31-December-2005: I dreamt that I was in a town I’ve never seen before in a bakery with a guy called Lewis Evans I know in waking life. There was this young woman with short blonde hair and I got it into my head to flirt with her and it ended up with me kissing her on the cheek. Things turned kind of bad when she wouldn’t leave me alone and wanted to follow me everywhere. I didn’t want to be nasty so I kept talking to her but Lewis was making angry grunts beside me. The woman wanted to know what was wrong with him so I told her that he was angry because I shouldn’t be talking to her because I was married. She walked off after that and I thought that would be an end to it. I got back to the trendy café that Marcia (my wife) and I were living in and told her all about my foolish flirting, knowing she would be grown up enough (hopefully) to just be a bit angry with me but get over it. Things got worse though as it became apparent that the girl was obsessed with me and began stalking us and showing up in our home, breaking things and smashing the windows on our car. It turned out that she was also married and her distraught husband came around to sympathise with us and try to help. His car also had smashed windows and headlights, the woman was a psychopath. I woke up determined that I would never ever think about kissing another woman in my life.
30-December-2005: I was dreaming about swimming in a public swimming pool – possible with Bob Addy, the guy from the dream a few nights ago. I think I was a woman at first swimming the width of the pool back and forth, but turned into a man (my normal state) after a few minutes. I was taking it in turns with Bob to see how far we could swim underwater without coming up for breath. I usually managed about a width and a quarter. There were two guys drinking beer in the pool, which isn’t allowed of course, and being pretty obnoxious to everyone around them. They were saying loudly, ‘We’re just having fun, relaxing is all.’ Over and over again, and swigging from their bottles of beer.
I got out of the pool after a while and was going to get changed. On my way out I noticed a young boy practicing a kung fu set called Jorn Sau and I had to stop and show him how to do it better. He asked me if it was all worth it and I told him, sort of to give him more enthusiasm, that of course it was, there wasn’t a person in this whole room that I couldn’t beat with my kung fu. Of course the two drunk guys heard me say that and wanted to fight. The first one tried to head-butt me but I brought my elbow up in a jui jutsu move and he smashed his own face open on it, rather than me hitting him. The other guy tried to kick me but I just brushed him aside and he crashed unconscious into a metal locker door.
29-December-2005: I dreamt that I was taking part in a prestigious art contest based on the written word. My old waking life head of 3D art from college, Avril, and her husband were the judges. For some reason the work being submitted was supposed to have first being read by the entrants’ mothers, who were meant to write their own comments and appraisals in the margins on the paper. My mother had not read my work for some bad reason, like she’d been drinking or something instead, so I had to hand my work in unmarked, which was something of an automatic bad score against me right away. Things got worse when Avril told me to give her a quick synopsis of the story instead and I couldn’t remember what I’d written, it was too long ago. Avril was frustrated that she had to read it herself, I think now that they were basing all their marks on what people’s mothers wrote, and sat there for fifteen minutes pointing out typing errors and giving no merit to its artistic content.
She told me next that my poor spell-checking would go bad for me and showed me on a score board how I was only one place a head of Ali G (a British comedian who pretends to be a rap star with appalling speech and grammar skills), who’d tried to out-fox the system by making himself into a judge halfway through the first round. Avril laughed as she told me that he got caught out because he was trying to judge the art using only his sense of smell.
I walked away from Avril and out into the night feeling a little dejected, yet sure that she was a Philistine and would one day be ousted on the grounds of this. As I emerged from the art building I herd a voice shout ‘Oi!’ from some bushes, in what was supposed to be a sort of 1970s streetwise fashion. It was my stepfather who I haven’t seen for more than a minute in waking life in over a decade. I considered ignoring him for addressing me as ‘Oi’ instead of shouting my name, but turned around and said, ‘For fuck’s sake, if you want to talk to me just shout my name you moron!’ He said that he had something for me but I was too annoyed with him and walked away. It occurred to me that he might have a lot of money to give me, but I thought that it wasn’t worth it whatever the amount. He caught up with me in a car and threw a plastic bag out of the window and drove away. The bag was full of black and white photographs of me as a child that I haven’t seen before.
28-December-2005: I had another dream about school, but this time it was entirely fictitious and, apart from Christopher Sharpe who I went to school with as a child, none of the people in my class were anyone that I know. I think the subject of the course was art and everyone was mourning the disappearance of a young man called Umberto. They were all discussing how life could not go on without him, when he showed up after a three-week absence all dishevelled and miserable. Umberto was sure that his contribution to the class was small and that none of us would miss him if he was not around. I had to tell Umberto how ironic his state of mind was considering the conversation just before he walked in. Everyone else joined in telling Umberto how important he was and how much they had missed him. I deliberately started a separate conversation with Christopher, so Umberto wouldn’t feel too self-conscious, about how horses would not be so awesome in battle if you stood up to them and punched them in the mouth.
27-December-2005: I was dreaming about my childhood school, that I’d gone back there as an adult to take part in a special botany class. The school had changed a lot since I was there, it was all domes and high-tech hydroponics glass houses which I got lost amongst. I was sure my new botany class must be inside one of the new domes but I couldn’t find it in any of them. It turned out to be in a very old classroom where they used to teach rural science when I was a kid. When I went into the class the teacher was very pleased to see me, like it was an honour to have me there, and she directed me to a seat at the front right next to my ex wife, Masayo. I wasn’t really all that bothered that Masayo was there and it was vaguely pleasing that she was doing something interesting with her life, I haven’t seen her in waking life for over 5 years.
26-December-2005: I dreamt that I went to visit someone called Bob Addy who I used to hang around with years ago in waking life. I was visiting him as a client for my waking life job, as a social worker, and he was pretending that he was just showing me around his house. I got a bit frustrated wondering what I was doing there and told him I was leaving if he didn’t need my help. He let me go and still kept up the pretence for the sake of his father that I was only there as a friend like I used to be, but when I was in my car he came running out and got in beside me, pleading for me to help him.
25-December-2005: I was dreaming about a group of militia or terrorists/mercenaries and laughing at how rubbish they were at their jobs, which partly included capturing me. I was cheating slightly because I had technology from the future; nevertheless I explained how they could never win against a trained, official army soldier (me, only in this dream), as they simply don’t have government interest and funding behind them.
24-December-2005: I dreamt that I was supposed to fly to New York with Marcia to see her parents but the travel agent had sold us tickets to York in England by mistake, which is where we were travelling from in the first place. So we went on a journey that lasted ages and brought us back home instead of to New York.
23-December-2005: I had a dream that I’d invented a machine to record dreams for the purpose of proving that my stepdad had stolen some fish from my plate in another dream. I ended up getting together with a group of people and videotaping each other’s dreams and we were laughing our heads off at the strangeness of them – especially the sound effects, which were more bizarre that we’d remembered.
22-December-2005: I dream that I was supposed to be getting a train to Bristol in England’s south west to meet two friends, Neil and Jenny, but I got the wrong train and ended up heading for Liverpool in the north west instead. I got off at the first station and hoped there would be a train that would link up with my friends somewhere. There was a vague thought that I would have been scared if it were happening in waking life, but I decided that I couldn’t be bothered with fear.
21-December-2005: I dreamt that I was spending the night at my old flat on the south coast of England. I told my friend Maja, who was still living there only in this dream, that it will be really strange waking up there again because I have lots of dreams where I think I’m still living there…
20-December-2005: I dreamt that I was watching Benji, from the message boards on this site, fighting with army training combat batons in a boxing ring. In the dream he was supposed to be an expert, but he got beaten by a dweeb.
19-December-2005: I was with a friend called Dave walking through an army base. Dave wanted to leave, I think we were soldiers there, and I knew of a way out at the back that I’d used in another dream from years ago. Dave wanted to just climb the walls around the perimeter but I told how they were all booby trapped to trigger an alarm if anyone tried to climb in, they worked both ways. There was a kind of turnstile at the back of the base where you had put a special code in, wait three seconds, then get through a little maze in less than twelve seconds without touching anything. I knew I could do it because I’d had the experience from the other dream, but I was certain Dave would not be able to do it. I told him how I felt but he insisted he wanted out of the army base and this was the only way. I went first and got through all right. Dave tried and failed terribly. Alarms sounded everywhere and helicopters were launched to hunt the intruders/escapees. Even though I knew we’d be caught I made a show of running for it with Dave anyway. Everywhere we turned helicopter spotlights were on us. A military policeman soon picked us up in his truck, it was a stretch in the cells for us – at least that’s what the MP thought. Dave started talking with an Australian accent and relating old army stories like he was a professional soldier, he and the MP hit it off really well and the cop thought it a pity that he would have to lock Dave and his friend away. I said not to worry about it, that I was their god. The MP said that locking me away was perhaps not such a bad thing after all, seeing as I was crazy enough to think I was his god. I said it didn’t matter, if he could bear with me for just a few minutes I’d be using my god powers to save his life and everyone else’s in the town.
Of course he didn’t believe I was a god or that the whole town was in danger. I told him that at that precise time, as we drove in the truck, someone was sabotaging the nuclear missile at the airbase and that it was going to detonate in three minutes. The MP said I didn’t know what I was talking about, that I probably didn’t even know what type of missile we had. Dave piped in, thinking it was all a joke, and said that of course I knew, I was their god, the missile was a Georgia 20MT Ballistic Missile. I said that it was not, that they got rid of that one last week – the missile being tampered with now was a British Trident Intercontinental Ballistic Nuclear Missile. The MP was a little worried about that because no one was supposed to know about the Trident. It didn’t matter for long though because the missile exploded with a huge atomic flash and a telltale mushroom cloud rose from the base. Before I woke up I was using my godly powers to contain the blast and save everyone’s life.
18-December-2005: I was in a dream about eyeglasses. I was wearing a ridiculous pair of square, black-framed eyeglasses to deliberately annoy someone who was interviewing me. He eventually got so annoyed that he took them from me and put them on himself, which made him even madder because they only had normal glass in them instead of lenses. I produced some other glasses instead that gave the wearer all kinds of information about the things they were looking at, such as people’s names, a car’s top speed, the actual distance to objects from where you are standing – they were incredible. I was later wearing them on a tour of a science lab where everyone spoke German. I used the glasses to detect people’s feeling towards me when I looked at them.
17-December-2005: I was dreaming about being chased around the outside of the house I grew up in by King Kong, after he’d burst through the wall of my bedroom like a movie trailer. I tried to throw Kong of my scent by running through the really stinky house next door. I felt a bit odd trespassing next door but the lazy man living there never even looked up from the TV set as I ran through. I ran around to the front of the smelly house then hopped across the street, hoping King Kong wouldn’t recognise my single footprint instead of my regular two footprints. I watched the huge ape from behind a hedge across the street come sniffing around the smelly house, he was about to follow my trail into the house but it was even too stinky for him. Instead he wrinkled his nose and gave up the chase for the time being.
I quickly got Marcia into our car, we had a trailer at the back with all our belongings packed inside, and drove off into the countryside. The countryside was full of people driving away like us, the land was apparently awash with mobs of King Kongs hunting like prehistoric hunter-gatherer humans with spears. I drove to the top of a hill and came across a heard of elephants running for their lives down some sloping plains. It occurred to me that there must be a big group of Kongs over the ridge to scare even elephants, so I turned the car around and went back the other way. It seemed that everywhere we turned there were normally wild ferocious animals fleeing for their lives until I wasn’t sure which way to turn. We came across and Australian Anzac manning an electric minigun, waving us behind him as a group of hunting Kongs came into view across a field.
People were being chosen by a psychiatrist and a social worker to be evacuated on a special steam train. I told Marcia that, seeing as this might be the end, I needed to tell her the truth about my origins. I told her that all those times I’d joked about being from another planet I was actually telling the truth. The social worker interrupted me to say that I’d been telling that story for weeks just so I could extend the length of my psychotherapy. I told Marcia to ignore her and the psychiatrist and activated my personal defence shield because I thought the doctor was going to drug me. I have a shield in some dreams that deflects bullets and also puts a protective barrier around all my veins and arteries so that if I get injected with poisons they are channelled away safely and don’t enter my bloodstream. Marcia and I were eventually chosen for the steam train and we got on together at the back where they kept all the steam rooms and saunas. As I woke up I wondered if the Kongs would be brave enough to try and ambush a big steam train. Then I pondered the old movie where King Kong grabs the train in New York and thought what great special effects they were for the time.
16-December-2005: I dreamt that I was by two rivers in the sunshine with Bill Connolly, a Scottish comedian. We were discussion a mutual enthusiasm for Terry Pratchett novels when a TV set came on with Terry dressed in exactly the same clothes as Billy, a pure white suit with a white hat.
15-December-2005: I was in a dream taking part in Robin Williams’ (American comedian and actor) first ever live stage show and TV appearance. Things were quickly disrupted as the stagehands and other acts were attacked by a large bear in the body of a seven-foot-tall man with a beard.
14-December-2005: I dreamt mainly about squirrels, mostly because I was writing a little children’s story about a squirrel court before I went to sleep. In my dreams I was developing the plot beyond what I’d already written.
13-December-2005: I was dreaming about travelling from Scarborough to York in England with Marcia on the train in an alternate universe. I didn’t know it was an alternate until we got to York, though the bizarre steam train should have been a clue. When we got to York it was all bigger and stretched out, it had a strange underground metro system that never took you to where you wanted to go. We wanted to get to Fulford but we kept turning up at Burtonstone Lane across town. We found an old couple that helped us out with some food, we were starving, and I demanded that they tell us what was going on with the trains. They wouldn’t say at first but some secret police came along searching houses and the couple gave us some cheese and bread to take with us and told us to never use the trains, never read the road signs and always trust your own sense of direction, then hurried us out of a back door.
12–December-2005: I dreamt that I went to see a friend called Benji when he was younger. It somehow transpired that I stayed at his house all night waiting for a book signing by Terry Pratchett. It seemed like we were waiting forever for Mister Pratchett to show up, we even resorted to pretending to be asleep in the hope that he would come along and sign our books, as if he were Father Christmas or something. He still never showed up so Benji had the idea of copying text from his books all over the walls thinking that Mister Pratchett would be so annoyed at the copyright infringement that he’d come storming in to tell us off, but again he never appeared. Benji got sick of waiting and went to find Terry and tell him that we’d written his work all over the walls. He seemed to be gone for ages but he eventually came back with a signed copy of The Colour of Magic, written in French.
11-December-2005: I had a dream that Marcia wanted to do naughty things with me somewhere outside in the countryside. We found a small woods and started canoodling, but I thought we should have a plan for an excuse for being there if the farmer came along, so we started gathering pine cones so we could say we were collecting them if he showed up.
10-December-2005: I dreamt that I was on a TV game-show that involved speeding along secret underground canals in London, England.
9-December-2005: I few years ago, in waking life, I was on a TV quiz show called Fifteen to One that has since gone off air. Last night I dreamt that I was at the show’s old host’s house with a bunch of other people, he was suggesting we all have a game of Fifteen to One for old time’s sake. I thought he, William G Stewart, was being a bit sad for obsessing about the show after all this time, but I changed my mind and thought, ‘what the Hell, it was a good game,’ and decided to play.
8-December-2005: I was dreaming about going to a Pizza Hut and a machine in the restaurant called The Rembrandt Breath Machine, a device that measured your lung capacity and predicted if you were a smoker or not. It was a kind of spirometer that you blew into with a handle you had to turn as fast as possible to try and get Rembrandt’s face to appear on the machine. The handle-spinning action was there to get your heart pumping. I was getting a bit frustrated because I kept messing up the Spirometer bit by letting my mouth slip from the nozzle, which had these little rubber things you had to put over it so it was hygienic. I kept breaking the rubber sleeves and having to put more money in to get another one. At one point I finally got Rembrandt’s face to appear but this guy called Bob Addy came along and put some money in, resetting the machine before I got my reading.
7-December-2005: I had a dream that seemed part movie and part adventure-dream with the title, Eddie Monsoon – A Life, which was based on the Comic Strip TV series from the 1980s in England. I played the part of Eddie Monsoon, well actually I just looked a lot like him and everyone assumed I was Eddie Monsoon. I was constantly being interviewed about what it’s like to be Eddie Monsoon and I was trying to tell everyone that I sort of fell into it by accident. A friend called Dave noticed that the house we were in seemed to be moving slightly on its foundations and I told him not to worry, that this always happens in my dreams and just means the house has decided to go on a trip. We all went to the window to watch the house slip away from the other houses in the row and speed off along the street, with us still inside. The house eventually found a gap in reality, a shimmering black puddle on the ground, and slipped through it so that we plunged beneath the Earth and found ourselves floating down to a new world where clichés and metaphors were banished.
6-December-2005: I dreamt that I was in some strange college somewhere with my friend Mark . I think it was a film college because hundreds of us where being made to watch a new Frank Spencer, Some Mothers Do ‘av ‘em, movie. Mark was practicing his review before the movie had played even ten minutes, saying: ‘A full on belly laugh – Daily Telegraph’ and, ‘One for a Sunday afternoon – New York Times.’ and so on. I replied as a joke, ‘The best movie ever – Wheldrake Tattler.’ Wheldrake is a tiny village where Mark’s parents live.
5-December-2005: I dreamt that I was a teenager called Jip that now lives at my mother’s house in waking life. He/I was being bullied by these gangsters, they needed some money that my boss had hidden in a safe, 9,000 English Pounds. Jip was afraid of his boss, the guy was a total psycho, but he was also scared of the people confronting him right now and his boss was away. He caved in, partly because he wanted to please the gangsters, and showed them his boss’s safe. They blew the safe and took the 9,000. Jip tidied up around the place and tried to pretend he didn’t know anything had happened when his boss came back with some of his ugly friends. Jip/I asked the boss if he could leave early and go for a drive in an old pickup truck parked out front, the boss said it was okay. Jip drove the truck towards a town I never saw before very slowly. I was very anxious for him to speed up and get away but he wanted to saunter along and pretend nothing had happened. He was hoping that his boss wouldn’t suspect anything bad of him if he looked relaxed and didn’t try to run away. It didn’t work, before long Jip’s psycho boss came speeding after him in a car with his ugly friends, cut Jip off and shouted at him, ‘Where’s my fucking money?’
Jip tried to protest that he didn’t know what he was talking about but his fear gave him away. The psycho got a big handgun out and made to shoot Jip in the head. The ugly friends said that maybe Jip was telling the truth, but a young guy pulled up on a motorbike and fingered Jip as the one talking to the other gangsters earlier. The psycho was really pissed off, half knowing that Jip probably had no choice but mad as Hell that he let him down nonetheless. He fired a shot off at the ground but it bounced and went through Jip’s/my hip and smashed half of his teeth out. He was pretty much dead. I wasn’t happy with the way this dream went so I did a rerun from when Jip drove off in the pickup and made him drive very fast and get out in the middle of town and run for his life. After that it was all sneaking around and wondering who was working for the psycho boss amongst the crowded streets.
4-December-2005: I had a dream that I found a part of York where I live that was stuck in perpetual summertime, with huge green trees and flowery meadows and a pond full of large goldfish. I think I may have dreamt about this place before.
3-December-2005: I dreamt that I was taking a tour of the school I went to when I was a teenager with Marcia. We were being shown around as prospective parents of future students.
2-December-2005: A ghost came into one of my dream and I told it to fuck off.
1-December-2005: I dreamt that my friend Dave and I kept shouting at each other in German, mostly saying, geradeaus! (guh-RAH-duh-ouse), which kind of means ‘Keep going straight ahead’.