31-December-2004: I had a dream that I was a pupil in a very old-fashioned school in England; I was dining with fellow students in the cafeteria, I ordered a meal with a chicken-burger but the burger wasn’t ready right away, I was told to sit down and wait. After 20 minutes I went to check on my burger and found that it hadn’t been started, the guy had forgotten about it – I didn’t have any more time to wait so I asked for my money back instead, the guy started being really rude to me so I phoned three French lawyers to come and inspect his kitchen and sue him for his attitude towards me. The three Frenchmen showed up within minutes and the chef was stupid enough to still be rude to me in front of them; his kitchen was closed down immediately and I was paid a visit by Tom Baker (the guy from Doctor Who), who was the principle of the school. He was going to be angry with me for shutting his cafeteria down, but changed his mind when he got a look at the three French lawyers.
30-December-2004: I was dreaming about my old back yard where I grew up; some of my friends were living there and digging up the lawn to plant crops, it was like the place had turned into a kind of commune and we were trying to be self-sufficient. Someone asked what would be the best thing we could have to stick stuff in and I made a joke, sheep; most people laughed but someone thought it was a good idea to have sheep on our land, saying they were much more versatile than cows, there’s so much more that can be done with their meat and you can sheer them to make clothes.
29-December-2004: I dreamt that I was in Mountain Bike race with a guy called David Elcock, someone I went to school with when I was a kid, don’t remember too much, just that we were racing through a forest along a dirt track and I was winning.
28-December-2004: I had a dream that I was part of a gang; one of our members was injured and taken to a little hospital that lay within the boundaries of a rival gang’s territories- I was keeping the motor running in a fast car, waiting for my friends to come out of the hospital and expecting trouble, lots of police officers began showing up, they were expecting trouble too. None of the rival gang members made an appearance though.
27-December-2004: I was in a sunny dream at my friend Che’s house; I haven’t seen the house in waking life before but it seemed familiar in the dream, he had a piano in one room that his girlfriend, Dianne, was tuning – I remembered it from an earlier dream and said, ‘Oh, is that the piano you bought really cheaply then painted with leftover wood stain?’ Diane looked up and past me saying, ‘No, no, this was a really expensive piano!’ She was looking at their son who’d been given the piano as a present; I’d almost put my foot in it but immediately explained that I was confusing it with another piano I’d seen at someone else’s house, pretending I didn’t know that the little boy was there. Either way, cheap or not, it was a very nice piano and I wished I had one just like it.
Boxing Day – 2004: I had a dream that a mother from an Australian soap opera called Neighbours was wading in the cold water of the river Ouse in York, England. Some Polish diplomats were watching her from a posh old hotel by the river; Lyn, the woman, kept bobbing her head below the water and coming up and attending to something near the riverbank, I went into the river to join her and see what she was doing. After a while other people joined us, I was swimming out into the middle of the river and collecting sticks and leaves with my arms as they floated along; I took my gathered materials and added them to a small harbour we were making along the riverbank.
Christmas Day – 2004: I kept having lots of nice dreams with Marcia, my fiancé, in them; she was really cool all the time, especially when she was dressed like a punk girl with a tartan mini skirt and black stockings.
24-December-2004: I had a dream with two spaceships that were at war with each other; they both had a main computer, one of them was good and one of them was evil. The good computer was called something beginning with S like Syrill, and the bad one was called Xerxes (sounds like zerksees); I was fiddling with the main computer boards on Syrill and found a little tab that I could press that made me flicker from one ship to the other. I was blocked from accessing most of the files on Xerxes but found that I could locate the same file I wanted to see on Syrill, then hit the tab and flicker across to Xerxes and be inside the same file for that ship. I was looking into a dark box with different coloured computer cards inserted into a main board; I found a green card that was in charge of handling communications between the crew, it worked like a CGI mailing script on a website only it was all hardware; I went from this file deeper into the ship’s bridge controls then hit the tab to flicker over to Xerxes and take control of the evil ship.
23-December-2004: I dreamt that I was taking my clothes off as I lay in bed, thinking that I was awake, then I woke up in exactly the same position and realized that my clothes were off anyway.
22-December-2004: I had a dream that was set in the middle of York in England; there was a dark doorway in King’s Square that, after walking through, led down some stairs into a large room full of people studying on computers. They were learning about how the outside world was no good; that it was much better to stay down here and never see daylight again. It was forbidden to go back up the stairs into the sunlight on King’s Square, but I held a security door open and let some people walk back up the stairs into the light – a lot of them were afraid because they hadn’t seen daylight in ages, but I made them go up there and breath the fresh air. Many of them loved it but missed their teachings underground; so the headmistress of the school decreed that people could come and go as they wished, my mother came in with a pushchair, she’d apparently been unaware of the original rules and had been coming and going all the time. I overheard the headmistress cutting a deal with a hidden computer voice; he was to count the pupils as they came and went and, whenever there came a time when everyone was inside, he was to lock and seal everyone inside forever. The student were happy for a while, thinking their ruler was nice for letting them come and go; but one time when they were all inside the door slammed shut and locked, the headmistress laughed and explained how they were all now sealed inside for the rest of their lives. I noticed that something had jammed in the door slightly so that I could open it; I went and held the door open and asked how many people wanted to leave – everyone started getting up and leaving, even a hugely overweight girl with a very pale face from years of being underground had had the spell broken in her mind and was leaving.
21-December-2004: I was dreaming about being in London, England; someone had crashed a motorcycle on a bridge; the bridge had a second road above it that had partially collapsed onto the bike. I went to look at the bike and it was my old Yamaha SR that I used to own when I was 18; the steering column was bent a bit and the handlebars had fallen off, I got a key out of my pocket that belonged to the bike and it started first time, I found a piece of wood to jam into the steering column and used it to steer the bike – I went for a ride all over London and the bike seemed to repair itself and ride better the further I went.
20-December-2004: I dreamt that I’d been in some kind of car accident, but I couldn’t remember any of it; there were people all over the place investigating the accident, trying to help me remember and comfort me – there were skid marks on a country road where the car had begun crashing, I was found around a corner about a quarter of a mile past that point, and my car was a further quarter mile around another bend. It was a sunny day and there were bails of straw beside the road where the car had stopped.
19-December-2004: I dreamt I was in the future with my wife at a funeral; all of her family were there, and so was all of mine, including some people that have died already; I’m not sure whose funeral it was because everybody was there.
18-December-2004: I was dreaming about hanging around some children’s swings in a park that I used to play in as a child; there was a large, green chain-link fence that I kept leaping over, some of my friends were on the swings and I bet them that I could jump right over the fence and land on a swing from a standing position. I made the jump and landed on a swing standing up; when I looked back I couldn’t believe it was possible to jump so far.
17-December-2004: I was taking the plane to America from England with my mother and brother; in my dream I was really agitated to be stuck on the plane for hours and hours, we were in first class at the front but it didn’t look any different to the other seats apart from them being blue instead of grey. The plane landed on an island just past Ireland in the Atlantic; we were in a long queue of planes waiting to take off again and I was getting a bit nervous about flying over the ocean for hours for a while, but it took so long for us to get to the front of the queue that I was getting eager to take off again. The pilot was an idiot though; I caught him reading the plane’s flight manual, he was only up to page 5! He kept driving the plane down the wrong runways and ended up on country roads, bashing the wings into trees and eventually wrecking two engines on the right wing when he hit a stone cottage. I tried to use a little green beam repair module form the Mothership to fix the engines but they were too far gone, all full of rubble and rusty; I thought of calling the Mothership down to use one of the bigger repair modules for fixing larger equipment, then I wondered why I didn’t just use the Mothership to get to America in the first place but decided I wanted to do it the conventional way, seeing as I’d have to get used to it in the future. I became resigned to the fact that I was staying on the island (it was quite a nice place really) until someone could send a new pilot and plane.
16-December-2004: I dreamt that I was in a part of York, England, that had been invaded by Darth Vader; he and a group of henchmen were rounding people up and giving them summary executions with light sabres, a bit like some Japanese generals did in World War two with samurai swords. For some reason he spared my friend, and me; I think it was because I had strong psychic powers and he couldn’t bring himself to harm someone who held the Force to such a large degree. He made us walk out onto the river, we walked across the surface of the water looking for a boat to get us away quickly; I kept picking some of them up out of the water and, after seeing they were useless in some way, throwing them away. We eventually found a little boat that would hold the both of us, but the outboard engine would not start; I used my unusual psychic powers to create a semi-real rigging and sail to catch the wind and pull us along, I had to manipulate the wind too because it was going the wrong way. We got away and left the boat later and entered an old forest; we were confronted by Jar Jar Binks, he wanted to ask us all kinds of questions and it took me quite a lot of effort to calm him down and tell him that Vader was coming. We went into a dark bush with an elevator inside; we emerged from the elevator into a huge Naboo settlement with escalators like a shopping mall and ads for pod racer parts.
15-December-2004: I had a dream that I was in a crazy game-show set in Rowntree Park in York, England; it was a sort of celebrity reality (I was famous) show where they were getting us to try more and more challenging games – I spent most of the time goofing off, running around the park acting the fool and making the kids laugh. I did take part in one game though that was supposed to be very hard. I was winched up a tightrope, hanging from it by my hands alone; you had to hold on as long as you dare as it got higher and higher, if you made it to the top there were different coloured rings to use as handhold and get down, you were awarded more points if you only used rings of the same colour – I got full marks for getting right to the top and only using the blue rings to climb down.
14-December-2004: I dreamt, for the second time this year, that I was taking part in a war in the Middle East, I’m pretty sure it was in Israel this time. I was part of a Western armed force supporting one side or another, it was hard to tell which side was our friend because they all dressed very similar, used the same weapons and they kept changing treaties so each side was never sure whether or not they were allowed to shoot at us or not. I remember hearing someone say, ‘are these guys on our side now or not? Are we supposed to shoot them or give them assistance?’ It was all too complicated until I found a hand-held surface to air missile launcher and started shooting down helicopters. There was something later about making it back to a green field where lots of civilians were waiting to be rescued; my friend Dave was very drunk (as usual) and came lumbering out of some bushes then lumbering back into some different bushes when he spotted a group of people with more alcohol, a large Hind helicopter came hovering towards our field and the civilians thought it was coming to rescue them, but the treaty had changed again so it was coming to kill them instead. An ex-enemy faction shot it down from a far away bombed out office block.
13-December-2004: I dreamt that I met my old kung fu teacher and went to his class with him; I was surprised that he’d gone back to his old style of teaching kung fu, the way I used to like it before I left. We all practiced sets of ancient Chinese kung fu forms; when the class was over Geoff (the teacher) threw me the keys to lock up and ran off, all the other students thought that he must trust me a lot to give me the keys to his gym after all this time, but I knew that Sifu had given me the keys because he knew that I was responsible and would be forced to come back for the next lesson, because I had his keys.
12-December-2004: I had a dream that a steep road in waking life was even steeper in my dream; it was so steep that it had handrails to hold on to, a friend called Paul Lazenby was walking up the hill with his dog, struggling a bit and out of breath. I was hovering above the ground in the lotus (yoga cross legged) position and effortlessly pulling myself up the hill using the handrail, it was quite a lot of fun. There were picnic tables along the road for people to sit, eat and take a rest; Paul decided to go back down and rest at every table; two Indian girls were cleaning the tables, always the one in front of where we were sitting, they were talking about boyfriends and other trivial gossip and I couldn’t stop smiling at their conversation. Every time they cleaned the table in front of us and moved onto the next, we moved down the hill and sat at the table they’d just cleaned. When we all reached the bottom of the hill Paul started chatting with one of them and the other one wanted to get intimate with me but I said I didn’t want to because I already have a girlfriend; after that I left the three of them to it and discovered a new field that ran down a very steep incline which I rode down in the sunshine on a mountain bike very fast, I put the brakes on halfway down but there was no way I was going to stop – I wasn’t frightened though, it was an exhilarating ride all the way to the bottom where I finally skidded to a halt next to Benji, another friend, outside a post office.
11-December-2004: I was dreaming that I was half watching, half inside a tale of love; the main character was an old Canadian guy, not sure how old but he had grey hair – he’d travelled back in time and was hanging around with his future love and soul mate; she really liked him but didn’t know him enough yet to be in love with him, they hung around with each other and she told him everything. The girl was always going out on dates and coming back and asking his advice; he had to put up with it (not sure why), knowing they would be together in the future. I ended up being the old Canadian guy after that and decided not to think about her for now; instead I went running off with lots of friends and came across a toaster in a kitchen, there was a cake inside the toaster which had a very complicated door device that took some working out, I tried for a while to get the cake to pop out of the toaster like regular bread would in a normal toaster, but discovered a chrome trapdoor on the side that flipped open, allowing the cake to slide out – I ate the cake and it was delicious, there was another cake inside with extra cream on; I was going to eat that one too but it occurred to me that someone must have put them in the toaster and would be coming back soon, expecting delicious cakes, so I ran away leaving the second cake and heard a voice behind me shout, ‘Hey!’ when they discovered the missing cake. I’d caught up with all my friends and someone had a dog with them I’d never seen before that kept biting me on the bum; it’s owner was trying to make him stop it, but there was something wrong with the dog that looked like a strange wolf – the owner said to her dog that he wouldn’t be going anywhere if he kept biting me then tied the dog up to a fence. The dog got angry and morphed into a cat; it was no ordinary little pussy though, it flew around in great circles, scratching people on the face and making them bleed. Jackie Cussack, a woman from work, caught the cat and tried to poke its eyes out but the creature was obviously possessed by demonic forces and not actually a cat at all. The cat/devil-thing leaped at my face and everything went in slow-motion as I selected a very small shovel and used an expert kung fu move to flip through the air and whack the cat-devil to the ground; I used the sharp edge of the shovel’s blade to dice the creature into small pieces, never fully convinced that it was dead. There was a behind the scenes discussion after that on how different it would have been had the hero selected the wrong shovel.
10-December-2004: I dreamt that Ian, my housemate, was trying to set up a hairstyle studio in my old bedroom where I grew up; there were a few of those big old sit-under hairdryers and swivel-chairs in my room instead of a bed. Two Swedish girls came to the house looking for work, they’d apparently arranged an interview with Ian but he wasn’t around; I didn’t want his business to lose out so I let them assume I was the owner of the hair salon. The rest of the dream was a jealousy drama with the two Swedish girls vying for my attention, one of them had very hairy, yet fluffy legs.
9-December-2004: I had a dream I’d been to Scarborough in England on my bicycle; I was on my way back, walking my bike along the road that leads to York on a very sunny day, walking because I was tired and hot. There was a bridge over a river and I wanted to jump in but it looked too fast-flowing; there was a calmer lake next to the river so I decided to strip off and swim in there instead. Before I got in the water I noticed there were lots of beavers and otters already swimming around in the cool water; I watched them instead of getting in, they were really nice and one of the beavers was purple.
8-December-2004: I dreamt I was calling my boss at work and Marcia (my fiancé) was distracting me; it was nice being distracted from work, I think I put the phone down.
7-December-2004: I dreamt that my friend’s girlfriend’s brother, Chris, was telling me that I should convince my friend Che to get a job (he does have a job in waking life, think my head was mixing him up with Dave the layabout); I told Chris that I have told Che he needs to get a job, he replied that I’m not trying hard enough; I told him that I ask him every day, he replied that that isn’t good enough; I told him that I’d gone down on my knees and pleaded with him to get a job, Chris replied, ‘Fair enough, you can’t do more than that.’ After that I got a group of six of my friends lined up along the edge of a street and said we should have a competition to see who could leap right across to the other side from a standing still position, the street was about 30 feet across; everyone seemed to know I could do it and made fun of me by pretending to try the impossible task but only jumped a few inched off the curb, then walked across – just then a yellow construction vehicle drove by with the bus driver from an earlier dream at the wheel. In the earlier dream I’d been sat at the back of a yellow school bus with two kids (I was a kid too), trying to figure out why one of them was such a difficult person to get along with; I took his phone off him and threw it out of the window, he was really mad at first but it did get him talking to us.
6-December-2004: I had a dream that I was back at school, walking along a corridor with my friend Mark, who I didn’t actually go to school with. There’s kind of a recurring theme in my ‘back at school dreams’; I’ve been going there for a year but for some reason I haven’t once turned up for classes on a Tuesday; I’m enrolled on the biology class or something but no one has noticed my absence because I haven’t been to a single lesson; the exams are coming up and I want to take biology (or whatever) so I feel a pressing need to attend the class, but I don’t want to be found out for playing truant the whole year and get kicked out of school altogether. As I walked along the corridor with Mark I said aloud, ‘Ah yes, but you see, I haven’t been to a single biology class my whole life.’ as the biology teacher was walking by. He gave me a stern look and I smiled at him like I was joking.
5-December-2004: I dreamt I was overlooking a huge ball-park in Los Angeles; there were hundreds of people all fighting, some gangs were fighting rival gangs, some people were grouped according to their race and nationality – a mob of Italians had one black guy surrounded; they were kicking and beating him, I wanted to run down and help him but he was miles away, I was at the top of a hill looking down on the fighting in a big green bowl-shaped field. Someone called the police and a robotic, lazy voice replied that a police car was on its way – my attention was brought back to the field by rapid gunfire from a MAC 10 
machine pistol, the black guy had pulled the gun out from under his coat and shot the Italian men that were beating him, there were blooded bodies all around him and people were running away from him, instead of crowding closer to see him suffer. I smiled at the man with the machine pistol to acknowledge that I approved of what he did and show that I was on his side, I think I was too far away for him to see me though and well out of range of his little Uzi-like gun. The dream turned out to be a Stanley Kubrick movie where all the police in LA were disaffected robots with a lack of enthusiasm for fighting crime.
4-December-2004: I dreamt I was running along the surface of the River Ouse in York, England, with my brother (there was a sense that I may have been female instead of male); we were heading for a special restaurant that could only be reached by walking across the water, we got to a weir where the water flowed over a lip very quickly – my brother walked along the slippery lip and got up some ladders to the restaurant safely, I was worried that he might fall in; instead it was me that fell into the water, my brother was worried for me as I was swept along the river but his dad (my step-dad) laughed and said I’d be fine. I was rescued further down the river and was upset because I couldn’t switch a light on that was attached to my body; everyone had a little electric torch that was powered by the body’s own electrical currents, the devices were surgically attached at birth – I kept shouting and crying that I couldn’t even operate my own torch, it was kind of a metaphor for being useless; something that even the stupidest person should be able to do.
3-December-2004: I had a dream that I was in a big supermarket with my brother and there was this guy called John Shipley there too, he was someone I used to hang around with when I was about ten. John was getting soccer balls from shelves and kicking them high over the aisles, not caring where they landed or if they hit someone and laughing like a maniac then running off. I think he was trying to make it look like my brother and I were doing the kicking, but none of the store-workers believed it – in the dream John was always in this store, my brother said, ‘he must like virtually live in this place; he’s always here when we come shopping.’ Later in the same store I was jumped from behind by this huge guy who was slightly retarded; he got me in a bear-hug and tried to squeeze me unconscious, but I used my kung fu skills to get him off and pinned him on the ground, then bruised his biceps so it would be impossible for him to get me or anyone else in a bear-hug in the near future. I saw my grandmother, who actually died in waking life a few years ago, walking down an aisle and hoped that one of John Shipley’s soccer balls didn’t come sailing through the air and knock her over.
2-December-2004: I dreamt I was an astronaut walking in space; normally it would be quite scary for me to do this, but this time I loved it – I eventually found my way to a space shuttle that was attached to the International Space Station, the views were amazing, dark blues, light blues and orange and yellow hues from Sun.
1-December-2004: I dreamt that I was trying to help my mother find a dentist’s surgery; we eventually found one and went inside only to discover that the man was actually a DNA scientist and not a dentist, my brother was there then too. The three of us decided to have our DNA tested seeing as we were there, plus it gave the man something to do, he wanted to test his new machine. We had to take it in turns putting our right hand in a sort of x-ray machine that whirred around a bit then took a picture; my mother’s hand was rejected because she didn’t keep it still; my brother’s picture went okay but when I put my hand in all kinds of alarms went off. The man fixed his machine after I broke it and we tried again; we were successful in photographing my DNA this time and I told the scientist I wanted to do it again; my brother and mother groaned because it took about 15 minutes to set up the machine and they wanted to leave; I said, ‘Look you can go if you want, but I want to do it again; I have a really neat trick that I want to doctor to see,’ then I turned to the doctor and said, ‘You really wont regret it, probably make the both of us very rich; at least give it a go for scientific reasons.’ The doctor agreed and showed me my photo while he was waiting for the machine to warm up for the second picture; there was a grey area at one end of one of my DNA strands, he told me that it may cause a problem with vittles in that area; I asked him what he meant and he told me that vittles was an old word for food, I said, ‘I know that; I meant what does it mean for me? You see I’ve been feeling pretty strange in my head for 15 years, could this be the cause of it?’ He then got out a chart with lots of fish on it and started mumbling about probable effects, but the machine was ready before he finished – I put my hand in the machine and altered my DNA before it took the picture; the doctor was very shocked and thought there must be something wrong with the machine, it was impossible for me to change my DNA, he thought. I showed him how I’d also changed the molecules in the lead plate that was under my hand, it was now a solid sheet of silver, again he was shocked. He asked his computer to make a 3D model of my DNA inside a freezer/pod-type room, when we went inside to look there was a massive (much larger than the pod should be able to hold) warehouse with people working inside – all created from the image of my DNA.