30-June-2006: I was in a dream with a guy, Jason Carlton, from my childhood school in a car that he was driving really fast. I didn’t mind that he was driving so fast and screeching around corners because he was a good driver, sort of like a professional race driver or something. We went to a little bungalow that was either in Ireland or Australia, to meat an Irish Terry Pratchett fan who was one of the Terry Pratchett Message Board members in the dream, but is actually a member of the cast (Connor)of Neighbours, an Australian soap opera, in waking life.
29-June-2006: I dreamt that I went to visit the university town of Cambridge in the UK. I was wandering the upper floors of an old college when a massive student protest began outside and on the ground floor. I don’t know what they were protesting about, but it culminated in them setting fire to the oldest college at Cambridge and me rescuing people and computers.
28-June-2006: I dreamt that my stepfather, who I haven’t seen in a decade, was driving a classic white convertible, 1969 Ford Galaxy and stalling it all the time.
27-June-2006: I had a dream that I was with my friend Neil Kay and his girlfriend, Jenny Sharp, in Japan. We were walking around a museum in a small town and looking at an unexploded atom bomb from World War Two. The town had never become famous because the bomb never blew up, and the Americans had never admitted to dropping the dysfunctional atomics. We all found it rather creepy and quite disturbing to be standing next to something with such destructive power, but the curator of the museum assured us that the bomb was way past its sell by date and, because it never went off as it was supposed to, it would never explode. I translated all this to Neil and Jenny, but we were all still creeped out by the bomb so we went to Italy instead, where we waited for ages to get a meal in a beachside restaurant.
26-June-2006: I was dreaming about rollarblading along hilly country roads in Yorkshire, England. The roads were very steep and it was difficult to slow my speed when skating downhill.
25-June-2006: I dreamt that I was making Marcia (my wife) laugh and giggle simply by saying, “Achi”, “Ach”, and “Utz”.
24-June-2006: I was in an uber surreal dream where there were two alternate Edinburghs in Scotland, I kept wandering between them. One of them, the closest to reality but more like Glasgow, was all run down and rife with crime. The other Edinburgh was all red and Chinese-looking, with a big brother/super commercialism twist. Everything talked to you; red steps up to a temple asked if you wanted your shoes polished on your way up (for a small fee) and automated gizmos on street corners, like little pagodas, offered Pantene and Loreal shampoo and conditioner with a street-side wash and blow dry included in the price. As I walked down some steps into a Chinese marketplace, a robotic voice instructed me to receive my enforced Taoism message from the old man at the bottom. A woman next to me complained that all the messages were boring clichés and the old man, thinking it was me that spoke, gave me a little Taoism book instead – like those novelty miniature bibles you used to get many years ago. I took it and he asked me for twenty dollars, I laughed and said allowed to society in general, “I’m not paying for your stupid Daoisms and automated commercialism, there are no real people here and no police to make me pay,” then walked away between the curved roofs laughing.
23-June-2006: I had a dream that I was in a late night bar, or nightclub, in York, England, that doesn’t exist in waking life (where there is actually a bakery). I came out of the club and four men in white shirts followed me. I was just about to cross the street when the men attacked me. I shouted for help, there were loads of people around, but no one came to help so I screamed like a girl instead. Three of the men ran away because of the screaming, but the fourth carried on attacking me. A bus came around the dark corner in the street and I flung the guy over my shoulder, with a jui jutsu move, and right under the bus, where he was killed.
22-June-2006: I dreamed that I watched Richard Lowe, a man I went to university with, rob a bank then stash the money in his car. While Richard was chilling out in an Irish bar someone stole his car with all the money in it.
21-June-2006: I dreamt I was being chased by monsters around a spaceship that was designed like an Oxford college. I had a revolver (gun) where you put electrically charged rods in the chambers instead of regular bullets.
20-June-2006: I had a whole dream, that seemed to last hours, about me talking to my friend Ché about welding – in particular gas or oxy-acetylene welding – and my life history and how I became artistically proficient at gas welding.
19-June-2006: I have a friend in waking life called Nathan Wood. In my dream I was at his house and he had a sister, that doesn’t exist in waking life, who was incredibly strong and slightly retarded. She picked me up and ran around the room with me like I was as light as a teddy bear. Everyone was worried, including me, that she might knock over an ornament or the TV, but the atmosphere was jolly and happy nevertheless.
Later Nathan and his dad, Dave, were asking me about different Japanese words and Dave asked me how to say Hanushi and what it meant. In the dream I looked up Hanushi and it meant ‘magpie’, but in reality I don’t think Hanushi is a Japanese word at all.
18-June-2006: I dreamt that I was shunned by the local community for jumping from a high place, Skeldergate Bridge in York, and landing unharmed on the pavement in a nonchalant manner. The bridge is not impossibly high, maybe only thirty feet or so, but there was obviously something odd about me that I could jump down from such a height without hurting myself.
17-June-2006: I was dreaming about a dark bar in a town I’ve never seen before. There was a girl sitting at a table that everyone was trying to be friends with, I think she was Greek. She was a college girl and very smart, not really interested in most of the men’s advances. I got talking to her, more as a friend than anything romantic, and my friend Dave Smiley kept following us around, totally drunk and pretty much incoherent. We kept walking away from him and going to really odd places, like the attic in a barn, but Dave always stumbled upon us and continued his slurred soliloquies.
From the barn attic the girl and I took a complicated route through secret passageways and hidden doors and ended up at her home, a huge trailer in the style of an art deco movie star’s trailer from the heydays of early Hollywood. I was a little surprised, but only a very little, to find Dave already there and talking to Oliver Reed, who himself was a renowned alcoholic up until when he died. Oliver was only slightly more coherent than Dave and I told him that he would die from his drinking whilst making a movie about a gladiator sometime in the future. Oliver seemed rather pleased with the thought and produced the largest and brightest bottle of Cognac I’ve ever seen.
I decided to give up worrying about Dave and Oliver’s alcoholic tendencies and proceed to show off my skills in bending unlikely objects by manipulating their molecules, such as a sign I could reach through the window of the enormous trailer. I showed them how we could switch worlds through a mirror, then later brought the four of us – the Greek girl, Dave, Oliver and myself – inside a computer game called Battlefield 2. We were actually inside the game and felt real pain whenever we were shot, but total ecstasy when we picked up a medipac and healed ourselves. We kept trying out different aspects of the game and found we could actually physically increase our enthusiasm and energy by simply shouting, ‘BooYaa!’ The louder we shouted it, the better we felt.
16-June-2006: I dreamt I was house hunting with Marcia in a leafy suburb of York, where we live. For some reason I’d taken Benji (a friend who sometimes posts on the forums here) along with us and he was being his usual hyperactive self, running in and out of people’s houses before anyone could stop him.
15-June-2006: I was in a dream set underground, like in a sub-basement of a factory, all murky and damp. I was with a small group of people being hunted down by killer robots, we were scouring a room for weapons we could use. I found a tool and weapons box that someone pointed me to and told me to arm myself, the only problem was the gadgets were all futuristic and I couldn’t tell the difference between ordinary tools and proper weapons. I grabbed a few items, hoping I got something useful for fighting robots, and stood in line waiting for a scan. The scanner we were waiting for was supposed to tell how well charged our weapons were, so I thought I least I would find out which of the things, if any, I had picked up were actually weapons. I was just about to discover what I had, as a scanning light ran down my body, when Marcia came into the room and woke me up.
14-June-2006: I had another dream with Lewis Evans in it. This time he had a bottle of wine that I thought looked very nice, though I sort of had the feeling that the bottle of wine I was carrying was slightly better. I was telling Lewis how lucky he was to have such a nice bottle of wine, all the while thinking mine was better and that I would surprise him with it later. When later arrived I brought out my bottle of wine then discovered it was exactly the same as Lewis’, after which I realised we were both lucky to have such fine wines.
13-June-2006: I had a rather jumbled dream about a friend called Lewis Evans, an autistic child, flying a large troop-carrying helicopter and deploying tanks (too slowly for Lewis’s liking) across a battlefield.
12-June-2006: I dreamt that I helped a man with herpes cure himself using the power of his mind. There was a trick anyone could use to find knots in the subconscious mind that, when untied, release powers available to any living thing in the universe. There was also something about a snobby elite who’d discovered this technique who were annoyed at me for showing the man how to use it.
11-June-2006: My friend Neil Kay was concerned that I felt I could not speak to him and visit him easily, which made me happy that he cared.
10-June-2006: I dreamt that I went to France to see a woman called Pauline Pfeiffer, a friend’s auntie, who I’d stayed with thirteen years ago in waking life. She lived in a beautiful house with a high stone wall and an arched entrance leading into a garden courtyard when I last saw her. I went to her house in the dream hoping she was still living there, which she was but the house had changed. The high walls had gone, which made the house into a detached building with the archway building in front of it. In waking life she’d told me the arch/barn building needed extensive repairs. In the dream it turned out they’d got rid of the walls to pay for the archway building. The house itself was full of people that apparently lived there. Her husband was still in the house too, which was quite surprising as he was very ill the last time I saw him in waking life. At the time her ex husband used to visit to help look after her ill husband, but in this dream they all lived together and they all seemed very happy.
9-June-2006: I dreamt that my grandparents, who died five years ago in the same year in waking life, were still alive and arguing. My granddad said to Grandma, ‘You know, I don’t think I’m going to eat chicken anymore?’ My grandma was shouting and cursing loudly, saying: ‘What the fuck do you mean you aren’t going to eat chicken? What the Hell is the fucking point of that?’ I tried to calm her down by saying it didn’t really matter, there are plenty of other food types, but she kept on shouting as if their sixty years of mild-mannered marriage has been bottling up hidden anger.
8-June-2006: I was dreaming about a woman who was cross at her furniture for not seeing that she had emotional problems. The furniture could speak and took it in turns saying sorry to her; the table lamp, the armchair and the couch all said, “we’re very sorry, we should have known”.
7-June-2006: I dreamt that I was deciding which dream to put in my dream diary, then decided to put the one in where I had the plague. As I thought this I was back inside the plague dream at the bottom of a pit with other plague victims. I don’t think the plague dream actually existed before I thought of it. The pit we were in was a sort of dusty moat in front of a castle, very deep with men and women walking amongst the castellation high above. There was a narrator’s voice over the dream as we looked to the lucky people above us, and I wrote into my dream diary, that said, echoing the words I wrote: “we lamented our non-plagued counterparts up in the castle”, after which I laughed uproariously and my mother said, “Oh please don’t, I can imagine something like this happening for real”.
6-June-2006: I dreamt that I was being kept inside a mental hospital with a bunch of other people, none of us where meant to be in there. I escaped with a guy from my younger years in waking life called Mark Rowley and a girl I can’t remember. Mark was a bit of a jolly psychopath in waking life, he wasn’t much different in this dream. We were split up during our escape but Mark found me half an hour later walking along a quite suburban street, he screeched to a halt beside me in a Ford Capri that he’d stolen. I reluctantly got in the car with him to put some distance between myself and the mental hospital, but it was very scary because he drove like a lunatic – just not the kind of lunatic they normally lock up.
5-June-2006: I dreamt that I was telling my friend Neil about a dream I had a few months ago where I sneaked into and army base at a place called Strensall in an alternate reality.
4-June-2006: I dreamt that I was an ex James Bond actor chasing another ex James Bond character in a fast car near the river in York, England. We were playing with big boys’ toys really, he in a new Bond car and me in a white Lotus Esprit from one of the movies. We were showing off and trying to see which car was the best. I had the impression that a woman was watching us and that she was the one we were showing off to. The two of us fired all kind of different weapons from our car to show which was best, but I won out in the end because my car could go underwater like a submarine. I drove my car into the river and couldn’t get it to submerge at first, I was treating it too much like a submarine and waiting for it to sink – what I had to do, I eventually discovered, was use the steering wheel like an aircraft joystick and point the nose down to get it to go deeper underwater.
The water was really murky at first but it cleared when I got to the bottom and opened out into a bizarre, underwater room with table lamps, chairs and ornaments whirling around like they were caught in a miniature maelstrom. I drove the car through a door into a kitchen in an alternate reality. I got out and found an old Jewish woman looking out through a window at soldiers marching down the street. She told me that she was still upset about World War Two so I told her that it was ages ago and she should try not to think about it. She thought I was crazy and I saw why when I looked out through the window myself. It was an awful parody of our own world with high, concrete walls and razor wire – there was Cyrillic graffiti sprayed across the drab surfaces. In her reality the Russians and the Germans had won World War Two (The Germans’ supplies were exhausted after they’d defeated Britain so they made a truce with Russia), it was they who divided up Europe and it had stayed divided ever since.
3-June-2006: I was a detective in a dream where I had to investigate a modelling agency for underhand practices, but the more I got to know the models and the owners of the agency the more it became apparent that the business was legitimate and actually quite nice.
2-June-2006: I was riding the train from York to London in England. I dreamt that I was fascinated with the idea of everyone on the train being naked. I think I was on my way to London to meet Richard Branson to suggest he start a nudist rail service on his Virgin trains.
1-June-2006: I dreamt that I was overseeing a women’s football game, that’s European football not American. Whichever end of the field I stood the team coming from the opposite direction always scored. The women made me take it in turns to stand at either end of the pitch so the game was fair. They said my goal-inducing powers were called Northern Exposure.