30-June-2005: I dreamt that I was in a small town near Liverpool in England called Runcorn. I was standing in the entrance/reception of a small laundry business, or something similar; a young girl was standing real close to me and try to touch me in naughty places, I wasn’t totally bothered by it but it did feel a bit odd and wrong. She asked me what my wife would think if she knew she was touching me that way; I replied, ‘Why don’t you ask here, she’s sitting right there?’ The girl looked around to see Marcia glaring at here, then ran off very embarrassed. Marcia was crying for a while, thinking I was interested in other women; this made me so upset that I decided never to even think about other women when I’m dreaming, which sort of meant that I knew I was dreaming. We both walked around Runcorn together and I joked about how much I loved Croydon (London Borough ); Marcia joked about what a nice place Runcorn is – the two towns became a kind of running gag for a long time in the dream. Later we were in France together walking along a riverside when we came across a point that the Loire was joined by another, smaller river. I’ve been fascinated by the confluence of rivers in dreams lately, no lesser in this dream; I asked Marcia if it was okay for me to jump in and swim to the point where the two rivers join and she said it was fine. I met an older guy on the other side of the river called Geoff that I haven’t seen in ten years, he still had a big bushy beard like the last time I saw him. The three of us had a conversation about how the pockets in jeans were perfect for storing things because they didn’t fall out.
29-June-2005: I had a dream that I went swimming with a bunch of Terry Pratchett fans in a public swimming baths in a town in the north or England I’ve never seen before.
28-June-2005: I dreamt that I was at York horse racing track in England with my mum’s dog, Tilly. Marcia and I have been saying, ‘Hewwooo!’ to each other like Elmer Fudd for the past few weeks in waking life and it’s crept into some of my dreams. We’d been saying it so much in this dream that Tilly had picked up on it, saying, ‘Hewwwwooo!’ in a little doggy voice; it was hilarious!
27-June-2005: I was in a dream set in a place I’ve never seen before in any other dreams; I was sort of king or president of the local area, but there was another guy indigenous to the land that had a similar claim of kingship. The dream was about the two of us running a race along a beach next to the ocean, the winner would inherit all the land. There wasn’t any real animosity between the two sets of people that were there to cheer myself and the native man; it felt like it was something we did for fun every year, the ruler of the land swapping over depending on who won the race that year. We were running along the sand in the race and I thought that the other guy was very fast, but I had my dream powers as an unfair advantage; I knew I could zoom away down the beach at impossible speeds, but I thought it would ruin everyone’s fun – so I ran along side the man, as we leapt over logs and tufts of grass along the shore, and said to him, ‘Why don’t we just become equal partners and both own the land?’ The other guy thought it was a good idea and laughed, we both stopped racing each other and went to the town’s museum instead to have a look around. An old woman who’d just started working in the museum came over to admonish me for picking something up off its plinth, telling me I shouldn’t touch anything. A younger woman came along and said to the older woman, ‘Don’t be silly, he owns everything in this museum, and the museum too!’ I told her that I now only owned half of it.
26-June-2005: I dreamt I was driving through the countryside in the south of England, I was with an old school friend called Sean Sucking – we may have been a bit lost because we came to the end of a road and had to get out and walk over fields. We eventually found a sleepy little train station and another friend called Ché; we all got on a train together hoping it would take us to London, where we could go and rest in my mother’s flat.
25-June-2005: I was dreaming about camping in a forest with all my friends, the campsite was being invaded by aliens of government agents or something – my friend Carl and I were trying to root them out. I kept shouting, ‘Hewwwoooo!’ like Elmer Fudd; eventually Carl asked me why I was doing it, saying that I would give us away. I told him that my wife, Marcia, was back at the tent shouting the same thing in my head, and I was merely responding to let her know where I was.
24-June-2005: I had a movie style dream about zombies in Australia, can’t remember much more.
23-June-2005: I dreamt that I was missing Marcia, thinking that I hadn’t seen her in a long time because she’d gone back to America on her own like she used to do, then realised everything was all right because we were married and she wasn’t going to go away like that again.
22-June-2005: I dreamt I was in a classroom and kept thinking that we should sack the teacher; then I went with a bunch of the pupils to the sea where the waves were huge, someone remarked that they could get no signal on their phone, which I thought was obvious seeing as we were so far away from any cities. After this we all held hands and flew away inland in a long chain.
21-June-2005: I dreamt that I went to London, England and met up with a bunch of Terry Pratchett fans that I’ve never seen before in waking life – some of them I recognised from pictures, others recognised me the same way. We all went to a restaurant and someone had an idea to sneak in, sit at a table and place lots of knives, forks, spoons and little pieces of bread on the table and pretend we’d already ordered something – so we could complain that our food had not arrived for a joke. It didn’t work though, the head waiter came and said, ‘you Pratchett lot are barred from this restaurant!’ We had to leave before we were thrown out, then we were all chased through some hilly fields by police with dogs.
20-June-2005: I’d been away for a week on my honeymoon, this was the first morning I’ve woken up in my own bed again – I had a strange feeling like I was still dreaming, trying to figure out if it was really my actual bedroom or an image imposed onto a hotel room by my half dreaming mind. I was not 100% sure it was my own room until I looked through the window and saw the landlord’s car far below.
19-June-2005: I dreamt I was at the train station in York, England, with my wife, Marcia, and a friend called Ché – it was kind of in the future and we all had to use little hand-held computers to buy our tickets, we were going to Portsmouth. Marcia’s computer was stuck in its Portuguese language setting and I had to fix it. Marcia printed out a copy of the computer’s workings onto some special paper, I could alter her computer settings by touching parts of diagrams on the paper. I said, ‘Isn’t it amazing how we can cause things to happen to computers just by touching a paper printout,’ knowing that the others would not think it amazing at all, just technology.
18-June-2005: A guy I haven’t seen in over a decade, called Antony Bulmer, appeared in my dream and told me that I should take up martial arts again to lose some weight, I’m inclined to agree with him.
17-June-2005: I was dreaming about a guy I’ve never seen before that I’d hired to do a job, requiring him to take photographs with my camera – he was going through the pictures I’d already taken on the digital camera and deleting them; they were my wedding pictures, it didn’t really matter because they’d all been saved, but I did think it was rather rude of him.
16-June-2005: I dreamt that I found a religious alter in a waterside cave on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea.
15-June-2005: I had a dream with an old man who had painful memories, I used my healing hands to take away the pain connected with the memories, but not the memories themselves. Marcia (my wife) and I were thinking of moving house, away from the people we were living with in the dream.
14-June-2005: I had a vague dream about being in a prison with a Hannibal Lector type person chopping people up into tiny pieces. Later I was the owner of an inflatable tall building that was in the street outside my house, someone wanted to pay me to make a copy of it in the same way that you make copies of files on a computer, it made perfect sense at the time.
13-June-2005: I went to an outdoor pool at a Nuevo Riche family’s home in a dream with a boy called Anthony Allison, someone I went to school with when I was aged 5-16. Anthony had bought some Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus that he wanted to try out in their pool – it was the only water that was deep enough in our town, a place I’ve never seen outside of this dream. I waited inside the gauche family’s living room for Anthony to try his SCUBA gear while they smiled at me like I was from another planet and smoked cigarettes and gleamed in their bright gold lamé suits. A naked autistic boy came into the room with a newspaper rolled into a cone covering his penis; his mother asked me to take him to the toilet and I said no, my friend Jenny said that I must and I left the house in disgust. The dream faded with me walking along a street, pursued by a horde of kids shouting fashion phrases at me.
12-June-2005: I had a dream about a river a few miles away from here called the River Derwent; I was trying to find the spot where the River Derwent joins the River Ouse, the main river that flows past our house in York, England. In the dream the location of this confluence was a big mystery; I don’t know exactly where the two rivers join in waking life, but it wouldn’t be all that hard to find – my dream made me want to go and see it when I woke up but it was raining heavily so I didn’t go, but I will.
11-June-2005: Wheeeeeeeeeeeeee, Marcia and Maljonic (me) get married today; I was too excited to sleep properly, so I can’t remember what I was dreaming about.
10-June-2005: I dreamt that I was a sporting journalist covering a Grand Prix lawnmower race; I had the feeling I was quite famous and normally did much larger events, but the people in this country local town had never seen me before.
9-June-2005: I had a dream that was based in my dream state version of London, England; there was a car chase across a part of town that doesn’t exist in waking life, we sped across a huge moveable bridge across the River Thames then I got out and went to a computer store to buy an X Box. I bought the X Box and a Nintendo games console and went for a walk down the street outside and hung the bag with my new computer inside from the handlebars of my bicycle, which was locked to a metal rail fence around a corner from the computer store. I left the computers hanging on the bicycle because I didn’t feel like carrying them anymore. After walking for a while it occurred to me that someone would steal the computers; then I wondered if there wasn’t a newer version of the X Box I could have bought, or even a Sony Playstation 3 – I wondered if my fiancé would allow me to get away with going back to the store and buying a Playstation 3, and the latest X Box on top of the things I’d already bought.
8-June-2005: I dreamt that there was a huge hole in my childhood back garden, the hole has appeared in dreams before and is sometimes connected to a secret underground base that is entered much farther down the garden, towards the back. The hole in this dream was right outside the back door to the house, it had all kinds of old fashioned, redundant sewage pipes and related fittings in it. These old pipes could still be used partially, but a new system had been fitted that made these old pipes and water tanks obsolete.
7-June-2005: I had a vague dream about arguing with my friends about which kind of computer processor was the best; my friend Neil said it was worth paying the extra for a Pentium, my friend Steve agreed with me that you may as well spend the extra money on a more powerful Athlon.
6-June-2005: Marcia and I were invited to a party, we brought gifts with us and it was quite exciting – until we got to the party and the two gay men (the hosts), who were a couple, went crazy and locked everyone in the house so that the guests couldn’t leave. I was angry with them, saying why should we leave, you (the couple) invited us all and we came here of our own free will, we even brought you presents! We (the guests) managed to convince them we weren’t going to run away but they still wouldn’t open any doors or windows, which were covered with steel plating. Everyone just pretended it was a normal party for hours, drinking and smoking, until one of the hosts opened the front door to get some fresh air – then Marcia darted out through the gap and I ran off with her before they could stop us. They chased us through some streets, up some hills, through an underwater computer game and into an early 1990s nightclub, but they never brought us back to the party.
5-June-2005: I was an autistic man, a bit like Rainman, in a Colombo mystery dream; my dream was like the first part of the TV show before Colombo arrives and the murder is being set up. Someone was going to be killed and I, being the autistic guy, was about to be set up as the scapegoat, at least that’s what I thought. It turned out that I was the victim, I spent the rest of the dream trying to foil the criminals, praying that I never saw Colombo for, if I did see Colombo, it meant I was already dead.
4-June-2005: I dreamt that I was shopping in Woolworth’s with my friend Neil, some air raid sirens started sounding in the streets of York outside – there was an announcement saying that there was nothing to fear, that everyone should come out of the stores and begin walking home. I didn’t know where the announcement was coming from because I know York doesn’t have a public address system that can address the whole town like that. I convinced Neil and as many shoppers as I could that we should head down to the basement of Woolworth’s; most of the store staff were following the announcement’s instructions like no-brained sheep and trying to herd people outside into the streets. I herded some of the people down into the basement and saw a blinding flash through the store window, less than a couple of miles away in the sky – I bolted down the stairs into the basement and joined the dozen or so people I managed to convince, the ground and building shook for a long time under the force of multiple atomic detonations. Our little group spent about a year underneath the wreck of Woolworth’s, living on chocolate bars and cola drinks, before I dared venture out to explore the outside world. There was nothing left of York, our hideout was at the bottom of a funnel-shaped depression in the earth, it had become a sort of landmark of wonder and some people were quite surprised when they found that we were living down there.
3-June-2005: I dreamt that I was walking down the street in the summertime with my friend Ché; we were talking on a street corner as lots of people filed in and out of a locale fete called the Fulford Show. For some reason the local papers mistook Ché and I for porn film makers – Ché went along with the idea for fun and after a short time loads of local girls wanted to be in our films; Ché was so convincing as a porn mogul that some producer paid us a million dollars in advance to shoot one of our movies.
2-June-2005: I was dreaming something about Masayo, my ex wife, trying to annoy me; she was a mixture of insane and trying to appear totally happy with her new life all at the same time. Marcia, my soon-to-be wife was there too; Masayo wasn’t being directly hostile to Marcia, but she was hoping that some of the things she was doing and saying would make Marcia not want to be with me any more – they had the opposite effect.
1-June-2005: I was taking a train journey in a dream with Marcia, my fiancé, and my friends Neil and Jenny; we were going on a high-speed train to a small town that doesn’t exist in waking life, there was supposed to be a concert or a party in the town hall. I was a little anxious about going on a train to somewhere I didn’t know, my anxieties got worse when we arrived and I discovered that we needed to take a bus ride too, even further into the wilderness. My fears were unfounded though because the bus journey only lasted about three minutes, we could have walked back to the train station in ten minutes. It wasn’t a concert we were going to but a boring town meeting; we were heading back home in less than half an hour.