30-September-2007: I had a dream that as was crying at a picture of the Light Brigade, the horsemen of the famous Charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimean war… then later I actually found myself in Crimea next to a watering hole where the Light Brigade had fed their horses and I tried to phone my friend Neil Kay up on my mobile phone to tell him where I was, but he would not answer.
29-September-2007: I had a dream that I was sat with an old man discussing the layout of various cities around the world. He was particularly interested in my description of Amsterdam’s spider web-like layout.
28-September-2007: I had a dream that I was walking on the outskirts of an alternate York, where I live in waking life, that seemed to be in perpetual twilight. I was with someone like Doctor Watson, as I was a kind of Sherlock Holmes character, when we saw a man fall from the sky (dead) and land somewhere within the city, about a mile away. We searched everywhere for the body but could not find it, no one else saw the body fall and we began to wonder if it was an illusion deliberately sent to trick us.
27-September-2007: I had a dream about a strange sheltered cove in Cornwall, South West England, where you had to go through a shopping mall, sea life centre and cave to get to it. When I did get to it I hired a boat to go explore the cove and ended up driving the boat into another cave and around the shopping mall.
26-September-2007: I had a dream that I was on the run from the police with an autistic guy, he was a sort of mixture of autistic people I know in waking life but no one in particular. At one point we stopped off at a petrol/service station to get something to eat and there was this famous American entrepreneur called Frank Boyer, a total invention of my dream, working behind the counter. Next to the counter there were these “life starter packs”, like plastic paint trays, the kind that come with a roller for painting walls, that contained various items for starting up a business or hobby. All the trays were called things like “Frank Boyer Lawyer Starter Pack” and “Frank Boyer Kite Making Starter Pack” and so on, wrapped in cling film. It was a bit like those George Forman Grill things, if he were selling them himself from the service station. Frank Boyer himself kept praising his own Starter Packs when customers came into the store then, if someone actually bought one, he waited until they were outside then said, very loudly, “ha Ha HA HA HA!” like he’d totally ripped them off. Eventually his HA HAs were so loud that they woke me up from the dream.
25-September-2007: I had a dream that a girl called Katie from a British TV soap opera called Hollyoaks was my sister and that my stepdad, whom I have not seen in years, was telling her to get to bed and go to sleep. I told him to shut up and leave her alone, that he couldn’t boss her around.
24-September-2007: I had a dream about a computer program that was written entirely in Welsh.
23-September-2007: I sometimes have a dream that I’ve murdered someone, or I think I might have murdered someone or I was involved in the murder somehow – but I can never remember which is the case, just some vague recollections of lying to the police about the whereabouts of a body I know to be buried in the garden, or someplace the dream happens to be set in. It’s a bit like an ongoing murder mystery where I dream a few more clues each time. In last night’s dream I overheard a man from the RAF (Royal Air Force) talking to someone on the phone about the murder case I think I’m involved in. I was eager to know what he would say, if he thought it was me or any details at all, but Marcia kept interrupting him before he could say anything pertinent. Then, when I eventually got Marcia to stop talking in the dream and I might have a chance at hearing some clues, she woke me up in real life to say she was going to work!
22-September-2007: I had a dream that there was an Alien infestation on Earth, as in the creatures form the movies ‘Aliens – etc etc’, in the village of Fulford where I grew up. An old lady had one inside her and she was asking me and my soldiers for help, but it was no use – we tried to kill her before the Chest Buster came out, but we were too late. The horrible slimy creature scuttled around in the grounds of an old people’s home as I chased it and tried to shoot it with a pistol. I did catch it and kill it eventually but there were millions more on their way through space. I had a plan to reactivate thousands of Cylons (robots from Battlestar Galactica (TV series) that had been defeated in the past in my dreams and use them to attack the Aliens. Before I could see the plan through though the government announced they were going to detonate a Nova Bomb over the infected area of Fulford. In the dream I knew what a Nova Bomb was but no one else had ever seen or heard of it. I told my soldiers to run for their lives down Saint Oswald’s Road towards the river before the bomb goes off. Some people wouldn’t move at first so I had to explain that the whole area they were standing in would be completely removed from the surface of the earth, they had the get further away where the buildings would still be intact. It was dark when we got to the bottom of the street and the sky lit up bright green when the Nova Bomb exploded – it looked so pretty like a new star, its namesake, until the green spread out gradually from the centre like an airborne tsunami. We watched in awe as the wave approached, causing the ground to tremble, then hid behind a very thick wall as it rumbled past overhead with an accompanying earthquake that lasted about three minutes. It was daylight again when we recovered and walked back up Saint Oswald’s Road. As we approached the top of the hill we could see the ruins increase and hundreds of people were arriving by car and truck to be with us – their only hope of surviving.
21-September-2007: I had a dream that I was Paul Atreides, from Frank Herbert’s ‘Dune’, heading out into the desert on my own after my first time consuming Spice. I lay awake in the heat, facing a blinding sky with my eyes closed, and saw with my mind different people come and go through Time and try to stop me being Paul Atreides.
20-September-2007: I had a dream that different men that I know, or used to know, where being gay and trying to kiss me and generally chat me up, all to differing degrees. I had the feeling that I told Peter Rankin to forget it ages ago and he had accepted it ages ago, then there was Timothy Wheeler who I told to leave me alone quite a long time ago but he occasionally tried it on… then there was Sean Easton who kept bothering me every five minutes and I had to keep pushing him away and telling him to fuck off.
19-September-2007: I had a dream that I was working in some wheat fields in Zimbabwe with my friend’s Ché Sanderson and Kevin Dobbin. Later I was with some Indian guy riding on a train to Scarborough in North Yorkshire, England, and showing him all these ancient walls, buildings and battlements that don’t exist in waking life.
18-September-2007: I dreamed I was in the countryside somewhere and all the fields were flooded, the water was really deep and I wanted to swim naked in it, but I was afraid that I might get caught on some barbed wire fencing beneath the surface.
17-September-2007: I had a dream that I was Rincewind’s (a character in some Discworld novels by Terry Pratchett) stunt double in a movie. Someone said, “You’re not Rincewind’s stunt double” and the actor Tim Curry replied, “Yes he bloody is, why do you think he’s got that stupid hat on with ‘Wizaard’ written across the front?”.
16-September-2007: I’m not sure what I was dreaming exactly, but as I woke up this phrase was spoken in someone else’s voice, “It’s like ripping pieces of paper past a falling guitar, completely meaningless!”
15-September-2007: I had a dream that I bought a small powerstation that was situated on a small rock of an island in the middle of a turbulent ocean. Lots of the workings were rusty with seawater , and the mechanics of the powerstation were quite bizarre, involving metal lobster pots and clear plastic tubing. Nevertheless, we managed to get it all working and supplied economical electricity to a nearby country in Africa.
14-September-2007: I had a dream that my old childhood house had a marketplace for hippy products in the attic – colourful cushions, incense and rainbow beads.
13-September-2007: I had a dream that I was in Europe, possibly the Netherlands or Belgium, with Marcia, my wife. We jumped onto the Eurostar train, the one that goes underneath the English Channel through a huge tunnel to England, without buying a ticket. After we got on all the carriages span around once to face the direction in which they would go, the spinning made me a little dizzy.
12-September-2007: I had a dream that I was in a military jet plane hovering behind an open wagon full of Romanian peasants and laughing at them hysterically. Later I had a World War Two incendiary bomb, like a little stick of dynamite full of phosphorous, that I threw into the back of a gypsies’ truck that was full of rope, string and paper bags. Someone said I was really cruel for doing such a thing, but I said “yeah, but look how cool it is burning like that! The string and paper shit up in flames immediately and now there’s just charred remains on the ground.” The people who accused me of being cruel admitted that the sight was rather cool.
11-September-2007: I had a dream that I was staying at my friend’s house, Mark , that was actually my own house from when I was a child. I had been staying at Mark’s for a couple of days in a spare room, but he said someone else was coming to stay and I would have to share a room with them. Then later he said another person was coming too and, because they had arranged to come and stay ages ago, they would have to sleep in the bed I was using and I would have to sleep on the floor. I felt a bit rejected at first but told Mark it didn’t really matter, I’d slept out in the open before under road bridges in Amsterdam… then I started making up a silly conversation about calling a doctor and telling him that one of my two front feet was hurting and Mark said I must have been a pothead’s (stoner’s/cannabis smoker’s) dream in the past telling my silly stories.
10-September-2007: In waking life I have a friend called Paul who is paraplegic and cannot speak. In last night’s dream I took Paul to a nightclub in an odd alternate universe version of Cambridge in England. When we got inside a girl said his wheelchair was too big and it would get in the way, so I took him off the chair and teleported Paul to a basement bar and sat him on an awkward stool. I few other people met us there but I don’t remember who they were, I thinks one of them may have been a man with Down’s Syndrome, but I don’t know who he is in waking life. Our group had to keep repositioning Paul on the stool because he kept starting to slip off and nearly falling on other clubbers.
9-September-2007: I had a dream that I was copying thousands of video files from a website on a ship using a laptop computer.
8-September-2007: I had a dream that I was talking to an old friend from high school, Sean Suckling, about my mother’s relationship with a much younger guy called Lee. We were talking about how things could be better and one of us, me I think, said something like “being over twenty would be better”, meaning that Lee is very young (though I think he is older than that in waking life, but not a lot). Sean told me that my mother and Lee had been to all kinds of relationship guidance places, counsellors, Samaritans and a place called Centre Point, which is actually something to do with homeless people in London in waking life.
7-September-2007: I had a dream that I went into a little sweet shop where I used to go as a child. The place looks exactly the same with sweets and chocolates everywhere on glass shelves and inside glass cabinets. I guy I went to school with, Larry Carr, was there buying sweets and I asked him to come with me to the local pub, The Plough, and meet my current friends – Ché and Carl Sanderson.
6-September-2007: I had a dream that I was riding my friend’s, Neil Kay, bicycle along a cycle track near a place called Tang Hall in the town where I live in waking life. I kind of felt like I shouldn’t be riding it, Neil had leant it to me but about three days before, so it was like I’d had the bike too long. As I rode along the front tire burst and I had to call Neil to come and get me, he wasn’t bothered at all about the puncture or me still having his bicycle.
5-September-2007: I had a dream that I was skiing and pulling a toboggan behind me with old lady tourists sitting inside.
4-September-2007: I had a dream that I was viewing places to buy and live but all I was being shown were incredibly tiny places that had vital rooms missing, like the bathroom or bedroom. Like there was one house no bigger than a trailer home but with two floors, but the first floor where you walked in was like a hallway with no furniture at all, then upstairs was a livingroom with a large flatscreen TV and that was it, no other rooms.
3-September-2007: I had a dream that I was supposed to be going somewhere with my mother but, much like in waking life, she had me waiting for her to do something else first. This time she was supposed to be just going to buy some milk but, again like in waking life, she took absolutely ages – like 45 minutes instead of the 10 it should have taken. When she got back it turned out she’d had the opportunity to travel back in time to the 1920s and play a game of tennis with a Hollywood heyday movie star, and I couldn’t really fault her for taking it.
2-September-2007: I had a dream that I was inside a huge intro to the latest version of a computer game called Half Life. I was a scientist watching some Commissars fire a cannon that was loaded with a nuclear projectile. I knew what was going to happen because it was in the computer program, and I was part of the program – when the projectile landed on the far away city it would explode with an atomic mushroom cloud. Only this time as I watched, with my mother beside me acting kind of foolish, some poisonous radiation shot our from the side of the cannon and landed near us, causing pink smoke to writhe up from the grass and start choking everyone… then these nasty tripod robot things appeared and started eating people and lasering the place to smithereens.
1-September-2007: I had a dream that I was with a friend called Nathan Wood trying to make the perfect chocolate mousse. It was very difficult because Nathan and his family claimed that they already possessed the perfect recipe for it, and being honest their mousse was amazing. I turned myself into Superman and flew to South America to get some raw, totally pure, chocolate, and came back with it to make my mousse. I woke up before I could finish mixing it though.