31-January-2008: I dreamt that I was on a sinking ship and that I ordered the captain to take it back to port, which wasn’t very far away as we’d only set off ten minutes earlier. We made it back to the port in India without the ship going down and I spotted a friend on a train, someone I don’t know in waking life. She was sitting in the space between carriages like she’s been there for ages so I went inside to talk to her. I told her about the ship nearly sinking and how I wasn’t sure what I was going to do next, as I said this the train doors closed automatically, like they do back home which was unexpected on an old Indian train, and I said “Well I guess that kind of seals my immediate future then” as the train set off and there was no way to get out.
30-January-2008: I had a dream that I was digging a tunnel under the sea using the same drilling equipment they used to bore out the Channel Tunnel in the 1990s. The tunnel I was drilling sprang a leak and we, myself and all the workers, had to evacuate as the sea came flooding in and swamped half of London.
29-January-2008: I had a dream I went for one of those fancy facial treatment things where they give you a shave with an cut throat razor. My friend Phil Benton was the one with the razor though, I was a little worried that he might accidentally slit my throat because he’s a bit mad in waking life.
28-January-2008: I had a dream that I found a silly looking Scottish red tartan coat and showed it to Jenny from last night’s dream, this dream was carrying on from that one – it was the morning after the drinks and pills from the brown paper bag. Jenny thought the tartan coat was wonderful so I gave it to her and she wore it then gave me a hug.
27-January-2008: I had a dream that I went for a drink with three friends, Neil Kay, Jenny Sharp and Dave Smiley, in town and they were taking pills from a brown paper bag and swallowing them.
26-January-2008: I had a dream that I was in a small private plane that landed at the army barracks near where I live in waking life and picked up some passengers, then we flew off to Amsterdam for a secret military operation at Schiphol.
25-January-2008: I had a dream that I was talking to my nephew, who’s like 4 years old, about bogies and making him laugh. “Grot de nez” I kept saying, while my brother was wondering how I was making his son laugh so much.
24-January-2008: I had a dream that I got married to a beautiful Greek woman, who was also a spirit or goddess, who I met during a cataclysmic interstellar event that involved a collapsing nebula falling to Earth and covering everything in showers of wood. The day after we were married, and back in Fulford where I live, the Greek spirit said she wanted to leave me for three months and walk around Scotland at night. I was upset because we’d only just got married, we hadn’t even slept together yet, and she wanted to leave me.
23-January-2008: I had a dream that I was talking to my friend Steve Lockie-Bloore about why my other friend Neil Kay was being such a bitch, which sounded kind of odd but he was behaving like a young girl in a bad mood.
22-January-2008: I had a dream that a nuclear bomb went off at my old childhood street called Heslington Lane.
21-January-2008: I had a dream that I was an undercover cop busting a prostitution ring run out of a comic book store in Moscow, Russia. I was either pretending to be a prostitute myself, morphing into a woman somehow, or telepathically directing a woman pretending to be a prostitute. I, or the woman, would hang around reading certain comics, that was somehow a signal of availability, and wait to get hit on – then I, or the woman, would take the guy into a back room and beat the shit out of him and try to get him to tell me who the gang leader was running everything. The dream got a little awkward when the store owner got suspicious, he was a deputy pimp of the big boss, and decided to follow me, or the woman, when the next client happened along, who turned out to be my waking life friend Mark . It almost got to the point where I had to pretend to be doing sexual things to Mark in a photobooth, with the pimp watching, but I decided we may as well break our cover and beat the shit out of the pimp instead of the clients. As I, and some other cops, were threatening the pimp he put on some loud music that was a signal to his gang that he had been busted by the cops and needed assistance. After that the dream was all about gun/kung fu fights between cops and gang members in dark alleys and Moscow parks at night.
20-January-2008: I had a dream that I was in a sitcom about two old men, one of them me, travelling around England by train as an attempt to discover their lost youth.
19-January-2008: I had a dream that I was at the haunted house I used to live in when I was a baby, kissing girls in cupboards and showing them secret passageways.
18-January-2008: I had a dream that I was hitting someone’s clavicle with a hammer, trying in vain to break the bone.
17-January-2008: I had a dream that I had to evacuate a burning spaceship. I floated in a spacesuit towards a space station and was picked up, but ended up stranded there for ages with nothing to do.
16-January-2008: I had a dream that my wife was expecting some Mormon visitors, a bit like Waiting for Godot but with Mormons.
15-January-2008: I had a dream that I was in Sweden with a friend called Paul Lazenby and that we were talking about playing golf in the snow.
14-January-2008: I had a dream that I was on a bus from Leeds-Bradford airport in England absolutely bursting to use the toilet, yet incredibly thirsty at the same time. Some guy from my childhood school, John Shipley, game me a can of lager and I was torn between wanting to drink it and quench my thirst and not wanting to put another drop of liquid into my bladder.
13-January-2008: I had a dream that I was hugging a friend called Chiemi and telling her she could come and stay with us. She was upset because she’d just split up with a guy called Simon Osborne who, in reality, I haven’t seen since I was a child.
12-January-2008: I had a dream that I was in the cast of a movie being shot outside a hotel called Encore in York where I live. My friend Phil Benton and I were only minor characters but these two sexy Russian girls came and talked to use like we were mega film stars, then gave us two tickets to come and watch them dance at a wedding party. I sort of felt like going but was overcome with guilt at the thought of betraying my wife. Phil harangued me into going with him and I eventually relented, but when we got to the party we couldn’t get in because the tickets were fake.
11-January- 2008: I had a dream that I met a woman who lived in an old level crossing house, a place where a train guard would have lived to open and shut gates to stop cars and let trains go by. I’m not exactly sure what I was doing there, but it had something to do with my master plan of reopening all of Britain’s old branch lines that were closed down decades ago.
10-January-2008: I had a dream that I was in a bank with my wife Marcia, we were attempting to deposit $80 and, what we called, 2 planks of the finest Laptop wood.
9-January-2008: I had a dream that I was in a town called Halifax in Yorkshire, England. I had no clothes on and went into a charity shop to buy something to wear. I was trying to look around for suitable clothing without making it obvious that I was naked, but when I did find something I had to go to the door of the shop and shout across the street to Marcia, my wife, to ask for money to pay fore the clothes – drawing attention to myself.
8-January-2008: I had a dream that I was hoping someone would recover from surgery, possibly an old man, but I don’t know who it was.
7-January-2008: I had a dream that I was running a farm for tourists and someone was complaining that I hadn’t secured the chickens properly, that they would run away.
6-January-2008: I had a dream that I was a Federal Marshal and that I arrested an old drunken cowboy, but told him I would let him off if he went and beat somebody up for me. I sent him on his way, as he of course agreed, wondering how badly he would beat the guy I somehow disliked.
5-January-2008: I had a dream that some friends and I took a steam train ride to an alternate universe. I had a lot of fun exploring my home town whose essence was almost identical but had its streets laid out in different ways and places. Some time later in the dream I wanted to set fire to something and discovered that matches had not been invented in that universe.
4-January-2008: I had a dream that my friend Mark , who is a teacher in waking life, was working as a teacher at my old art college. He’d made a big sculpture with his class out of metal and it had nice furniture and carpets inside. I offered to buy it from them so I could adapt it into a spaceship.
3-January-2008: I had a dream that my old teacher from Art college, Avril, was at my old high school hoping to teach life drawing classes. I went to see how it was going and found here in an art supply cupboard, totally naked, covered in green paint and almost invisible, blending into the green wall behind her. She told me she was having some misgivings about teaching teenagers how to draw naked people while I took my clothes off and lay down on a cot next to her. There was a toilet in there and Avril sat on it to take a pee while still chatting with me about the students. As we were talking two teenage girls came into the supply room, saw me lounging naked on the cot, then Avril painted green, peeing, and only visible where the white toilet parts showed behind her instead of the green wall and said, “Oo, very Herman Hess” then left.
2-January-2008: I had a dream that I was in a massive queue in Israel waiting to make some kind of Jewish vote, a bit like a presidential vote but all mysterious because I didn’t know what to expect. Someone in the queue told me not to worry, Jewish people don’t like fotsing (spelling?) around so the queue will go down in no time. I was reluctant to believe them as it was about 5 miles long, literally, but I was surprised when I found myself inside the building where people were voting within about fifteen minutes. Inside the building was hugely overcrowded with thousands of people, which made me incredibly nervous – it seemed like half the Jewish population was in there and I worried there might be a terrorist attack, with the conditions being so ideal for such an incident. Anyway, there was no attack and I eventually made it to the voting booth and put my tick next to the “Oy Vey Party”.
1-January-2008: I had a dream that I was on a spaceship parsecs away from Earth and awaiting delivery of an interstellar Land Rover, a future version of the British offroad car you can buy today.