30-September-2005: I dreamt that I was in my old best friend’s (Sean Easton) house, by old I mean from when I was a child. It was like the house was mine, Sean wasn’t in the dream at all, and the bedroom at the front was my room and lots of people that I knew as a teenager, many of which I didn’t like that much, filled the room and I wanted them to leave. The main people I wanted to leave were my brother, who was a complete twat when I was a teenager; Mark Rowley, who was this psychopathic bully that seemed to be always somehow drawn to me as a friend – liking me so much that he said he’d break my arm if I didn’t go away on holiday with him; Tina Barrat, who was just a miserable bitch that was never particularly friendly towards; and a few other people who were just mildly irritating for being in my room in the dream. After repeated attempts to convince them to leave they all seemed determined to stay, I threatened to make them temporarily deaf if they didn’t go but they assumed I meant I was going to put on some loud music and just laughed. What I did do was perfectly imitate the sound of a Rolls Royce jet engine, the kind they have on Boeing 747 Jumbo Jets; the noise built up in the room gradually and my ears were somehow immune, the sound quickly became terrible as if the engine was right there in the room with us, in this quiet suburban house, whining away like a mega-banshee getting louder and more ear-splitting by the minute until it sounded like a plane on takeoff, as if we were all outside on a runway. The scene changed and we were all in town, the people with me looked rather miserable after being able to hear nothing at all for four days. I cheered one of them up by doing a weird trick with a trinket shop window, melding my fingers with the glass and creating a hole then removing a little golden boot from the display inside. As I pulled my hand away the glass went back to normal and we went and sat down with the other guys to look at the golden boot; the story of my airplane engine trick was being told as I arrived. The person being told the story didn’t believe I could make people deaf, the others were afraid I was going to do it again; instead I mumbled some magic words that made everyone there go deaf again, after a minute I mumbled some more words to make them better again – now the new guy looked as unhappy as the others from the experience of total deafness.
29-September-2005: I had an odd dream where there were two Marcia’s (my wife) and I was somehow forced to spend the day with the other Marcia. The other Marcia was supposedly the same inside, she knew everything about me that the original did, but looked completely different and had different foibles. I liked her because she was, after all, my Marcia essentially, even though she had blonde hair instead of dark hair and walked around in a bikini all the time; but there was something not quite right, at some point she said she had to go shopping and a car came to pick her up and she drove off without me. At this point I really missed my proper Marcia, her face, hair and eyes; I said to myself, ‘That Marcia’s nice, but she’s not MY Marcia, I want my Marcia.’ Only I had to wait all day to tell her because she was at work. I spent a lot of the dream looking around junk shops and walking the streets trying to make the time go by quicker, eventually ending up in a the lobby of Marcia’s apartment in this dream, where I was constantly harassed by Marcia’s landlady who kept telling me about this huge form I’d have to fill in if I wanted to come and live in her building. She gave me a suspicious looking present that turned out to be an example tenancy agreement like the ones she’d been talking about for over an hour; I didn’t unwrap it completely but peered inside and got a glimpse of row upon row of questions with boxes for Day Month and Year next to them, I threw the present away across a glass coffee table and ignored the crazy landlady from then on and waited for Marcia to come home. Marcia did eventually appear but before I could tell her I loved her she cut me off because she was on the phone, then afterwards she came over and kissed me and I started telling her how much I loved her and how glad I was to see her then woke up as the real Marcia was coming into the bedroom and shouted, ‘It’s MY Marcia!’ and told her all about the dream.
28-September-2005: I dreamt that I was in a slightly different reality in York, England; I was driving down Blossom Street in my car and there was talk on the radio of a possible hurricane or tornado hitting the town, something that has never happened before. It started to rain and the wind got pretty fast so I stopped the car outside a computer store and went inside, the staff were trying to keep the customers calm who were torn between making a run for it to get home and staying in the store. Two Japanese girls said, ‘Let’s go down,’ to each other and got on some escalators that went up then said, ‘oh, up!’ The escalator went over a little hump though then actually went down into the basement, so I said, ‘Down,’ in a friendly voice with a smile. I thought about Marcia, wondering if she’d managed to walk home yet and wondering if she would be safe on her own, or perhaps frightened by the storm. I decided to get back in the car and go home, but when I got outside the computer store I couldn’t find it anywhere; I looked up and down the street like people do when they can’t be their car has actually been stolen, but finally submitted to the fact. It was raining lightly now and I didn’t think the big storm everyone was expecting was likely to happen; the TV in the store said the storm was heading south anyway, which was the direction I wanted to go and meant it was heading away from me. I decided to walk home and went around a corner to discover a whole section of town that doesn’t exist in waking life, with an architecturally great building that said ‘Selby Art Gallery’ on it’s sign above the front doors. Selby is little town with not much going for it about 12 miles away from York; when I saw this great building in the middle of York with its unlikely name I said, ‘What the fuck?’ and some guy said, ‘What do you mean?’ When I replied that I meant that that building isn’t supposed to be there he said that it’d always been there; I told him that it had not, that there’d been a shift in reality and fully expected the rest of the dream to be going down that avenue of investigation when I woke up.
27-September-2005: I had a dream that I was a young boy again on a train with lots of other young boys. The train pulled into a large station in the middle of Iowa, there didn’t seem to be anything around but fields and farms for as far as the eye could see; it reminded me of something a friend called Garner said a while ago about an existentialist’s nightmare, though I thought it was very exciting to be there. I ran up a hill and flew high into the sky to see if I could see anything different apart from fields, but I could not. Two of us split off from the group and went on an exploration; we came upon some wild bore near a copse of trees, in the dream we didn’t know what they were and thought they were just dumb little pigs like in stories that we could easily overpower with our superior human knowledge. Of course the bores overpowered us instead, chasing my friend around the field and nudging him easily into the air from behind. We made a deal with the bores to leave us alone if we could go and get them some nice food from a local farms we saw, they agreed so we went into a farmer’s grain store and filled bags up with pigfeed pellets. The farmer caught us on our way out back to the field and seemed very disappointed with us, we said we’d pay for the pellets but we didn’t have any money at the moment, we’d come back later when we found our parents. The farmer shook his head and waved us away as if he was expecting to never see us again, which was highly likely seeing as we were street urchins with no parents. Still, we felt guilty later in the dream and took a bag full of assorted junk we’d collected to an antique store in the little town; the woman there didn’t trust us but bought our wares anyway, she gave us $100 which we intended giving to the farmer. I woke up before that happened though.
26-September-2005: I dreamt that I went to Paul’s house, a guy who I help use a computer and also maintain his computer, and there was this older man there supposedly fixing the computer. Paul’s mother was a bit embarrassed that I’d arrived when the other guy was still there, but I just smiled and didn’t mind at all. The guy seemed pleased that he’d fixed whatever was wrong with it, I think Paul’s mother thought he’d done something that I couldn’t, but I explained to him that that’s the way it always is when I leave, all fixed and running smoothly, but Paul does all kinds of things to mess it up again after you’ve gone. And because he can’t speak he can’t tell you what he did, though it often involved the removal of system files that you have to go and look for in the recycle bin. After explaining this I felt very tired and fell asleep, sleep within sleep inside the dream, on Paul’s bed.
25-September-2005: I had a pretty normal dream where lots of my back teeth were falling out, I felt quite lucky that no one would be able to tell because my front teeth were fine. I thought they were falling out because I’d caught gum disease from a dirty iron bridge that goes over some rail tracks.
24-September-2005: I dreamt that I went to a really cheap and crappy Dungeons and Dragons theme park with a kid called Thomas, he thought it was better than I did but still wasn’t all that impressed. You got given a bow as you went in but were expected to find ammo that other people had dropped, only there was hardly anyone around with it being so crap. There was a castle in the middle that had a few more people in, but you had to pay a lot extra to go in there; we eventually decided there was nothing else to do but blow all our money on getting in the castle, and paying the extortionate price for quivers of rubber arrows. We only found two enemies, they were hiding behind some barrels and had obviously been playing the game for ages because they were very good at it, but it was also quite sad because there was no one but us for them to play with. I think my dreaming mind must have got sick of the tedium because the dream shifted into something a bit more real where I was a High Elf running and leaping across rooftops, looking for my way back to the forest.
23-September-2005: I dreamt that this guy and myself were ex-revolutionaries living in Russia. The country had turned into a super high tech, big brother nightmare of a place and the government was trying to eliminate all antagonistic elements like my friend and I. They were first onto us when we went to an antique furniture auction that was actually a trap; the government knew that the antique furniture from the old Russia would be particularly attractive to people who preferred the old ways, the people who’d started a revolution about 5 years ago. There assumptions were correct, when we turned up for the auctions we recognised virtually everyone there, all of us pretending we had never met before. The pseudo auction was taking place on the third floor to make it easier to trap us, but there was a large round whole in the floor, which was part of the building’s design, that went through all the floors from ground to roof. I noticed security guards amassing around the building’s entrance, stopping normal business folk from entering; I said to my fellow ex-comrades sitting around a table that we may as well drop the pretence, they knew who we were. I said I didn’t like it one bit but they said I was being too excitable; I leapt over a balcony into the hole and drifted down the ground floor like I can in dreams, controlling my descent. As I dropped down I noticed smoke coming through the vent near where the others were sat, it was probably gas; the guy that came with me jumped over the balcony too as soldiers in masks stormed the room and started subduing the others. We escaped out the front door passed the guards, who didn’t know who we were and didn’t expect anyone trying to escape quite to soon, assuming they’d have to run down three floors at least after the time for gas had arrived. The rest of the dream was the two of us going from one apartment to another, a few steps ahead of pursuing soldiers and government officials.
22-September-2005: I dreamt that I was in France with this loopy, obnoxious girl in the middle of nowhere trying to find transport to a big city. The only apparent transport was this dating bus that was attached to a dating TV show, taking female contestants to a hotel in Paris or somewhere like that. It had nothing to do with us and we had no business being on the bus, but the obnoxious girl got on anyway and made me go too, even though it was for women only and I’m a guy. We weren’t on the bus long before the girl started criticising the driver, saying his bus was crap and the dating show was stupid; like in a movie, the dream switched to the two of us standing in the middle of a country road with the bus disappearing in the distance. The girl was frantic about being lost in the countryside and I tried to walk off and leave her, whishing that Marcia was with me instead. The girl followed me then started harassing an old man that we passed on the road, he was carrying a crumpled bunch of flowers and looked upset. The girl asked him what he was upset about, then answered for him before he could reply, ‘Realised you prefer pansies to daisies? Upset that you like looking at men’s backsides?’ The man waved her away and swore, I wished she would just go away.
21-September-2005: I dreamt that I was sitting on a rock in the middle of 
the ocean with John Noakes; the rock marked the spot where Orleans in France used to be in this dream. John was making a documentary about the old town that simply slipped into the sea, never to be seen again, and I was there to interview him about it. He explained how a crack appeared in the Earth’s crust and a whole piece of land that the French town rested on came away and plunged into the ocean without warning. We were sitting on the very edge of an underwater chasm, with huge waves banging the rock we were sitting on; I had the feeling we too could slip into the chasm at any moment, John increased my worries by telling me how unstable the rock was and how it could easily follow the rest of the town to the bottom of the sea, dragging us down with it. After this we both agreed to leave the rock and jumped off to swim towards land in the bright sunshine; the ocean’s huge waves propelled us along like surfers as we swam towards the shore. As I alighted onto the beach I felt like I’d changed into a normal human being from an energetic monster that came from the sea, I woke up with the tune from the Incredible Hulk TV show playing in my head.
20-September-2005: I had a dream that I was with my alcoholic friend, Dave. We were with two other people called Andrew and Catherine in the house I used to stay in as a baby, in waking life it was my grandparent’s house and haunted. There were no ghosts in this dream but there is a slight connection in that the real Catherine does have an interest in ghosts. I used to drink a lot myself in waking life but haven’t for a long time, in this dream it was like all four of us didn’t really drink anymore, not even Dave; we were talking about how we might have gone to the pub for a pint before closing had is been a few years ago, half trying to convince ourselves that it was a good idea to do it now, yet half afraid to do it as we’d gone so long without drinking – in this dream at least.
19-September-2005: I dreamt that I was talking about a mysterious back lane that can be used as a short cut near a village called Escrick, outside York, England. We ended up walking along the two-mile stretch of mysterious lane when I realised I’d seen it before in another dream from a long time ago, I’d forgotten all about it till then. I explained to my brother that we’d have to be careful, that the lane went through a parallel universe where everything was evil, or wicked to a degree. I picked up a sample leaf from a tree and showed him that the very pattern of the foliage was evil, virtually oozing ill intent towards us. I explained that creatures that were thought a bit creepy, such as spiders, in the normal world were the epitome of evil in this world – they world actively seek us out and try to bite us, though they were no more deadly than our own spiders. It sounds really nasty, but it was actually more of an adventure through Narnia or something.
18-September-2005: I had a sort of Wacky Races dream at a place called Moor End Farm, a real farm that I visit every two weeks in waking life. The man that runs the farm with his wife was using a car to batter his way through hedges and make roads; but instead of driving the car normally, he and I were stood on a plate at the back and steering the car, which had its engine constantly on full revs, by leaning left and right as if it were a skateboard or something. The car was a red sports car halftrack, meaning that it had wheels at the front and tank tracks at the back; we squashed everything we ran into and had no way of stopping. The dream turned into the wacky races later on when other people started joining in with their own customised vehicles.
17-September-2005: I had a dream that my friend Neil and I were living in prehistoric Britain. We were looking for a nice spot for our tribe to settle when we found an ideal, flat area with a cliff wall rising up to the south and the most beautiful hills I’ve ever seen to the north. I kept commenting on how amazing the hills looked, a bit like the green terraces they have in Asia; I would fly through the air right up to them to see if they looked the same when I could touch the emerald, textured surface patterns of the step-like slopes. Later we were marking out a new camp for our tribe when a big fat man came along and said he wanted to fight us, explaining that all the lands around these parts belonged to his people and he had the right to challenge any strangers who wandered through to a fight. Neil noticed that the man was wearing a pendant with a horse on it, just like his own, and started chatting to him and making friends – the pendant meant that they were distant cousins. I had a similar pendant but mine had a dragon on it too, showing that I was related to the ruling classes of this man’s people.
16-September-2005: I had a dream that my brother went for a walk to a place called Colton on the outskirts of York, England, to get away from his family and stresses. He eventually came home but his wife drove him nuts, so he decided to walk back to Colton again and stay in the local pub, The Sun Inn.
15-September-2005: Dreamt something about being in a wooden house that was surrounded by floodwaters that were steadily dwindling, probably due to watching New Orleans on the news.
14-September-2005: I had a dream that my friend Neil took me to the school where I used to go as an infant to meet a woman, one of the teachers, who wanted me to take part in a beer drinking competition. Even though I told her I couldn’t drink more than a couple of beers, she was convinced that I could win the competition with a mixture of cunning and barbequed food.
13-September-2005: I had a fun time in a dream being witness to a core meltdown in a nuclear reactor; I felt that it should have been dangerous, but I was fascinated by the orange core melting and the feeling of radiation saturating my body.
12-September-2005: I had a dream that I was on the island of Soda, the home of Thomas the Tank Engine, but can remember little of what I was doing there, other than buying ice creams and walking around a lot.
11-September-2005: I dreamt that I was driving a car with some friends in the back, we got pulled over by the police who suspected that I was drunk, which I wasn’t. I just wanted this dorky police officer to test my breath and let me go, but he kept asking me stupid questions about me like I was famous or something. My friends didn’t help either, they kept telling him people I knew, such as Avril my old art tutor; the police officer was saying, ‘Oh my God, you know Avril! How do you go about knowing somebody like that?’ and asking me all kinds of stuff about art and paintings, until I was feeling really sleepy and actually looking a bit drunk.
10-September-2005: I had a dream that I was a host for some friends from the Terry Pratchett Message Board, I took them to the house I grew up in where there is sometimes a secret hi-tech room in my dreams. We went in and I showed them a new Virtual Reality machine that felt just like real life when you played it. We were going to have a go at being Space Marines and playing a huge virtual game of Warhammer 40k, but first I let them play it one at a time to get the idea. While you were playing you only had to wish something about yourself to be true and it was; two of them went in together (started out as Orrdos and Rincewind, but turned into me and my stepdad) and one decided that he’d like to have super kung fu skills and kick the other guy across the room, which he did with great finesse. I had to remind him though that the other guy can wish things too, that his kung fu skills are superior to Rincewind’s and that he could kick him clean through the wall, which he did – then it turned into me and my stepdad pointlessly upstaging each other till I switched the current game off. Later some other guy, don’t know who, had fantasised that he ran a butcher’s stall on a marketplace and that my friend Ché’s ex, Wendy, was his assistant; he really fancied her but was afraid to say anything – the Terry Pratchett Message Board people were watching everything on a screen and laughing hysterically, until someone told me to go into the game and explain everything to him. I went up to the guy on his butcher’s stall and explained that he could do anything he wanted just by wishing for it out loud, to which he replied: ‘All I want is for Wendy to love me!’ and Wendy instantly looked up at him and said, ‘Oh, but I do love you dear!’ Then they both started kissing and getting rather serious until my friend Ché appeared and told them to stop it. It became clear that some of the more cheeky members might start conjuring up other people’s girlfriends, wives and so on to wind each other up – so we agreed to make it a rule not to do this. We were getting down to working out the rules of Warhammer 40k and the workings of Spacer Marine armour and weapons when I woke up.
9-September-2005: I dreamt that I was sort of a freedom fighter, or terrorist depending whose side you were on; I was on an island with a nutcase who’d found a way to make himself invisible, we were trying to make our way to a laboratory to retrieve something and this guy wanted to hold all the guns we had. I couldn’t stand the thought of this loony, even though he was on my side, running around me with loaded firearms when he was invisible, so I argued with him about it and talked ever softer until he had to come real close, then snatched the only gun he was carrying and said I’d carry all the weapons, that he didn’t need them anyway because no one could see him. He ran of across the island we’d infiltrated, making a Hell of a noise through the jungle bushes and causing all the enemy soldiers to run after him downhill. I took the high ground above the tree line, watching the branched quiver below as enemy soldiers sneaked through them towards my insane comrade. For some reason I was wearing Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus, or SCUBA gear (I thought of them in terms of their full name in the dream) and actually had the air intake attached to my mouth. As I was sneaking through the higher jungle trees I found a naked Japanese girl lying on the ground and looking up at me, giggling and saying she can’t think of anything to do, that she was board. I guess some sort of sexual thing was implied, but dreams being dreams it ended up being some bizarreness involving her foot turning into some kind of sleeved implement.
8-September-2005: I was in a dream that seemed to be a drunken party 
that took place over the entire city of York, England. Lots of people I knew from school as a child were drunk all over the place, the highlight of the party was when I stole an old fashioned London bus and everyone cheered me along as I drove it around the streets like a maniac. Every time I stopped people got on, mostly drunken friends but some unsuspecting customers too. I tired to drive around what I thought was one of the bus routes, bouncing off the sides of the streets and colliding with other buses. Someone said I should be careful, but I said it didn’t matter because the police never stop buses no matter how badly you drive.
7-Septemeber-2005: I dreamt that I was a teenager, or slightly older, at a public swimming pool. A girl that I knew in the dream wanted to kiss me, and did a little for a few seconds, but felt that it was wrong because her boyfriend was my best friend, even though he was a bit of an idiot. There were lots of other people in our group that knew she liked me, and I liked her, but they always assumed that nothing would happen, they all loved her boyfriend like a brother and assumed I did too. The girl dumped her boyfriend, with the hope of being with me eventually but not right away, and he became very angry with me. He attacked me but was too weak to hurt me, all my other friends were angry with me even though I hadn’t really done anything. It was a strange dream because I didn’t recognise the place, the scenery, or any of the people in the dream.
6-September-2005: I had a dream based on another dream I had over a year ago; it’s in a big city with architecture a little like that in Budapest, on the Buda side of the Danube, but set in the far east, like Hong Kong but with an ancient wall around it. The whole dream is like a movie musical that starts off with me and this guy called Sean I went to school with staying in a posh hotel overlooking Hong Kong (sort of) harbour; we went around the Buda-looking concert halls and ballrooms with some other tourists and me leading the way, we found our way to the city walls as happens in this dream, but found they were too difficult to get onto for some older women that were with us. We went over a bridge that took us to a tram terminal that’s half submersed in water, this side of town had a complicated tram system that was partially water based like the gondolas of Venice; some older American men were saying that the movie (my dream) was pointless and boring. I said that I know, that’s how it was made, but the director got someone else in to do the second half, which should begin shortly, and the whole movie stops being a musical and turns into a surreal art piece, taking us around the walls, through jungles and into a chase with armed terrorists – then finishes off in black and white with the new director explaining his motivations for the movie while looking out to see beyond the harbour at some gigantic waves heading inland. Everyone was satisfied with my explanation, but I woke up before I got to live through the whole dream a second time.
5-September-2005: I was in a surreal dream where I had to use phrases that people had written down in conjunction with a sophisticated computer program to create rail tracks for trains, each track was for an individual person based on their personal quotes. Most people wrote about one paragraph, but one guy who calls himself Rincewind on the Terry Pratchett Board, gave me a page full of tiny one-sentence quotes so that I had to build him lots of little railway tracks.
4-September-2005: I dreamt that I was in Scotland with a friend from childhood called Sean Easton; we’d gone to Scotland by train to visit a house full of students that I’ve never met before, they were all very nice apart from one woman who was putting on a posh accent and saying that I was a common northerner, which was a bit silly seeing as she was in a place hundreds of miles further north than where I came from. Later I was telling everybody how I could play any tune on any musical instrument, it was quite exciting but the only instruments around were a broken electric guitar and a weird recorder with flute-like attachments and a telescopic body. To make things worse, even knowing I could play anything in the whole history of music, people kept asking me to play things like Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody and, even worse, the Céline Dion song from Titanic – all on the recorder!
3-September-2005: I dreamt that I was in Lithuania, I walked through a large archway into the private grounds of some rich person. There were guards at this gateway that stopped somebody else getting in, but I just drifted by like I was meant to be there and the guards were pretty much fooled, yet slightly suspicious of me. A small boy, more untrusting than the guards, followed me to see what I was up to; I ran away from him and climbed over an ivy-covered wall into and enclosed garden. The boy eventually found where I was in time to see me scanning the exterior of the large mansion house with a thin, green beam of light; it was a device for copying the architecture of buildings perfectly so that plans could be drawn up on a computer and a replica building could be constructed. What I was doing was against the law in Lithuania in this dream, but the boy seemed to sympathise with me somewhat and said he would distract the guards for as long as possible.
2-September-2005: I had a dream that I was climbing along walls a lot, first on an artificial climbing wall with my friend Ché, then later climbing walls in high up places in an alternate reality with an old friend called Sean Suckling, who I haven’t seen for decades. The walls we climbed were ancient Roman ruins that led into different building in York, England, that don’t exist in reality. We climbed into the window of one building that turned out to be a high rise Chinese restaurant; we took the stairs down to the ground floor and emerged onto the streets of Leeds, nearly 30 miles away from where we were supposed to be. While walking through Leeds I ran into some other space aliens and asked them what kind of skin they were wearing; the three of them looked at each other rather nervously and one said that he didn’t know what I was talking about. I told him that his skin looked like a high-stress polymer, a nice looking job; it was supposed to be a compliment but they took it as a challenge to their identity and ran off to get some of their police to come and hunt us down. Right before I woke up we were hiding from the other aliens in a nightclub lounge area, waiting for space within the club to become vacant so that we could go in – the last think I could remember was the coat check girl pointing us out to some men wearing helmets and carrying riot shields.
1-September-2005: I dreamt that I was learning something to do with the funeral trade, something to do with moving skeletons around at funerals so that the families never see them – like a weird kind of apprenticeship. There was one funeral, my first as my role in this dream, where the teacher kept warning me that there was a real danger I may actually see a dead body, which I’d pretty much come to expect considering. We were in an old Catholic church that was dimly lit, myself and other apprentices stood off to one side and chatted like we were apprentice builders or something while a real family mourned a dead relative – I had their relative’s skeleton at my feet and was trying, fairly unsuccessfully, to stop it from rattling against the pews. After they left I was allowed to place the skeleton in the coffin and a girl started playing a Gorecki requiem on an old pipe organ, I played along with her note for note on an old harpsichord – everyone clapped when we finished, and I woke up.