31-July-2005: I used to live with a guy called Daryl, he was a heavy drug user at the time but I think he’s past that stage of his life now; in last night’s dream he kept spiking people’s alcoholic drinks with drugs, LSD I think. He had this twisted notion that he was doing them a favour, said that they’d get wasted quicker and wouldn’t have to spend so much on drink. I rescued an old friend from him and walked miles with him, holding him upright and trying to stop him from feeling weird. He kept changing from being freaked out to saying it’s not that bad actually, kind of funny. We ended up in a hostel in the middle of town, he couldn’t walk any further; it was a special hostel where only trustees and their families could stay, Daryl showed up and assured the owner that Anthony’s (my drugged friend) family were new trustees, that they’d donated a hamster to the hostel that very morning.
30-July-2005: I had my second dream about going along the River Thames in London, England, heading for Windsor Castle. London is a huge sprawling mass of urban construction and I’ve often dreamed of starting from the middle of it and seeing how long I would have to walk along the river before I was out in open countryside; this dream was a reflection of that desire, only I was on a bicycle and it didn’t take very long at all. I was with two people I don’t know, the three of us were archaeologists heading for Windsor Castle for research. As we emerged from London the river became more and more idyllic, like a sparkling stream from a fantasy story, glittering in the afternoon sunshine. We all kept stopping to have a swim.
29-July-2005: I was dreaming that I was in a bar somewhere I’ve never seen before, perhaps in my late teens again as some people I used to know from that era were all there. In particular there was this psycho guy I used to know called Mark Rowley, he was trying to convince me that it was okay for he and a few of the other guys to drag me outside and throw my clothes away, kind of like stupid people do at stag/bachelor parties. I was trying to convince him that it was a stupid idea, telling him I had something very important to do, but he just kept on smiling at me like an idiot and insisting that the plan should go ahead, I even hit him over the head with many different blunt objects but his skull was to thick to make any impression on him (I had another dream later where I was explaining this dream and said the exact same sentence I just wrote here). I eventually had to resort to some of my space-age technology that I usually have secreted about my person in dreams. It was a tiny little gun that looked like a small plastic toy and totally ineffectual that I brought out from my coast pocket; I shot Mark in the chest with the tiny white beam of light that the gun emitted. Mark walked away after that looking a little sorry for himself; a few people came over and asked me what I’d done to him. I explained that the gun I shot him with was called an argumentendatron (or something similar), that it fired electrical impulses through the body and to a specific part of the brain, making the subject believe that any argument they were in had been resolved and that they were the ones whose case had been lost, that it left you feeling rather dejected and unable to remember what the resolutions of the argument were.
28-July-2005: I had a dream that an old friend came to see Marcia and I in a house where we were living, which I’ve never seen before. This old friend was a woman who’d brought some taps/faucets with her and attached them to our bathroom sink; they didn’t fit very well and leaked water everywhere. After Marcia had gone to bed the woman tried to seduce me and I said, loud enough for Marcia to hear me, ‘Please leave me alone, I am not interested in you because I have found the one I want to be with.’ to which she giggled and looked towards our bedroom door.
27-July-2005: I dreamt I was with Marcia in New York, being scared about getting a flight to England; the flight we were meant to get crashed as it tried to take off, no one was hurt and Marcia and I went to look at an engine at the rear that was hanging loose from the tail-plane. One of the people who was on board during the crash immediately wrote a quick poem about it when he got off the plane, then sent it by email to a TV programme called Countdown, a sort of light-hearted afternoon quiz show whose host died two weeks or so ago. I can’t remember all the poem, something like….
Bla bla bla I was so scared I thought I might poop, Only too glad we didn’t land in the soup
26-July-2005: I was dreaming about a future version of York, England that was kind of based on a Big Brother 1984 type scenario. I was speeding along the water of the main river, trying to avoid the attention of massive robots that were just standing there like sentinels. There was some kind of genetic twist where men were having babies and women had become the more dominant sex, in control of an underground resistance against the robots. There were TV sets everywhere feeding us political bullshit and pseudo news items, and a newspaper with a picture of a guy called Robert I used to work with holding up his two babies he’d just given birth to.
25-July-2005: I was walking along the riverside with Marcia in an alternate dream version of the countryside near where we live. It was a sunny evening and we were playing a little quiz game together as we walked along, I can’t remember how it worked but it basically proved how much we love each other – I woke up very happy.
24-July-2005: I dreamt that I’d found a mysterious tunnel in a part of town where I live called Acomb; the tunnel started right at the edge of Acomb and came up right in the middle of a shopping mall. I met a girl called Kat that I haven’t seen in years when I came out of the tunnel. I’ve had similar dreams in the past where a tunnel is connected to a shopping mall, only in a different town.
23-July-2005: I was in a dream where the main character (possible me, not sure) was an old German man, he was meeting an old English girlfriend that he hadn’t seen since World War Two, in a French town somewhere. Someone said Het to him which, only in this dream, meant for him to stand up. When I awoke I was trying to remember what ‘Het’ actually means and thought that maybe my unconscious mind was confusing the word (I saw it visually in the dream) with the Russian word for ‘no’. It doesn’t mean anything in German.
22-July-2005: I was in a dream where I was billed to play in a playhouse production of Laurel and Hardy in Scarborough, a seaside town in North Yorkshire, England. Some people didn’t think I could do it and I was sure that I would be a roaring success, I woke up before I found out though. During the dream I was counting out rent money that I owed my granddad (he died years ago) but found that only half of it was there, he wasn’t expecting me to give him any money and he was going to give me money before I stopped him. I left him then and went outside to go to the local grocery store called Jackson’s, it had graffiti all over it and a sign on the door reading, ‘Closed due to Warrior damage’.
21-July-2005: I dreamt that I was on a kind of school camping trip in Spain, only I decided not to go home with the rest of my class when the vacation was over and stay there a few more days. My classmates packed their tent away and left, but when I came back later that day to go to my tent it had gone too. I asked the campsite owner what had happened to my tent and she said that she threw it away, she thought that someone had left it by mistake and didn’t know I was staying longer. I decided that I’d buy a car and drive to England with John Shipley, I guy I went to Fulford school with when I was a kid and who was sharing the tent that had been thrown away.
20-July-2005: I can’t quite remember what I was dreaming about for the most part, but just before I woke up a group of people were arguing about what they could use to solve a problem, somebody said they could use penguins and someone else said, “Penguins? What the Hell are penguins good for,” then I, imagining them waddling up to me and holding out their wings said, “They’d be great for a group hug!” Then woke up laughing hysterically.
19-July-2005: I dreamt that I was in Tokyo in Japan, riding up and down on different trains; sometimes the faster intercity type and sometimes the slower and smaller urban railways. I was riding a little silver train that was only one coach long and thinking that it was going a bit too fast, it was a bit scary and I almost considered jumping out of the window and flying away, but I stuck with it instead. I remember thinking that Tokyo didn’t look anywhere near so strange as I remembered it.
18-July-2005: I dreamed that an old friend called Maja was with me in the house I grew up in, I haven’t seen her for a long time in waking life and I think I knew this in the dream because I gave her a big hug. Her brother, Nikola, was there too; we were looking at an ancient map of Britain, more than ancient actually, it was well before humans were around. The map showed Scotland detached from England and there was a huge volcano spewing lava where Edinburgh is today. Also, later on in the dream, I dreamt that I woke up and couldn’t remember where I lived.
17-July-2005: I used to know this boy called Morian in waking life, he’s grown up now but I haven’t met him since he was about ten years old. In this dream he was grown up like he is now and living with Marcia and I, like he was our adopted son or something. He’d been secretly spending all our money on expensive antiques, I noticed when we got a bank statement that said we were minus 30,000 because he’d bought an antique green bicycle; he said he hadn’t realised that the card he was using to buy all the stuff would end up making us owe lots of money, Marcia had given him his own personal card and I was thinking it was a bit odd for her to do that without telling me about it.
16-July-2005: I sometimes dream that I am working at Fulprint again, a small printing company where I had my first real job. In this dream I was back there again, only the equipment was all up to date with modern computers and so on. They were getting some guy in to teach the staff how to use the computers, it was like they’d been brought forward in time from the 1980s and knew nothing about 21st Century computers. The boss said I should do the training too, I told him that I know everything about computers, that there was nothing I could learn on a training course for beginners – he made me do it anyway. The guy came to Fulprint to train us all and, as I suspected, he was an idiot; he said that he could sense that I was bored and asked me how I would rate my boredom level. I told him that I would get more mental stimulation from watching a tap drip, he thought I was joking but I was not. I didn’t do a very good job of training the staff, I ended up showing them everything myself.
15-July-2005: I dreamt that I was in London with Marcia walking along the banks of the River Thames; we were attempting to walk from the middle of London to Windsor castle, just to see how far it was.
14-July-2005: I was in a dream with a friend called Neil; we were at a cabin in a forest somewhere and I overheard Neil talking to a woman I’ve never seen before, she was telling him how some people have to work hard to get their college degrees, how some people have real talent – then she was saying how some people are charlatans, fluke their way through with second rate work behind them. Neil was agreeing with her, they were flicking through a portfolio of artwork and laughing at the drawings – when I went closer to them I discovered that the drawings were mine.
13-July-2005: I was in a dream where there was a party being hosted by a guy called Fred Peebles, someone I haven’t seen in waking life for over a decade. The party hadn’t quite started yet but everyone, apart from me, was getting drunk – I was a bit worried about the thought of getting drunk as it’s something I haven’t done for a long time.
12-July-2005: I was dreaming that two friends of mine, Ché and Wendy, were married like they used to be in waking life; they were getting divorced in the dream, like they are in waking life. I was offering to go to marriage guidance counselling with them.
11-July-2005: I dreamt that I was riding a train through Warwickshire in England; the floor of the train had a piece missing that ran along the middle all the way through the train, you could see the track zipping by underneath and you had to leap across the gap to get to the seats at either side. In the dream I’d written a book all about Benji, a guy from the dream message board that I know in waking life; I was talking to a woman about it, she was telling me how wonderful the book was, how she felt she almost knew Benji from reading it.
10-July-2005: Another dream about the Terry Pratchett Unseen Message Board; this time I was obsessing about photo albums, dreaming that dozens of people were using the members’ photo album I installed on the site before I went to sleep.
9-July-2005: I dreamt that I was watching a conservation documentary on TV about the decline of bears in northern California and Canada; just before I woke up someone was talking about introducing beneficial rabbits, which made me laugh out loud as I opened my eyes.
8-July-2005: I had a cool dream where Marcia and I were working for the British RAF on a kind of friendly work exchange scheme; they were teaching me how to refuel huge 747 transport planes, while Marcia was let loose on their computer systems. Later they let us sit on top of a tower that overlooked the airfield, we watched jet fighter planes take off and prepare for an upcoming air show.
7-July-2005: I had yet another dream about a river; this time it was a river I’ve never seen before, I was getting really low down and close to the water’s edge in order to take artistic photographs at sunset.
6-July-2005: I was dreaming about being a Japanese priest touring the countryside of China looking for a cure for bad luck.
5-July-2005: I had loads of dreams about the Terry Pratchett Message Board and its hidden counterpart, the Terry Pratchett Unseen Message Board that I am currently working on.
4-July-2005: I had a vague dream about declaring a small scale Jihad on some people in order to free a child.
3-July-2005: I dreamt that my mother had a girl from Finland staying at her house, which does happen sometimes in waking life, and I was at school studying history. I went into the class as normal and found that the Finnish girl was sitting next to where I was going to sit. The history teacher kept talking to her really slowly so she might understand, but she did not; I translated everything for her instead. The teacher was amused at me being able to translate the lesson and asked me how many languages I can speak; I replied that I can speak all languages, I just have a knack for it. I went on to do a demonstration where I asked the teacher to think of any phrase that came to mind, she chose ‘how America gained its freedom’ and wrote it out on the board – I quickly translated the phrase in old Mandarin (Chinese) script and French, writing them both simultaneously with either hand above and below where the teacher had written her phrase.
2-July-2005: I was dreaming that I was this guy called David Wicks from a British TV soap called EastEnders; I was trying to behave all casual while Cindy (a woman he had an affair with in the show) was trying to harass me into telling her what I was up to. I walked away nonchalantly down the street then doubled back after she had gone; I was looking in the bottom of hedgerows for a pen so I could write my dream down.
1-July-2005: I dreamt that I was in an English guesthouse somewhere near a seaside resort, I was with a group of people I don’t know sharing a cooked breakfast in an unusual manner. All the elements of the breakfast; baked beans; sausages; bacon; eggs and so on were placed on a huge plate in the middle of the floor, we all sat around the plate and took stuff off that we wanted to eat, I didn’t manage to get any sausages before they were all gone – this didn’t really bother me, probably because I don’t eat sausages in waking life, but I did sort of note it in my head. I saw a little label somewhere that said, ‘six sausages for £1’, which I thought was put there by my mother and was entirely pointless, as everything was already paid for. I thought that I don’t want to stay in this guest house another night without Marcia being with me, that I might go and bring her here – then I decided I may as well just go home and not come back here at all.