31-August-2006: I was dreaming about a dance school, a bit like the academy on Fame in the 1980s. The teacher was teasing me at first, thinking I couldn’t dance, and asking me to do silly moves and exercises in the hope that I’d be tired out and make a fool of myself. I soon showed everyone that I was the best dancer that ever existed as I did the most amazing routine to a piece of music called ‘Rockit’ by Herbie Hancock.
30-August-2006: I dreamt that two friends, a couple called Grace and Clay Garner, had moved from their house in Hastings, by the sea in southern England, to another seaside town called Scarborough in the north east of England. They lived in a flat high up on a cliff and a group of us were waiting, hundreds of feet below, on the street for them to come out and see us.
29-August-2006: I was dreaming about a computer game called Half Life, a much improved version in the future where you are actually inside the game. I was playing the game with two friends, Steve Bloore and Neil Kay, and explaining one of the maps to Steve.
28-August-2006: I had a dream with two friends, Dave Smiley and Lewis Evans, where we were playing with unusual toys and musical instruments in an ethnic/world-type store. The sort of place that sells singing bowls, drums of African and Native American origin etc.
27-August-2006: I dreamt that homeless people in Leeds, England, were begging for money and charging VAT (value added tax (sales tax)) on donations.
26-August-2006: I dreamed that I was taking charge of Ouse Bridge in York, England – blocking off traffic in both directions and setting up a barrier to thwart an alien invasion. Someone messed up though and didn’t switch on the power to some laser beams (or similar) and the aliens came into our world unimpeded. After that I was running around and hiding in the rubble of destroyed houses to evade capture.
25-August-2006: I had a dream that my friend, Mark , and I were working at Fulprint – a little printing shop where I worked as a teenager many years ago. We were both working there part-time for fun as we are now, Mark a teacher and me a Web Designer and writer.
24-August-2006: I had a dream that I was at a friend’s house called Benji (from the dream message board) and playing Battlefield 2 on a new game console that will be invented sometime in the near future.
23-August-2006: I dreamt that I owned land in Japan and on the Moon, the latter is sort of true in waking life, and that I was telling my friend Neil Kay (again) about government grants to own beaches around the UK.
22-August-2006: I keep having these dreams, that I sort of forgot about, recently where I’m on holiday in this idyllic town in a perfect house somewhere in the south of England. I’m usually there with Marcia, my wife, and feel like I want to stay forever and never go home again. In this dream I met the owner of the house, an old lady, who wanted to sign everything over to us – including the elephant in the back yard zoo that needed caring for – and we were figuring out how to move our stuff there from our house in York. We were very attached to the elephant, even more so when he went missing and we searched all across the South Downs to find him. There were helicopter rescue teams out looking and his picture was being transmitted on local TV stations. I found the elephant myself next to a lighthouse and brought him home. I think this is what made the old lady decide that we were the ones to take over the running of her house and zoo.
21-August-2006: I head a dream that I was following my granddad around Burma in World War Two, I was one of the soldiers just like him. I was surprised that the local villagers we happened across were carrying on with their normal lives and seemed indifferent to the invading armies of the UK, USA and Japan. After this I started thinking about medieval knights and the Crusades, figuring the locals were probably indifferent to them too.
20-August-2006: I dreamt that I found a beautiful beach with lavish blue sea calmly lapping the sand near London, England. It was the kind of place you might find in the Caribbean, but not anywhere in the UK. My friend Neil Kay was surprised to find we had such beautiful beaches here and asked if they were for sale. I told him the government were selling such places cheaply on islands around Scotland, but you had to agree to look after them as if it was a nature reserve, to strict standards, if you were to be granted your own beach.
19-August-2006: I had a dream that I was about to capture Hannibal Lector, who was disguised as a security guard where I worked in the dream, but he set himself on fire by putting his hands in a strange furnace that burnt him from the inside out – so that he looked fine for a while, but flames and smoke eventually came from his mouth and ears before he burnt up totally.
18-August-2006: I dreamt that I was involved in a train crash that had been set up as a prank to delay someone on their way to work – the supposed accident blocked the street where they normally drive their car to work. All the other people, besides this one person, in the traffic jam were either actors or people who’d paid to be in the prank and watch this woman getting frustrated by the hold-up. The dream later turned into a high-speed train ride across America where I met a friend called Peter Simmons who, I just realized now as I write this, used to have the nickname, ‘Pete the Train Driver’.
17-August-2006: I was dreaming about some characters for a screenplay I’m trying to write in waking life, and what might happen to them.
16-August-2006: I dreamt that someone was raising the British flag on a pole and the bottom edge was crumpled up. A guy I used to hang around with as a kid, called Jason Carlton, was upset about the crumpled flag and said to the guy hoisting it, ‘We [him and I] don’t like to see our flag crumpled and messed up, we see it as an insult to our nation’. I interjected, ‘Actually, Jason, I’m not really all that bothered about flags and nations, I’m more of a people person’.
15-August-2006: I had a dream that I was a visiting dignitary from another planet, spending the week in Moskva/Moscow in Russia. During my time there some fool accidentally detonated an atomic bomb in the middle of the city and we all, myself and the family I was staying with, watched in horror as the place was destroyed. We sat in the cellar of a ruined building while I used my watch to projects broadcasts from worldwide TV stations onto the wall, so we could see if the outside world was reporting our situation and if they knew what had happened.
14-August-2006: I was dreaming about a Jewish family that was looking after me, I was staying in their house. One night they decided to go carol signing at a local Catholic church with some friends, I think the people in the town took it in turns partaking in each other’s religion. I didn’t go because I didn’t feel I fitted in with either of them, not being Jewish or Catholic.
13-August-2006: I had a dream that my granddad was still alive and that he’d had an operation to remove his legs, he was walking around on the stumps where his legs used to be.
12-August-2006: I dreamt that I cycled with my stepfather, who I haven’t seen in over ten years in waking life, to a place called Acaster Selby to see a mysterious church. Acaster Selby and the church are real places in waking life, the church is quite odd because it’s situated in the middle of a field with no roads or pathways leading to it. It was apparently built for the villagers across the river who got to it by boat many hundreds of years ago. In my dream the church was on the other side of the river and the roof was missing. There was an old sarcophagus inside, with no lid, that was full of water. Local villagers and a vicar were trying to scoop out the water with buckets. I could see that they were never going to shift all the water so I got an old fire hose and cut off the length of the big tubing to make a siphon, which I placed in the sarcophagus at one end and in a drain outside at the other, where after sucking a bit the water began to drain away easily.
11-August-2006: I had a dream that I was younger and flirting with two girls on the stairs in Borders bookstore.
10-August-2006: I dreamt something about hanging around outside a bakery/cake shop and café opposite a castle in York, England, where I currently live in waking life.
9-August-2006: I dreamt that I was riding my bed through streets, down stone steps and across parks.
8-August-2006: I had one of my frequent plane flying dreams, ones that usually start off on a runway and the plane doesn’t take off properly. This time we got the end of the runway without taking off, then the pilot swerved onto another runway that had regular traffic coming the other way – cars and trucks et cetera. As we came down the runway at high speed the other traffic moved to one side as if it was a regular thing. There were tall tress at the end of the runway and I wanted to shout, “Hellooo, trees!’ but the plane took off and crashed through the trees before the words came out. The right wing had a bit of metal hanging off from tree damage but I analysed the structure of the plane with a white Nintendo DS Lite, which said everything was okay.
7-August-2006: I dreamt that I was driving around Shropshire, in England, in an anti-aircraft tank. Lots of other people were also in tanks, another reference to my current Battlefield 2 obsession I think. I later ended up at an art college carving birds from black polystyrene.
6-August-2006: I had a dream that the Borg, from Star Trek, were ruling the Earth. I was living in a sort of prison house for people who hadn’t been assimilated yet with my friend Neil Kay and his Girlfriend Jenny Sharp. There were mainframe connections all over the house for the Borg to connect to a hive mind, Jenny hacked into this with an old laptop computer and asked us what we should type in as an enquiry – pretending we were one of the Borg. I said it would really screw with their mind if we typed, ‘I want to go home’, because they aren’t supposed to think as individuals. Jenny typed in the message and it caused an instant malfunction, and a whole host of Borg to come looking for the fault. We climbed up on the roof of the huge house to escape them, they were too stiff in their movements to be able to follow us, and eventually escaped into the countryside looking for ancient pathways that gypsies and circus folk used to use.
5-August-2006: My dreams were all about tanks, the battle variety, and manoeuvres in tanks. (Battlefield 2, again)
4-August-2006: I dreamt I was flirting with some young girls outside a frozen food store called Iceland. The dream was sort of induced by a section of American Gods, which I was reading when I fell asleep. I was showing off an old sports car, hoping the girls would think I was cool, that actually belonged to my mother in the dream. When I went to drive it down the street it turned out to be not as fast as my Volvo in waking life. I woke up to the theme tune of Popeye the Sailor Man, which reminded me of a woman I know called Zag who grew up thinking his name was Popeye Deseillerman – not speaking English as a child.
3-August-2006: Lately I’ve been dreaming this one-liner voice as I wake up, this morning it said: “Have you ever seen the film, ‘The Outside World?’”
2-August-2006: I dreamt that I was going to Heathrow airport to catch a plane with Marcia, we were late and missed the last flight which was at 12:30. I was quite pleased because I was afraid to go on the plane anyway, but Marcia was upset because she wanted to go to America – so I said we could go to Gatwick instead, which had more flights in this dream. At some point between the two airports Marcia kissed another guy thinking it was me, then this other guy kept teasing me about it all the way to Gatwick.
1-August-2006: I had a dream about Battlefield 2, a computer game I’m into at the moment. My friends Neil Kay, Dave Smiley and Mark and I were all playing a futuristic version where we are more or less inside the game. Instead of flying helicopters and planes like in the real game, we were flying hoverships that could turn instantly through 180 degrees, which were quite hard to control.