30-June-2004: I dreamed that a friend called Dave had a new apartment in town; I went to see him on my bicycle. When I got there he was drunk and wanted to go and buy some more booze; he’d already had his bike out ready to go out before I got there but started putting it away again when he asked me if I came in the car, I said no but he didn’t believe me. I ignored him, it is the only way when he’s in that state, and got on my bike and rode off; hoping to be too far away by the time he realized I was telling the truth. I didn’t get far, I was stopped by a police officer for riding in the dark with no lights; he wasn’t satisfied with just telling me off, I had to listen to the full lecture… Dave turned up before he finished, with light on, and started taunting me for riding in the dark without lights; of course it’s also against the law to ride your bike drunk as a poet on pay day, so Dave got a long lecture too while I walked away. I forgot about Dave and made it home (never seen the house outside this dream) and went to bed. I woke up a few hours later (still inside the dream) and couldn’t remember how I got from Dave’s house to where I was now; it didn’t bother me, I just assumed it would come back to me eventually. I heard a scraping noise outside the window; I went and looked out to see a woman pulling a child on a little sled in the snow. It was morning but it was still dark; I went outside and followed the snow tracks until I was behind the woman and shouted, ‘BOO!’ so that she screamed and I ran off laughing before she could see who it was. It was Christmas morning and everyone was getting up early in the dark; back in the house there were lots of girls and a few boys, we were all some kind of temporary orphans living together, our families were being brought back to us in a few months. One girl brought a huge boat or arc covered in Christmas decorations, the craft had no roof and was full of presents. One of the boys said something about the baubles on the Christmas tree; perhaps they were the most he’d ever seen? We three were the only ones out of bed; there were about twenty more people still upstairs. The girl took a present out and unwrapped it, I think it was perfume? I wanted to join in and looked in the arc for my name; there were quite a few addressed to me from a lovely decorative ‘M’, the girl said, ‘Oh, she isn’t here yet; you know you can’t open yours till she gets here.’ I didn’t mind at all; I don’t think I’ve ever felt such an overwhelming sense of Christmas spirit, not even as a child, it was so strong you could almost taste it. It filled the air and sort of misted my vision; it’s the most wonderful thing I’ve ever felt.
29-June-2004: A friend called Chris that I went to university with came to York in my dreams last night; he asked if I wanted to go for lunch so we walked around the old town looking for something nice to eat. Everywhere I took him was kind of posh but he wasn’t impressed, he really only wanted something big and cheap to eat; we eventually settled in a little blue restaurant and had cheese and tomato quiche. I thought he didn’t like it so I asked if we should go somewhere else, but he said he didn’t mind it actually as he stuffed his face with the quiche, picking up the whole thing in his hands. The waiter kept bringing us bottled water that we hadn’t asked for, opening it and pouring it out for us so we’d have to pay for it. The owner of the restaurant came along with some friends and sat with us, he wanted me to help him pick out some winning horses in the French Derby; I don’t know much about horses or horse racing but asked him to choose the one that’s called Fairy Something. As they were looking through the papers trying to find the horse I recommended, Chris and I snuck off and told the girl at the cash register that they (the owner and his friends) were paying.
28-June-2004: I dreamed I was a child playing beneath the city walls in York in an alternate universe; everything was slightly different. There was a grassy hill that we were playing at soldiers across, throwing spears and sticks at each other. My mum threw a stick that flew about a mile; everyone, including my mum, was amazed at how far the stick went. I wandered off and found an old building with a back door, I went in through the door and discovered a museum. I went to the top of some winding stairs and found some exhibits; there were some WWII machine guns behind Perspex and a rusty old hand grenade out in the open, I considered stealing the hand grenade to take home and show my friend Neil but thought better of it and put it down. An old man came along and told me I was in the Imperial War Museum, which in my reality is in London, and that he’d wandered in here when he was about my age (about 15 in this dream) and never found his way out again. I was sure that with my powers, even if I could find the right doors, I could keep knocking walls down in a straight line till I found myself outside again.
27-June-2004: I had a dream that fifteen others and myself were involved in a very complex bank robbery in Switzerland. We’d infiltrated and taken over a post office next to the bank for about a year and broke into the bank from there. Instead of actually stealing any gold or money, we had a computer console with a screen and a probe that sank itself into the wall of the vault and connected up to the bank’s main computer. I put a four digit passcode in and the console started accessing millions of bank accounts around the world; we had only minutes before the bank’s employees would arrive for work, but the console was extracting extra dollars every second from random bank accounts and depositing them into our own. We hoped to get a few thousand dollars each out of it before the console was discovered and removed. As the front doors of the bank opened, we made our way out through the post office and walked very calmly back to our apartment in the old town. We had a computer there where we could see our bank balances; see how long the console was operating until its discovery. We were getting very nervous because our bank balances were going up and up, the bank’s staff hadn’t noticed the console clinging to the wall like a conspicuous limpet mine, siphoning off masses of funds. The amount the console was taking multiplied every second, like a snowball out of control it was gathering ever-increasing amounts of money. After three hours people around the world were beginning to notice, we were in far too deep. Some of the poorer countries were completely out of cash, reported one TV news station; the money was going somewhere but nobody knew where. Someone called Andy suggested we phone the dullard Swiss bank employees and give them the passcode to switch the console off, quickly before the whole world is broke and we fifteen have all the money. I’m not sure what we were going to do next; we never told the bank about the console, and the world never got its money back.
26-June-2004: I dreamt that my flatmate, Ian, wanted to do some life drawing; he had a female friend that he wanted to draw naked, he was already naked and insisted that I should be too. We went into my younger brother’s bedroom in the house where I grew up, there was a young naked woman with long black hair lying on the floor waiting to be drawn; Ian knew her but I’d never seen her before, she kept joking at how funny it was to be able to see both of our private parts as she lay looking up at us. Ian shone a light in her face so he could get interesting reflections of her body; she complained that she couldn’t see us now, that it wasn’t fair, and jokingly compared it to an interrogation saying. ‘You wont get any secrets out of me comrades.’ Later the same girl was in the bath, she was letting out menstrual blood so much that the water was red and she had blood covering a lot of her body. She seemed to think everything was normal but I was sure she wasn’t meant to bleed that much. I must have been wrong because later she was fine.
25-June-2004: I’d only been asleep for half an hour before I was woken up again by a scary dream… I was running around York train station when a rat jumped out from someone’s luggage and clamped its jaws onto my fist; it was biting me so hard that it snapped both it upper and lower jaw bones, the crack it made was such a horrible sound that I woke up and cringed.
24-June-2004: I had a nice sunny dream where I was walking with a botanist through some shallow water over green turf; we came to a wonderful placid lake with a large otter swimming in the middle, the lake had evergreen trees on the opposite bank. I remarked how wonderful it would be to strip off and go for a swim; the botanist agreed but said that we couldn’t do that, it was a nature reserve especially for the animals and walked off towards a big wooden house. I followed him and wondered what were we if not animals? My feet were squelching in the shallow water and the botanist asked me if I was wearing rubber boots like him, his were light green; I looked down at my feet and saw black footwear sticking out from my trousers and wondered if I had put rubber boots on or just wore normal shoes. I lifted my trousers up and saw that I was only wearing black leather shoes; my feet were getting wet, but I didn’t care. We went inside the house that was actually a kind of country tearoom; we walked past a little girl playing a grand piano and went up a broad staircase then took a seat at a dining table. A boy came and sat next to me, he had a plate of yellow food that looked a bit like French fries; he said, ‘This food was brought to me with the letter kay; mattash, pattash, yakash.’ I felt I should know what that meant, but I did not.
23-June-2004: I think some government agents were invading my dreams, trying to find a secret bunker that lies underneath the back of the garden at the house where I grew up. There were also some space aliens involved, I was avoiding them by climbing the old apple tree.
22-June-2004: I dreamt that my leg was vibrating, it was my phone; when I answered it Jackie from work was telling me not to forget that I was working on Saturday night, then she started crying. She was saying that my friend Mark and his Wife Chiemi had been in a car crash; she said Mark had been out partying all night and was driving home when he slowed down for a duck crossing the road, a car crashed into them from behind. Jackie kept telling me that Andy was in a really bad way, he was at the hospital if I wanted to see him; I didn’t have a clue who Andy was and wanted to know if Mark and Chiemi were okay or not. I woke up before I found out, the conversation was so loud and real in my dream that my ear was aching just like I’d actually been on the phone.
21-June-2004: I dreamt I was travelling in Iran with an old friend called Lewis, and some other people I don’t know. We met some wonderfully kind people who let us into their lives, we spent a lot of time playing music. There were some interesting flutes that I played music on from different areas of the world; my favourite was an ancient Egyptian flute that that had only five finger holes instead of six, an Iranian man had found some traditional Egyptian music on paper that I could play. As I played the flute all our heads were filled with visions of ancient Egypt, the Nile, and crocodiles. It came to the end of our vacation time and Lewis said it was time to go; I asked why we had to go and we all got together and decided that we didn’t after all, we stayed there another three months taking drumming lessons and playing in live drumming concerts. We came back to England but kept going back to Iran every month or so for about five years, always playing drums, buying new drums, and repairing old drums. A woman that came with us once bought a huge round drum that lots of people could play at once, it was awesome.
20-June-2004: I was in an old town in England I’ve been to before in other dreams, but I have no idea where it is in waking life. In this dream my grandparents were alive again; they had died but they had joined some scheme that allowed them to come back to life, they said, ‘Life begins at eight-five,’ and were all smiles. I an old lady had dumped an old white D-series French Citroen on a grassy island in the middle of town; I rescued it and painted it red. I loved the car and drove it around town all the time, but everyone was laughing at me because they thought it was going to break down any minute, the fools!
19-June-2004: I found myself a little lost in Bradford, England, in my car. I dreamt that I’d left the house to go and buy something but kept getting further and further away from York, England, where I live. I turned down a street in Bradford and came to a dead-end, when I turned around to leave the street it came out onto a completely different road. Thinking I must have made a mistake I kept going back down the dead-end street to search for other exits, but there were none.
18-June-2004: I dreamt I was a French policeman working undercover in London with English detectives; we were just heading back to our police van at night in the rain when we spotted some teenagers breaking into it. They saw us and ran, the English detectives all spread out to catch them and ran off through some abandoned warehouses; I walked casually around the side of an old building and bumped into one of the teenagers trying to double back, I caught him and put him in the van. They turned out to be part of the gang we were investigating; the boy I arrested was the only one we had caught. We hypnotized the boy to get him to give us the names of his accomplices, repeating a mantra over and over again to make him feel okay about giving their names away. As he came out of hypnosis and I asked him to give us the names, he started singing the mantra like a corny 1970s song…
I’m doing this to make my life be—-dder, I’m doing this, fo—-r me!
I awoke with these two lines going over and over in my head.
17-June-2004: Yet another dream about school as a child, sort of, I was kind of grown up but a child at the same time. A small boy was walking past the tennis courts with me and I was telling him how bad bullying was, he didn’t agree and thought it was fun until I pointed out that he as being bullied by my brother. He said that was different, he was going to tell my brother to get lost the next time it happened. I left him and started walking off towards the playground by the pool, when I looked back he was confronting my brother. I saw the smaller boy push my brother away, but he simply laughed very loudly and kicked the smaller boy very hard between the legs. I shouted at my brother telling him he was crazy and that I was going to report him. He thought I was bluffing but I helped the boy up and took him to the head of school to report what happened. When we got there it was all high-tech, the young boy had to type his name into a tiny keypad and a ticket with a number came out, we had to go and sit with a group of people who also had tickets to see the head teacher.
16-June-2004: A friend called Paul just moved to a new house recently; I never before dreamt about his old house yet, after only being there a few weeks, I had a dream about his new house which is a bungalow. I dreamed that when I arrived the house was wobbling, I hadn’t noticed before but the house had been built on thousands of tiny metal springs. I recalled how all new houses of this kind were being shipped fully constructed with springs on the bottom to make walking around more comfortable, it all made perfect sense at the time. Paul’s dad was in the garage at the back, I went to say hi and picked his coat off a hook, it was so heavy that it dropped to the floor. I couldn’t believe how heavy it was, there was a battle of wits between me, the coat, and the hook I was trying to return it to, I felt like Superman drained of all his powers. When I finally returned the coat, Paul’s dad showed me a new very high-powered torch/flashlight he’d just bought; it was so bright that even ghosts were lit up by it. Every time he switched on the light we saw spiritual spectres shrieking away from its beam.
15-June-2004: I sometimes play first person shooting games on the internet; last night I dreamt that I was playing a live version, still on the internet but sometime in the future where you can actually be inside the game. There were two teams that each had their own base; on the opposing team was Nester, a guy who posts messages on the Terry Pratchett message board that I’ve never actually met in real life. All his team members seemed to know exactly what they were doing. Normally the objective in these games is to capture their flag, in this game we were supposed to fill Nester’s base up with as much poo as possible, we were carrying the foul-smelling brown stuff in baskets, using every trick we could think of to avoid Nester’s troops, but they were too good and we never delivered one ounce of poo. I even tried logging myself out mid-game, hoping that Nester’s team would go and look somewhere else so I could log back in at the same spot but it never worked, Nester knew all the right places to post guards. He knew exactly where I was going to log back in every time.
14-June-2004: I dreamed that I was in the mothership with my friend Neil, he’d got the floor of the bridge all dirty with his muddy boots. When we went up into orbit to look at Earth from space I made the floor transparent for a better view, the last time I did this it really freaked out the passenger, this time it didn’t make any difference because of Neil’s muddy boots. He insisted we go and land on Table Mountains north of Cape Town, South Africa, to see if he could buy a joint off of someone. I didn’t really want to go there but gave up in the end; when we landed there was an old Zulu trying to wave us off the mountaintop, Neil ran out and wanted to start a fight with him.
13-June-2004: All the earthquake and volcano type disaster areas were shifting around the world; I dreamed that I was standing in the street where I grew up with some friends; there was a massive plume of thick grey smoke come from Sean Easton’s (childhood friend) house, someone thought about calling the fire brigade until we noticed the smoke was actually coming from the tip of a volcano, it was pushing itself up through the grass in Sean’s garden. The ground was shaking and we knew it was going to erupt any second, I ran past my house shouting, ‘volcano!’ but no one paid any attention. Some people stopped running when they were halfway down the street and I was shouting at them that it wasn’t far enough, volcanoes spew lava for miles. It settled down eventually and never went off.
12-June-2004: I dreamt that my brother was annoying me again but we made friends and went to an old fashioned, yet new trendy, game arcade. There were lots of retro-style games that I never saw before and there were two guys there that were really stones (smoking joints or something) who made us play a bizarre kind of table football/basketball with them. Instead of just one ball, dozens of balls were shooting around the table while the player tries to capture them with crab-claw-like clamps and deflect them into their own goal. I think I won in the end with 1117 goals. After that a woman tried to get us to play at her table but we couldn’t be bothered to wait for her to explain how, it had something to do with a scarf and a piece of pink squidgy stuff and looked very boring… the two stoned guys were fascinated.
11-June-2004: I dreamt I had gone to Wakefield in England with some friends, I have no idea why we went to Wakefield; there’s no reason why I should go there in waking life. In the dream we had all gone to a new nightclub that closes at exactly 5:55 A.M., the plan was to stay there all night but the club was boring and full of idiots it bright silver glitter-wear. For the first half of the dream I had the feeling that I had to stay there till the end, but I later realized that 5:55 A.M. was a significant time for something happening in the future, I’d got the two mixed up. Once I made this discovery we were all free to leave the horrible club, which we did immediately. When we got outside it was daylight, even though it was supposed to be about 1 A.M., and I was flying from rooftop to rooftop until I thought I should stop because I didn’t want to stand out in a strange town. We all turned a corner near a river and walked into a sort of outdoor fightclub, a line of men were picking people out of the audience to fight; one of them asked me but I laughed and told him that I couldn’t fight, I thought he wouldn’t care but my reply made him go away. He asked my friend Steve who said, ‘Sorry mate, but I’ve got two kids to worry about.’ The guy replied, ‘Cool, this’ll be great.’ Steve said, ‘Okay, fair enough,’ and prepared to fight the man. We were all excited because we knew Steve used to be a bit of a psychopath when we were all at college together, we knew Steve would totally bash his brains out. Someone commented on how thuggish and caveman-like these Wakefield people were and I said, ‘I know, was that a train we took to get here or a time machine?’ Though I was kind of looking forward to Steve beating him up a bit when I woke up and missed everything!
10-June-2004: My grandparents used to live in this old house inside the medieval York city walls; I dreamed that some friends and I bought it last night and were getting ready to spend the night there. I couldn’t go upstairs because I still remembered the ghosts from when I was a child; the only room left upstairs (that hadn’t been taken by my friends) was the one I used to sleep in when I was young, the most (maybe only) haunted room in the house. I sat downstairs in the kitchen instead, drinking and telling the neighbours over the wall that I couldn’t go to sleep because of the ghosts. They sympathized with me and said that’s why the previous owners had left.
9-June-2004: I had a dream that my mother and stepfather were back together again, it could be considered a nightmare if the thought wasn’t so ludicrous, my brother and I were teenagers again in our old home and they (mother and stepfather) kept creeping off upstairs like no one knew what they were doing. Meanwhile my brother was behaving oddly, asking me if I’d like a cup of tea and being really kind and polite. A guy called John Shipley was there too, he’s normally a bit of a hard man but he was crying because I’d stolen some Spam (meat) off him.
8-June-2004: I like to read Terry Pratchett novels and post messages on his fan’s web site; last night I dreamt that all the people that post messages on the web site came to York and I met them all on the medieval city walls. We were all trying to guess who was who, apart from a couple of us who knew each other already. One of them who goes by the name Rincewind tried to push me off the walls but I spun him around so that we both fell off, some people laughed until Rincewind hit a rock at the bottom and died. I went down to him and laid on hands to bring him back to life, like some kind of magical priest.
7-June-2004: Dreaming of a round the world cruise, as a child with school. We first went to Spain in the ship and stayed there for three weeks; I met two girls that were apparently my arch rivals in a kind of comic book type scenario, I made peace with them by teaching them how to jump from high places and make your molecules cling to the molecules in the air as you descend, until you land softly on the ground. They would never need a parachute ever again. After Spain the ship went around Cape Horn, the weather was terrible with storms and high waves; I thought we weren’t going to make it. Once around the Horn we headed north but I was sick of the whole trip; I was airlifted off the ship and taken to Japan, where I knew the ship was going to end up. I was glad to get there in a few hours rather than days but discovered that I missed going to Las Vegas and Los Angeles, I wasn’t too bothered about Vegas but I always thought I’d go to Los Angeles one day and was disappointed I’d missed the chance to get it out of the way.
6-June-2004: I dreamt I was in a kind of sports hall and a teacher was asking me some serious questions, she was annoyed because I wasn’t taking her, or the class, seriously at all. It suddenly went dark when someone snuck up on me and put a cloth bag over my head; I thought it was either Tony Easton or his brother Sean (childhood neighbours) as I reached behind me and used a jui jutsu move to throw him over my hip, he crashed onto his back on the hard floor. It was Tony. No one went to see if he was okay as he lay there in pain and I kept giggling every time he groaned and tried to get up; now and again I said, ‘Ha ha, the bionic man,’ and laughed and laughed like it was the funniest thing in the world… I was still laughing about it when I woke up.
5-June-2004: I dreamt I was in a queue to buy some food with my girlfriend with me on my right; she was wearing a red business suit. All the other people around us, hundreds of them, were shrouded in mist or clouds apart from a friend called Mark a few feet behind us. I haven’t spoken to him in real life for about 8 months and was wondering what he was thinking. I didn’t really want him to come and talk to us if he was going to be strange, drugged up or something; but I did sort of want to say ‘hi’ at the same time.
4-June-2004: A confusing dream at first where I found myself climbing some stairs in a dirty house with my brother. Something had happened so that we needed somewhere to stay for the night, all that we could find was a grotty old house that was full of really rough people. I had to go right up into the attic and my brother was sleeping in a room on the floor below; he didn’t stay for long but went downstairs and next door to a pub called The Swan. I was left alone in a little room with a man that instantly hated me and his girlfriend, who tried to make me feel welcome. Every time I spoke the man winced at the way I pronounced my words, I could tell he was thinking I was an educated know-it-all while, at the same time, his girlfriend was pleased to be able to talk to someone that could string a sentence together; which further angered the man. His attitude changed slightly when someone came in and recognized me as the owner of Manchester City Football Club (very odd as I hate football), and started whispering to the angry man, they both ran out together and I knew they were off to tell the newspapers, so I left. The next thing I knew I was in a huge shopping mall in Japan somewhere with my girlfriend, we’d bought the mall and every single store within it; everything was going well until a samurai (modern upper-class Japanese, not old-fashioned warrior) came to our house and wanted to kill me. I’d been sort of expecting it, we were old enemies, but when he got out of his car he had a sword, I didn’t know we were going to be using swords. Our butler answered the door and told the samurai, ‘I know this is frightfully inconvenient old chap, but I’m afraid the master doesn’t have a sword and is therefore unable to fight you on this day.’ After which the aristocratic Japanese man simply said, ‘Oh,’ then got back into his car and drove away.
3-June-2004: I had a dream that I was in Australia in the desert, I’d been working there for six weeks on some kind of X-Files type operation. It was time for me to go home but the boss wanted me to stay on working there. I didn’t want to live in Australia, I had a girlfriend in America and we were deciding whether we should live in America or England; I didn’t want to tell her that we might have to live in Australia! Then I realized I didn’t need to get to Australia by plane, I could use the mothership. I told the boss that it didn’t matter where we decided to live, we could be back on the ranch in Australia within two hours of being called. He thought I was being stupid or trying to make him feel better, so I made him promise not to tell any of the others in our team if I showed him how I would do it. He agreed so I telepathically asked Catface to bring the ship down and take us to England. Within seconds a black and white helicopter carrying a crate came plummeting out of the sky at, what my boss thought, was an alarming rate. I told him it wasn’t actually a helicopter and, as if in agreement, the machine stopped dead about twenty feet from the ground with its rotor blades still. I directed my boss into the crate which transformed into the bridge of the mothership, I asked him if he was afraid of heights and he replied that he wasn’t, so I made the skin of the ship transparent so it looked like we were standing on nothing. We shot straight up into the air and out of the atmosphere until we were orbiting the Earth, my boss decided he was scared of heights after all. We hovered over to the Northern Hemisphere and waited for England to come around, then plummeted straight down again till we were at my house, then took the same trip in reverse back to the desert. The trip only took about twenty minutes… I couldn’t remember much after that until I checked the dream message board today and someone else’s experience reminded me of something strange that happened to me. I woke up, or thought I did, and felt the presence of a man in my room. I was certain that he was a vampire just standing there watching me, I didn’t look for a long time because I was too afraid; but I eventually decided I was too tired to care and told the thing to get lost and went back to sleep.
2-June-2004: Someone was telling me about a dream (within my dream) that predicted all the volcanoes were going to erupt at once, which would fuse together all the copper in the world. They were just explaining how this could be used for cheaper telephone calls and getting electricity to the far reaches of the globe, when a man fell from some scaffolding. He hit a concrete pathway that was in my childhood back garden, closely followed by a metal pole that broke both of his legs. The man was Robert Blake, a boy I went to school with. I saved his life by making him lie still until the paramedics got there; his back was broken in a number of places so his spinal cord would have snapped at the slightest of movements.
1-June-2004: I had a dream about fishing in the river Ouse in York, England. Every time I cast the line in it got snagged on some piece of trash that someone had dumped in the river, bits of plastic and empty soda cans. I gave up after a while and went inside a house I’ve never seen before, found my stepfather preparing to go outside for some fishing. He bullied me into going back outside with him and, worst of all, he made me wear a pair of huge green waders so I could get right into the river, the feet were too small. A girl called Kat was by the river when I returned, she hasn’t spoken to me in years in real life and I never found out why; she didn’t speak to me this time either, just looked past me and spoke to everyone else as if I wasn’t there. I tried to talk to her but she transformed into Margo, a character from a 70s British Sitcom, and started complaining about her wrinkles.