30-November-2003: I was a Chinese kung fu sword fighter in Japan; I was famous for being deadly and helping the Japanese fight off an invasion by the Americans. Later I was on the south coast of England, as an Englishman, firing rockets over the channel to France to blow up the Germans in WWII. The Germans were firing back but doing little damage. A cease-fire was called and a German general came over for a chat. He was appalled because on our side there were only three of us; he had three hundred soldiers manning the artillery on his side of the channel and we were beating him.
29-November-2003: I went back to my grandma’s old house with my family. I was trying to get to sleep in my old bedroom, it was haunted when I was a child and it was still haunted now, a young boy appeared after flapping my bed-sheets around. He said it was nice to see me again, all grown up, and that he thought I’d never come back. I was never really sure when I grew up if all the childhood haunting had been real; now the boy confirmed for me that it was his ghost that had been frightening me. He hadn’t meant to scare me, he just wanted someone to talk to. I couldn’t believe it was only him all the time and asked him if there were any other ghosts in the house; he told me there were another five, all men that had died in Greece during WWII. I told the rest of my family about the ghost boy and everyone believed me, even though they couldn’t see him, apart from my stepfather who isn’t all that bright. I even got him to knock a few things over like he used to do when I was an infant; my stepfather wasn’t convinced but, as the evidence mounted, the rest of my family slowly began to be able to see him.
28-November-2003: I was with a friend called Carly in a new type of nightclub in Leeds, England. It played heavy rock music and had a stage with a labyrinth of dark curtains, dry ice and clockwork movements. When you entered the club you had to choose a team to be on; either zombies or soldiers. We chose to be soldiers and were given a Kevlar vest and a laser rifle with a chainsaw attachment. We also got a utility belt with a radio to talk to other soldiers in the nightclub and a proximity radar to detect all the zombies in the club. There were some punk girls in the corner waiting to join the game; one of them said, ‘Let’s just go in guns blazing. If we get killed off in the first half hour, we can go home and have a break for dinner then come back.’
Carly kept making silly statements about how fashionable the straps on the vest were and what make of buttons were being used on the belts; others pretended not to hear him or shook their heads, I went straight inside to hunt some zombies!
27-November-2003: I was quite young again playing just inside York’s city walls near where my grandparents used to live. A boy called Neil Burgess came along in a denim jacket; he had a gun on him that he’d gotten it all dirty, the gun was mine so I took it off him and fixed it up. We were waiting on Nunnery Lane to get to a sweet shop across the street; it was the shop my mother used to live in before I was born, the shop is no longer there. I couldn’t wait for the traffic so I leaped high in the air, over the cars, and landed on the opposite pavement outside the sweet shop.
26-November-2003: I was in charge of a naval battleship on a mission to invade a terrorist island nation; I wasn’t the captain of the ship and had to hang onto the side and give my orders from there. There were some factories and chemical plants that needed to be destroyed; every time I gave the order to bombard them the captain had to approve it first. It got really annoying, I’d shout ‘open fire’, the captain would relay the order and the crew would fire the big guns at the island; the annoying part was that they’d only do it once and we’d have to go through the whole process again. I tried to explain that when I say ‘open fire’ I mean for them to carry on bombarding the factories until I tell them to stop; it didn’t work, they kept on firing the shots one at a time.
25-November-2003: I was dreaming that I couldn’t get to sleep and that I was watching TV all night. An Australian soap opera called ‘Neighbours’ came on and I became part of the show; getting involved with the plot and organising someone’s birthday party.
24-November-2003: I invented a new kind of material based on oil; it could be worn as a mask that automatically covered your face if you went underwater, the oil-material filtered oxygen out of the water so you could breath. A group of us made a topless submarine; we all went exploring with the oil masks on under the Atlantic, we found a secret base where they were shrinking animals for nefarious reasons. There was an elephant the size of a Chihuahua in a little round steel container; it was making little trumpeting noises and trying to get out. The underwater complex was massive with all kinds of nasty experiments been carried out on animals and some humans. We went back to the docking bay where our submarine was and pressed some buttons that made half of the vehicle turn into a six-metre-tall robot, we ordered it to start wrecking the place while we rescued the animals and drove back to Europe. We found the headquarters of the evil operation in Belgium; unfortunately we had been infected by some kind of virus in the underwater base, some of our group were dropping to the floor and falling into an everlasting sleep. The virus also made you want to give yourself up to the enemy; a girl in our group came running out of the house that was the evil headquarters and shouted at us that there was no point in running, we would all be dead or captured soon anyway. There were three of us left; we turned and ran for it through the streets of Brussels, everyone seemed to be watching us and reporting our whereabouts. We ducked into a dark and dingy workshop and hid under an old bus; the hunters didn’t find us but one of our remaining party, Dave, had gone completely stiff and unconscious. Now there were only two of us left.
23-November-2003: A few nights ago I had a dream with a house that I’d never seen before that was in a town I’d never seen before, the whole time I was there I was anxious to get back to my home town and familiar surroundings. I’d forgotten all about that house and written about a different dream the following morning. Last night I was at the same house again in exactly the same town, only this time everything was familiar because I’d been there before a few nights ago; I even found the room I was staying in and the same people were there waiting for me. I don’t know any of the people outside of this dream or any of the scenery; in this dream I live in this house with a whole bunch of friendly people, I look forward to visiting them again some night.
22-November-2003: I found myself back at school taking a biology exam; my brother-in-law Ferdie was there too, we really stuck out being thirty-three years old in a room full of sixteen-year-olds. My brother had been annoyed with me earlier that day for not helping him with his revision, not that it would have helped given that he only started it the day before the exam. On my way to the school I met some people I used to know; they didn’t know me as a grown-up and they looked odd to me, like they were seventeen years ago. A boy called John Shipley came running past my front gate and I started laughing at him. He came over all angry because he thought I was mocking him, he didn’t know me yet but I knew he would because I’d done it all before, but I told him I was laughing because he was a funny guy; he could always make people laugh with his jokes. Jason Carlton was with him and he agreed that John does make people laugh, Jason didn’t know me yet either.
21-November-2003: I was standing in front of a very interesting looking cottage (that doesn’t exist) down the street from my childhood home; a woman was waving at me from about a mile away so I waved back, I was wondering how we could see each other from such a great distance. She came up to me on a bicycle; it was Julia, someone I know in my waking life who is always on a bicycle. When she asked me what I was doing here I told her that this was my cottage and that I’d just bought it this very minute. She said it was nice and rode off on her bicycle. After a short while a friend called Jenny came along and wanted to have a look inside my new cottage, for it was now actually my place, so we went inside to have a look around. The outside of the building looked great, but the inside was a total mess; cobwebs, leftover meals and junk everywhere. The last person that lived there had been an old lady who’d died; the people who sold it to me had just left it as the old lady had left it. Every time Jenny opened a cupboard it was crawling with spiders and other insects, some of them were huge! I got Catface to beam all the rubbish and insects out of the little house so that it was nice and clean.
20-November-2003: There was a three-day party at my old childhood house; all my current friends were there, not the friends I had when I was a child I mean. After the party I went for a walk around the village and spotted a group of Japanese women; I really wanted to talk to them but I thought they might just ignore me, I decided to show off instead by flying around in the air. They didn’t notice me at all and went into a large house. I noticed another girl who was really pretty and said ‘wow!’ and flew down to talk to her; she said wow too, not for the same reason though. It was Kerry, a friend I haven’t seen in over ten years; we started chatting about what we had been doing all this time.
19-November-2003: I was part of a group of time travelling journalists; we were in France armed with digital cameras filming the D-Day landings of WWII. It was getting a bit hectic with soil and debris from the explosions everywhere; I decided it was a bit dangerous so we went away to film Neanderthal man instead. It was all going pretty well until two hurricanes started blowing furiously and the primitive people thought it was our fault; they chased us down to the edge of a ravine and I used my ability to fly to get everyone across.
18-November-2003: My brother and mother were arguing about how useless flies are; saying they didn’t do anything apart from spread germs. I told them how flies help things decompose by laying there eggs on them and how the maggots are born and eat the dead flesh of the animals they are born on. They looked at me as if I was crazy, like I was making the whole thing up. They said they’ve never herd of that before. Later I was in a flat in London watching a film; every time I looked out of the window I got scared and turned my attention back to the film. I was scared because I didn’t know where I was, didn’t recognise the scenery outside. Then I worked it out; I wasn’t in the real London at all, this was the London of my dream world and in reality I was at home in York asleep in bed.
17-November-2003: When I was an art student I used to live in a house on Nunmill Street in York; the house was a total dump with no carpets and no locks on any of the doors or windows, it was the best place I ever lived. I have this credit card in some of my dreams that randomly takes fractions of pennies from large companies around the word whenever I use it; it’s normally used for emergencies and such, but last night I used it to buy the house at Nunmill Street. I also bought a Land Rover and had it painted my own special colour.
16-November-2003: I made a three-pronged candlestick at art college years ago; it has a sort of vine leaf design with three leaves for candle holders, my brother was bending the metal leaves to be obnoxious. Unlike reality, a map of the world was somehow imprinted on either side of each leaf; I tried to remember which technique I’d used to get the images on to the metal, then I became annoyed with my brother for bending them. I took it off him and went upstairs; we were at home again where we grew up. Ben (my brother) started crying because he wanted to play a game (Counter Strike) with me that would have been pointless with only two players. He started making up a pointless story about how he was bending the leaves to make them look better; he got another candlestick I’d made with a fish on it out of his room, he said he’s brought it especially for me but he hadn’t. He’d stolen it from me ages ago.
15-November-2003: I was travelling the world on a cruise ship; it had some kind of problem so that we had been stranded at the same port for over a week, I didn’t mind because the place was beautiful and I’d met an interesting woman. She was older than me, and nothing like the sort of person I’d go for in real life. The dream was all sunny beeches and hotel lobbies; I hoped the ship would never be fixed so we could carry on our little romance forever. It was more like watching a soppy romantic film than actually being about me, we were doing all sorts of silly things before we got together. Like casually brushing each other’s hands together as we talked and nearly kissing but not quite; we knew we were meant to be together but the older woman said it wouldn’t work out, I’d regret it in the end. I gave up and walked away down a hill; I was leaning against a wooden gate feeling dejected, I didn’t care what happened next. Then everything changed; she couldn’t hold back any longer, to the sound of dramatic music she came running down the hill and we flew into each other’s arms.
14-November-2003: A really pretty girl wanted to be my girlfriend but lots of people kept telling me she was bad, she would use me and I’d end up being alone again and feeling miserable. It was quite irritating that they all thought I was so stupid. She had a really silly name, something like Goran Mackenzie, and I was at home waiting for her to come and call around for me. I’d waited for hours and she hadn’t shown up, some friends came instead with ‘Told you soes’ and ‘better off without hers’; I told them to stop being so nasty and to give her a chance, they thought I was being so naïve. Goran turned up eventually; she came walking down the path, looking very sexy, crying and soaking wet in the rain. When I let her in she had a big cake with white cream and red cherries on, it was all squashed and misshaped; she’d wanted to prove that she could be nice and that she wasn’t like the person everyone kept saying she was. She wanted to get changed into something dry and warmer; I told her not to bother, I was going to fly her to Trinidad and the journey would only take three minutes.
13-November-2003: I was with Tilly (my mother’s dog) walking around a golf course. We kept getting angry looks from golfers; some were even brave enough to mutter, ‘You can’t walk your bloody dog on here,’ but no one was brave enough to actually face up to me and say it. I walked around the full course, all eighteen holes, irritating golfers. It was hilarious. The best part was that I owned the golf course; there wasn’t anything they could do about it.
12-November-2003: Sometime in the near future a new high speed train had been invented; my brother, mother and myself were on board travelling from York to London. I was a bit scared from being closed inside the new super-fast train until we discovered there was an upstairs or second floor, we went and sat up there right at the front of the train. There were all the driver’s controls but no driver; I felt a bit comforted by the fact that I could stop the train any time I wanted, assuming the driver must be at the back of the train with the other engine. We were going so fast I couldn’t see the tracks; my brother was insisting I owed him sixty pounds from last Wednesday. I did not. He was lying, just like he used to when we were younger, but my mother was believing him for some reason. He started shouting a lot, again like he used to when he was lying, but I wasn’t going to be intimidated by him like I used to be; I just said, ‘Whatever.’ And ignored him.
11-November-2003: I was in London at night time with some Japanese friends; I was explaining to them what the Japanese writing on their t-shirts meant, it was Japanese lettering but the word were English. A large mushroom cloud erupted in the distance; I broke down the door of a disused building and hustled everyone down to the basement, we had a bit of a wait before the blast-wave got to us so Chiemi phoned some of her friends to tell them to come and join us. She asked me if I wanted to phone Masayo, my ex, but I said, ‘Why the hell should I, she wouldn’t care if I was going to be blown up?’ I asked Chiemi to phone her instead though.
10-November-2003: There was this mad old man I was working with in a nuclear missile silo; the alarms were going off, telling us a missile was incoming. It came straight down on top of us; we managed to get below ground and close the hatch just in time, the atomic explosion was right above our heads. The mad old man launched our missile at nowhere in particular; the guidance radar was broken but the man assured me it would land somewhere in Russia, he was a real lunatic. I was shouting at him; saying how crazy he was just launching it like that when we didn’t know where the attack came from, with no proper direction millions of innocent people could be killed! He didn’t care; putting on his NBC suit he climbed outside to inspect the damage, I did the same and followed him. A shopping mall was still standing and there were some people milling around inside; we headed over to see what was happening, the mad old man was mumbling something about it always being the Russians. As he was ranting I noticed some kind of unusual aircraft dropping off even more unusual soldiers in front of the mall, they were dressed like Nazis but had some kind of other worldly weapons and shiny black helmets. They were forming into groups and herding the surviving humans on to the aircraft; some of the humans were fighting them, shots were been exchanged. I went to help and kung fued my way through the lot of them; we got to the leader who’d been shot and he pleaded with me to let him die with dignity and not to remove his helmet, the old man laughed and smashed a rifle butt through the front of the alien’s helmet. There was no face inside, just some thick and slimy black substance.
9-November-2003: I was working in Quincy’s (the TV medical examiner) lab with Sam; one of the dead bodies was showing some unusual signs, even though the body was definitely dead the nerves were twitching all the time. The body kept sitting up and the legs were shaking; the face muscles were making it smile and alternately look shocked, Monahan thought it was all very funny. The scene switched to a woman in the morgue; one of the little morgue doors was made of glass, the container was full of water and a big fish was swimming inside where there would normally be a body. The woman said, ‘That’s strange, I wonder why the water isn’t leaking out?’ Then she put her hand up to the glass and slipped it right through into the water; there was a brief moment when nothing happened before the whole room was suddenly full of water, a deathly voice started moaning, ‘We’ve got to bring her in,’ as one of the bodies came to life and grabbed for the woman. She swam, for the door with the dead body groping after her… Back in the lab the body was now properly animated and wielding a Japanese sword, I ran away. In the basement of the building was a subway station; I got on the first train that came along, I thought I’d escaped but the train was running alongside a road where the body with the sword had teamed up with Bruce Willis and was chasing me on a motorcycle. When the train stopped they got on; I waited till the last second then jumped off as the doors were closing, I’d escaped a second time and the pair were trapped on the train till the next stop. I had expected to be in Los Angeles but I was somewhere completely different; I was in Delaware, not sure if it was the real place because I’ve never been there before but my dream told me that’s where it was. There was a winding river with lots of white rocks in it; I jumped over the railroad tracks and headed down the rocky river, trying to get as much distance between the murderous duo and me. The dead body spoke to me telepathically; saying what a fool I was for following the river, it told me how the town was like a hand scooping up the water. The river went all the way around the town before it headed off in a new direction, all my efforts had taken me no further away from them. As soon as this was said I heard the motorcycle again and they were on me; I told them to just get it over with and kill me, they said they couldn’t do that- they had to kill me very slowly and cut me up a bit at a time!
8-November-2003: I was the leader of a gang of kids who were on the run; after years of running from the law, for what reason I don’t know, we settled in a small and quiet town. We’d been there for about a year and most of the people had got to know and like us; we were very happy there, going to parties all the time and being chauffeured around in a red Ferrari Testarossa that drove itself. One day a member of the gang discovered a sinister plot; citizens of the town were disappearing somewhere inside the bank. One night she dressed herself in black like a ninja and climbed to the roof of the bank and went inside. She found an underground prison over lorded by robots; she broke the prisoners out and they all escaped over the roof, a golden robot chased her onto the roof and fired laser rounds at her. The robot could not leave the building but kept on firing from the roof, the girl escaped around a corner and back to our gang to tell us what happened. About twenty minutes later news stories were reporting that our gang had robbed the bank and were extremely dangerous; it was time for us to move on again, I was very upset.
7-November-2003: My mum’s dog, Tilly, woke me up by sniffing in my ear. I got out of bed and chased her round the room, which was great fun. It wasn’t until hours later when I really woke up that I realised it had all been a dream.
6-November-2003: I met Tamsin and told her about the dream I had last night and how Dave was teasing her with a sausage, she thought it was really funny.
5-November-2003: My friend Dave was drunk and being very obnoxious, the two of us and a girl called Tamsin were walking to the gym. Dave kept poking a sausage at Tamsin saying, ‘I suppose you wouldn’t eat this, would you?’ Tamsin replied, ‘Well, no I wouldn’t.’ Later I was at Tamsin’s brother’s (Lewis) house; only it was actually Carly’s house, I was sat in a room with two girls that really liked me. There was a problem though; I couldn’t stop breaking wind (farting whatever), at first no one notice but the room started to get smellier and smellier until they realised it was me. I ran all the way across town to my old childhood home, it was full of people I used to know but don’t like, having a party. I ran again. Next thing I was touring the world with Jordan (aka Katie Price), she was my girlfriend. We kept going to these world famous noodle bars and the different owners retold the same little anecdotes to us; once in America, once at Heathrow Airport and again in the centre of London. There was a huge loch in London that connected a canal with the River Thames; the water was all swirling and looked very dangerous, when I told Jordan how dangerous the water looked she jumped in. I jumped in straight after her; the current was nearly dragging us underneath, Jordan said, ‘It’s a lot harder than I thought it would be to swim, I think we might die!’ I caught hold of her and floated up out of the water and into the air; we ended up floating together amongst some tree branches with exotic Chinese songbirds chirruping around us. I asked Jordan why she had jumped into the loch, she said she wanted to see if I loved her enough to come and rescue her. After this I found myself in Japan; I was at a new kind of booth where you put a simm card for your game console in and download games to play on it, not the silly phone games you get now but huge PC full colour type games. I downloaded the entire Tomb Raider collection in one minute; it had a snowboarding game and ice hockey included for free!
4-November-2003: York City Council had spent years renovating a narrow gauge steam railway that used to run from one of the chocolate factories to Dunington, a small village about five miles out of town. I was sitting up front expecting a pleasant journey; it was a beautiful sunny day, my ex-wife was there- hmm. The steam train set off and all was right with the world, it was wonderful seeing the countryside outside town and chugging along in an old French polished wooden carriage. I was enjoying the trip so much that I didn’t notice we’d been going for over two hours; the ticket collector announced Robin Hood’s Bay (a seaside town about fifty miles away from York!) as the next stop. I was in a bit of a panic, I was meant to be back in York helping the citizens start a riot; there was nothing I could do but sit there and enjoy the slow journey back. I was being really nice to this old woman; sort of like I behave in my real life job as a support worker, secretly hoping that Masayo (my ex) would notice how nice I was in case she’d forgotten. One of the train’s staff kept walking past and making little comments about how nice Japan is, how lovely Japanese people are and how he wishes he could speak Japanese like me; my ex-wife is Japanese, she was pretending not to hear it all but I knew she could. I eventually got back to York and made it to the riot half an hour late; some of the people had lost faith in me as a leader and were been harassed by some soldiers in a tank, I pushed the tank off the road saying, ‘Things’ll run a lot more smoothly without that great big thing in the way!’ The crowd cheered and the protests resumed.
3-November-2003: Catface was celebrating the mothership’s triumphant return to active duty by using the planet announcer speakers to play music all around the world, for an hour each day. No one knew, apart from me, where the music was coming from. The Americans were getting very annoyed; sending up helicopters as high as they would go to try and find the source and blow it up. No one ever came close. I had Catface play all kinds of music to suit everyone each day; jazz, pop, country, classical and music from different decades, the first night we started off with Vera Lynn. People started getting used to it after about a month; it wasn’t really loud, it was beginning to compliment the tides of the Earth. At one point I was impressing a girl I liked by asking her to give me the name of a song; I would telepathically send the name to Catface and the Earth-wide music would change to that song, it was a wonderful sunny day in the Museum Gardens in York.
2-November-2003: I’d been to a party and in a haze the next morning took the wrong car to get home. When I woke later that day everyone was talking about the brave/stupid person that stole Mrs William’s car from the party last night; I looked out of my window to the side street across the road and there was the car that I accidentally took, it was her car! She was the mother in the most notorious crime family in town. I had to put it right somehow; if I took it back they’d cut my fingers off, but if they found out it was me that stole the car…. I got the mothership to pick it up and remove all traces of me being in the car then drop it, not literally, outside the Williams’ house. When Catface told me it was done I went around to the house and hid until Mrs Williams came out to see what her reaction was. She came out and exclaimed, ‘Bloody hell!’ and I came along as if I was just passing and stopped to ask, ‘Are you alright?’ She told me how her car had been stolen and how her boys were out looking for it now; how they were going to murder the culprit, she was secretly hoping that it would never be found so she could get a new car. At least until she saw it now; Catface had re-sprayed her old rusty car in its original colour, replaced all the parts with identical new ones and given it an automatic soft-top. Mrs Williams (a widow) thought she must have a secret admirer, she was so happy that she called off the murder.
1-November-2003: I was back at my old kung fu school, only this time I was doing all the teaching.