about three seconds of extreme g-force and joined me on the Mothership; she also operated her body by remote control to give a thumbs up to one of the other pilots, who said an underhanded comment to someone else about Marcia being away somewhere else – not realizing how true that was.
11-May-2005: I had a dream that Marcia and I were at art college together; there were some other people there that I actually went to art college with me in waking life – Phil, who looks like a 1970s disco reject was kissing Su Bellamy, and other people were doing similar things. There was something about me tempting a woman into a bathroom from a long way off, but I can’t remember how I was doing it or why.
10-May-2005: I had a dream that these local hooligan kids kept popping up to my window, three floors up from the ground. It would normally be impossible for someone to do this, but they were using some special ninja tricks to fly up the walls. Marcia and I put some slippery gel on the windowsill so that they slipped off every time they popped up to our window. I knew it wouldn’t be long before they got inside, so I leapt out of the window and chased them off, after having a fight with their ninja trainer and winning.
9-May-2005: I was dreaming about watching this guy ride a BMX (small off road bicycle) down a desert track in South Africa; I kept thinking that he should be doing more stunts, that he was riding it more like a mountain bike – but I supposed that I was just behind the times or something, that this is how they ride BMXs these days. I watched him tear down dusty, rocky tracks while camera cars tried to keep up with him, he was actually quite good at the course; a big black Toyota Land Cruiser shot by a bridge underneath him to get a dramatic shot as he flew uphill and won the tournament. They awarded him the prize money of 50 thousand English pounds just as the dream shifted and I was the guy who’d won; I went walking out of a train station with a paper bag full of money, thinking I’d better get into a taxi before I get mugged. When I came out from the station I bumped into an old friend called Maja, I was now in England instead of SA, and she said hi and walked away. Two other people walked along the street with me for a while but turned off down some steps; I thought they’d try and steal my prize money if I followed them down, it looked pretty deserted and grey down there, so I kept walking straight ahead. The walking became very difficult with the wind working against me down a long elevated street with heavy trucks rumbling by. I found Maja at the end of the street and realized she must have taken a different route, underneath where I’d walked, to get there so quickly and avoid the wind. It also occurred to me that that was the reason the other guys went down the steps. I wondered briefly if I could have a naughty (sexual) moment with Maja but thought better of it, seeing as I’m getting married soon; I noticed that Maja’s legs were a lot fatter than they are now, like plump old women’s legs and stopped thinking about her that way immediately. I asked her where we were and she told me, Sheffield. The place looked awful, all boarded up windows, garbage and heavy trucks; I said, ‘God, what a shithole!’ When I woke up I remembered that the place in my dream was nothing at all like the real Sheffield.
8-May-2005: I dreamt that I was in Liverpool, England, with a guy called John Adams and some other people I went to school with as a child. We were riding around the place on a bicycle that carried four people, one doing all the work while the rest sat in the back – I was the one doing all the work. I stopped the strange dream bike and got off, saying it seemed fair that I should have a rest and someone else should ride up front; John took offence at this and acted like I’d punched him in the face or something, then I got all upset that he’d got upset with me – I pleaded my case with one of the others, asking them if what I’d suggested was unfair. They were all too scared to say anything to John, even though they thought I was right, and I got fed up with them all and went to the airport to get a plane home. As usual in my dreams, the stupid plane wouldn’t take off properly but I made it fly by getting annoyed and pushing myself so far back in my chair it made the nose tilt up and we took off.
7-May-2005: I dreamt I was with an autistic boy I visit once a fortnight, it was in the future – he didn’t talk a lot, but he did talk more than he does now. I was with him and his mother taking a dog for a walk by a big lake, the dog was theirs but they don’t have a dog at the moment in waking life. The dream changed a bit so that the boy was in a car, his dad was encouraging him to drive it on his own, which he did really well, but I thought it was a bit odd seeing as he was only twelve years old. He drove the car to a castle and then drove it inside and right to the top, some officials at the door of the castle were trying to tell me about him and his ways, thinking I wouldn’t understand them and not knowing that I’d been visiting him for years.
6-May-2005: I was in a dream in the near future set in York, England. As I walked passed what used to be a fire station (still is in waking life), but was now a library, I noticed that all the windows had been smashed. I swelled up with pride for the old town and was so angry that someone had broken all the windows, feeling an affection for York that I’ve never been able to before.
5-May-2005: I had a dream that I was with my friend Neil, we were by a big river in one of the southern states of America looking at old junk for sale. Neil found a little boat that he liked, it turned out to be a boat that Cary Grant used to own which made it more expensive, but Neil bought it anyway. There was a problem though, Neil had nowhere to keep his new boat, I thought of buying the house where the boat was moored at the moment and said, “Wouldn’t it be funny if you bought that boat, then I bought the house and let you moor it there; the boat wouldn’t have moved anywhere and you’d have paid all that money for it?” We saw a helicopter gunship coming then and ran into the house, which I’d already bought ages ago. There were other people in the house that knew Neil and I; we were all together in disguise, constantly on the run from whoever was arriving in the helicopter. Neil quickly built a hi-tech raft at the back of the house and attached the motor from the little boat he’d just bought, which was on a different river at the front of the house. Four of us in different superhero-type disguises were on the raft and speeding away just as a SWAT team came bursting through the back door of the house and onto the little back porch/pier. Our pursuers were back in their helicopter and chasing us through swampland that was the Florida Everglades; we were bouncing off floating alligators all the time and one or two even ended up on our raft, I had to kick a couple off me. We lost the helicopter as soon as night fell and we were under heavy tree cover, the last thing I remember in the dream was pulling up to a little riverside town where the buildings were all white, made from wood and had heady music and a smell of bourbon coming from them.
4-May-2005: I was dreaming about a war on another planet, pretty much like Earth only slightly more advanced, with hoverships and such patrolling outside. I was in an outlawed gang run by John Travolta. John was accusing me of ratting him out to the police, who were outside the building we were in knocking the walls down to get inside. I was upset that he’d even think such a thing and told him so. I said that even if I didn’t like what he was doing I’d promised to take care of him and that I wouldn’t let him be captured. I called the Mothership and found that my friend Mark was flying the ship; this has never happened before, Catface is usually the pilot. Anyway I told Mark to bring the ship in very low along a battle-scorched valley behind our building, to try not to attract any of the local hoverships (we were not from this planet), but to destroy any that got in his way. I took a gamble and got into a car with John and sped off in the direction I thought the Mothership would approach from, thinking we’d only be out in the open for a few seconds. We sped through heavy ground flack, with bursting volcanoes of soil erupting all around us – the Mothership was nowhere in site, the driving was too difficult for me to check my scanner to see where it was; I called the ship with my voice but kept getting an automated message that it would be there soon. John Travolta and I ended up being cornered in a farmer’s field after twenty minutes of hectic chases; I think he was going to shoot me for failing him then shoot himself when the Mothership turned up and destroyed all the cars and hoverships surrounding us. I asked Catface what had happened and it told me that Mark decided to make himself a cup of tea before he set off to rescue us, then kept forgetting that he was supposed to rescue us – Catface had to take control of the ship from him, but allowed Mark to fire the guns when they got to us.
3-May-2005: I dreamt I was in an acting school, or a sort of big college/lodge for new actors looking for work. There were dozens of us crammed backstage auditioning for parts in some kind of puppet movie; behind us auditioning actors there were loads of newspaper reporters waiting to see who got the new parts. I think I got the part of voice for Scooby Doo.
2-May-2005: I dreamt that I was being held captive on a spaceship thousands of light-years away from Earth, the mood of the dream was more like an adventure though than a nightmare – like a movie where I had to find a way to escape. My captors thought I was just an ordinary guy with no knowledge of space travel, they had no idea that I was highly skilled in the interstellar arts, or that I was the owner of the most sophisticated, and ludicrous, spacecraft in the universe. I decided early on in the dream that I would not be using the Mothership to come and rescue me though, that I would use my own cunning to escape the evil captain of this huge black military cruiser. I found a little gaming console next to the chair I was forcibly strapped into, the console had a code that needed cracking before you could access it; I had nothing better to do so I played with the buttons until I got inside. I was presented with a green screen showing spacecraft schematics and assumed the console was a sort of training aid for the crew, there were numbered with labels saying things like attitude, angle, pitch and so on. I played with the readout labelled attitude, moving a symbolic slider from 2 up to 8 then pressing enter; the whole ship we were in made a vertiginous lurch to one side so that my chair was now facing the ceiling instead of the wall or, rather, the far wall was now the ceiling. Someone’s voice came out of the console in my hands, as if they were expecting someone in particular, they said “What are you doing, you aren’t supposed to change attitude like that without telling anyone.” I heard the owner of the console say that he hadn’t when he realized it was his console the female voice was talking to, he told her that he’d left it with the prisoners by accident. The woman made a big show of letting me know it wasn’t a big deal that I had the console, pretending she didn’t know I was listening; I’d already used the device to un-strap myself and my friends, a small crew of a ship we must have been on before the dream started. We were all hiding behind some oil drums to ambush the guards when I woke up.
1-May-2005: I dreamt that I was in a classroom at a school I’ve never seen before, apart from my fiancé, Marcia, none of the other pupils, or the teacher, were familiar to me. I said something that caused the teacher to say, ‘if that is all you have to offer us, perhaps you shouldn’t be here?’ This upset me greatly, I got up and walked out, slamming the door behind me. I walked around the school building and found a green, grassy cloister where I began singing a song I remembered from my home planet. The song was an elaborate complexity of other-worldly notation and tone that caused intricate patterns to form against the sky; I knew that everyone would have to come outside and see what was making the amazing song, and hoped that Marcia would be the first one to see me. I wasn’t disappointed, Marcia came out from the classroom first and we danced together on the grass to the music which had, by now, taken on a life of its own – independent from my singing. Everyone else in the school soon joined our dancing and the Mothership came down through the complex patterns in the sky, surrounded by a psychedelic, multi-hued glow.