Dreaming LifeDreaming Life

31-January-2006: I was dreaming about being part of an American college style drama, like the ones on TV only sort of real. Something happened so that the female star of the dream/show was unconscious and needed to be operated on. The only people around to do the job were a couple of student doctors who were totally wasted on drugs and alcohol.

The girl was terrified and blood was gurgling out of her mouth and between her teeth every time she breathed. They put the gas mask over her mouth and she was out in seconds. One of the loaded student doctors was laughing at the cardio monitor going bleep bleep and saying, “I’m surprised it’s still bleeping like that, it should be going bleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep by now.” Meaning that the girl should be dead. I told them to leave her alone, that they didn’t know what they were doing. One of them replied, “Who’s the doctor here, me or you?” I said that’s what all crappy doctors say when they can’t think of anything intelligent to say. Two student doctors grinned at each other and one said, “I think someone needs to chill,” and brought out a thin hypodermic needle with morphine in it. They were going to hold me down and drug me so I begged for them not to, assuring them that I’d stay quiet.

The rest of the dream was about them chasing me, or showing up in odd places, and trying to drug me – apart from a bit where we found a fully preserved prehistoric crocodile with a short tail that came to life when we put it in a river, then the whole town came screaming past as they were being chased by hundreds of dinosaurs.

30-January-2006: I had a dream that I was hovering cross legged a few feet from the ground, something I do a lot in dreams. I was floating towards the gym that I go to in waking life, a big crowd was also walking in the same direction. As I hovered through the crowd a young Chinese couple started asking me questions about spirituality and Kung Fu. I ended up teaching them Kung Fu, spirituality and Jui Jutsu in the gym as if I worked there. They tried to pay me but I said the first lesson was free.

29-January-2006: I dreamt that I won a holiday in Sweden but the event began by taking a trip to San Francisco.

28-January-2006: I had kind of a nightmare where I dreamt that I got sucked from reality into the chaos of Hell, it was pretty scary. The floor melted open like a huge magnetic field had sucked a hole into it from underneath and I was pulled through. I kept falling and falling into chaos, I knew that it was the real Hell. I should have been terrified as dreams of falling forever used to scare me when I was a kid, but I told myself that it was only a dream and there was no way I’d be going to Hell if it was real. As I thought this I was shown a reflected image of myself in a mirror and I had little devil-type horns and wicked facial features, but that just made the dream all the more ridiculous and less believable. I wasn’t at all frightening after that.

27-January-2006: I dreamt that I was watching an animated film about sperm impregnating an egg. The narrator was saying that there has to be at least 9 sperm to fertilize one egg, though only one of them actually does the fertilization. There was a picture of nine little sperm swimming around an egg, which was described as being Nth to the power of 10 larger than the sperm. Six of the sperm killed themselves on the outside of the egg, trying to get in, then the seventh of the nine made it through and exploded. The film said the explosion coated the inside of the egg with a mucus that dried solid instantly, preventing any more sperm from entering the egg. I woke up wondering what manner of creature is created in this way.

26-January-2006: I dreamt I was talking to my mother and a friend called Garner about the number of members on the Terry Pratchett Message BoardsTerry Pratchett Message Boards. I was saying how there are so many people joining now that I can’t keep up with who is who. Garner and I were agreeing that it’s funny how some people are saying welcome to newcomers and we hadn’t noticed the people saying welcome join in the first place, even though they’ve been on for months.

25-January-2005: I dreamt something about Marcia describing car engines and digital piston rings, which as far as I know do not exist in waking life.

24-January-2006: I was in a dream where I worked for the CI5 (a branch of criminal intelligence a bit like the FBI) in England. Two of us were being led along a trail of clues by a master criminal. We came to a house that we thought was the location of the criminal, or part of his gang, but when we got there all we found was a note telling me how predictable I was. My partner started getting angry and searching the house but I told him we should run like Hell outside, which we did just in time to avoid being caught by the explosion of the house. There were some tree down a steep hill and I was going to run down through them to try and cut off the criminal who was driving away in a car. My partner told me that we can’t take shortcuts, that we must follow him along the exact same route he took.

23-January-2006: I dreamt that I went to Bournemouth on the south coast of England. In waking life I used to live in Brighton about 80 miles east along the coast. Brighton has a beach made from pebbles instead of sand, in my dream I appeared in front of a golden sandy beach at Bournemouth and said, ‘So that’s why everyone in Brighton is jealous of your beach.’ I became friendly with a gang of surfers who insisted I had to watch a video called Wedge Warriors before I could join them. I told them that I’d already seen it, which I hadn’t, and that I even had a body board called Wedge Warrior, which is true.

22-January-2006: I dreamt that I was employed at Fulprint, the printing company where I used to work when I was a teenager. I had this high tech printing device from the future and I was impressing my old boss with it. I showed him how you only needed to print one copy of something and place it on top of s stack of paper and shine the device onto the copy, the printed copy on top would then be duplicated on every sheet of paper underneath it. It sounds really boring now but in the dream it was a revolution in printing that I thought would change the whole world. You were only limited by how high you could stack sheets of paper. Bob, my boss, changed the printing machines so that we were mainly using the paper stack at the back to keep the sheets in exactly the same place on top of each other so the copies would be identical when you shined the device onto them. Before he was printing around 4,000 sheets an hour, now he could create 4,000 copies instantly once he’d made the first copy. In fact we could quite easily stack 50,000 sheets of paper and create 50,000 copies right away – millions if we had 50 stacks of paper.

21-January-2006: I had a dream that I was living in a kind of art house or trendy artist’s apartment with a woman from Thailand and my friend Neil. The woman from Thailand was interested in me romantically but I thought she was very shallow and had to keep verbally pushing her away from me. I heard a helicopter coming and told her and Neil that it would soon be hovering in front of our apartment looking for me, which it often does in dreams of my childhood home. Neither of them believed me until the helicopter was hovering outside the window in front of them and a guy on a loudspeaker was asking them where I was. They said they didn’t know me or my whereabouts. I was hiding just out of sight down some stairs.

20-January-2006: I had a dream set in a dark woods somewhere and had to somehow convince this guy that he was dead but I can’t remember why. The actor Patrick Stewart (second time this week the name Stewart has cropped up in my dreams) was helping me out by playing the part of Patrick Stewart Grim Reaper, DeathDeath, the Grim Reaper etc. He jumped out on the guy as he walked along a forest trail at night and said, “I have come for thee!” in his best Shakespearian voice. The guy screamed and ran off.

Later Patrick was tied up and inside a cage that was being lowered into some water from a boat in the ocean. As he was lowered he was saying to himself, “I surmise that because the cage is getting deeper into water I must therefore be heading in a downward direction,” then after a pause, “The cage is surrounded by airtight glass so I deduce that breathing will be an option unless…” the glass began to crack and he continued, “the glass breaks and the ocean floods in upon myself.” which it did. After this Patrick turned into a goldfish and swam out through the crack in the glass. He had to keep coming to the surface for air because he didn’t have fish’s gills. Every time he came up for air a cat tried to snag him with its paw.

19-January-2006: I dreamt that I was walking around Liverpool docks in England, Albert Docks I think. There was a piano just under the water and I was expected to play it. A special machine had been constructed to lower me underwater on my back with a breathing tube, though I was told that the water would be removed as I was lowered and the tube was just for safety.

18-January-2006: I dreamt that I was at a writer’s seminar hosted by Terry Pratchett. He was trying to teach how to get the essence of love across in a book by making us all strip off our clothes and listen to Barry White while he sat at the front of the class slowly grinding like the archetypal love machine, also naked.

17-January-2006: I dreamt that I was a pirate on the top deck of a pirate ship that had supposedly stolen a hoard of oranges. We were floating in the middle of the Pacific somewhere on a hot, sunny day and I was with a young boy who was trying to calm me down as I declared aloud to the world that I didn’t want to risk my life being a pirate for a bunch of oranges. The boy was worried because other pirate that were after us were below deck and I was making way too much noise, no one knew we were up there at that point. I opened a chest to start throwing the pirates’ hoard of oranges overboard but soon discovered that only the top layer was oranges, underneath them were gold bars wrapped in cloth. The boy and I took one each and jumped ship. We floated down to the bottom of the sea where I knew there was a barrel full of air and waited for the pirate ship to leave us for dead.

The scene changed to us clambering ashore at night and walking out across a desert plain. I said to the boy, ‘Does this look to you like the kind of place that would have wild animals such as panthers or lions prowling the night?’ The boy agreed that it did so we turned about to hang around the seashore until daylight. When daylight broke we found that we were near a road and I quickly surmised that we were in Australia because all the trucks that passed were driving on the left. We found our way to some kind of outdoor cattle market and there was this man there called Alf Home and Away Alf StewartStewart, a character from an Australian TV soap called Home and Away. The boy started talking to Alf and Alf seemed to know him and asked how he was doing. I thought how odd it was that we had become pirates, then abandoned the idea and ended up washed upon a beech in Australia only to bump into the boy’s uncle.


16-January-2006: I dreamt that I was chilling out in a diner with Jarvis Cocker, the lead singer of a British band called PulpPulp. My friends were eating curry and drinking beer at another table and I was trying to convince Jarvis to come over and meet them.

15-January-2006: I dreamt that I was watching a new TV sitcom about a retirement home. This old couple were always talking about needing the toilet in a sort of old person crude fashion that made the audience, and me, laugh a lot. All the old men in the show kept getting erections and trying to hide them from the staff. The old guy from the talking couple said he’d had an accident and the camera shot to his erection sticking up inside his jogging pants with a little wet patch around the end. He got up and tried to get to the bathroom before he completely wet himself, but he had to keep turning away when nurses walked by near the bathroom door he was heading to. Every time he turned around the audience could see his penis with the wet patch sticking up inside his pants like a banana, it was hilarious.

14-January-2006: I was dreaming that it was my birthday and my friend Ché had bought me a book about the history of the Discworld, which seemed quite nice at first. When I opened it some sheets of paper fell out from the middle that were stapled together, it was a Terry Pratchett DiscworldTerry Pratchett Discworld exam – and it was mandatory!

13-January-2006: I had a dream that I was a time traveller. I found myself near the end of a big battle in the American Civil War. I was wearing a modern red coat and didn’t want to look like an enemy so I put on a blue jacket I found on the ground. Things turned bad for me when it became apparent that the Southern army had won this particular battle and I was walking around in a Yankee jacket instead of the gray ones they were wearing, which I didn’t fully realise until I was being chased by officer thugs on horses. I told them that I wasn’t on anyone’s side, that I’d put the jacket on because I was cold, but they wouldn’t listen. Having an English accent wasn’t helping me at all. I ended up barricading myself inside a big wooden house and trying to figure out how to time travel again before they got in when I woke up.

12-January-2006: I dreamt that I had a dream about being in a plane crash in Vietnam. I kept seeing images from the other dream of me being someone called Thomas running away through the jungle from soldiers during the Vietnam war. The boy/me was running towards a wardrobe that had fallen from the plane because it had his clothes inside, he wanted to get some pants on and cover his nakedness. I opened a drawer in the wardrobe in the jungle and pulled out some white underpants and started putting them on. When they were halfway up my legs I found I was in the other dream, not in Vietnam, where I was supposed to be looking after someone’s house. I was in their bedroom putting their pants on.

11- January-2006: I dreamt that I lived in a huge old house and some teenagers were breaking in downstairs. I asked my butler to get me the antique silver pistols and we both went downstairs to frighten the boys away, the pistols were not powerful enough to really hurt anyone – just go POP! We never found the teenagers anyway and the downstairs had been turned into a museum, tourists were in the gift shop looking at old pictures of the house.

10-January-2005: I had a dream that was kind of like a story about story-telling, with a narrator talking about story-telling techniques. There was something about a fishing boat film with the question being asked, ‘what do you think happens next?’ with people guessing the answer. A girl’s voice suggested that one of the fishermen might through a rock in the water. Another voice announced that they were going to have a party, to which someone replied by running off and getting in the boat with them. There was an image later of Snow White, or perhaps Alice, floating down through some tree branches and describing how she felt. After this she was sitting on a stone chair at the bottom of an uphill pathway, waiting for an old man to come out of an ice castle at the top. The man came and complained that the magic in the castle wouldn’t work for him, even though he was the most powerful mage in the world.

9-January-2006: I kept dreaming about going to the top of tall buildings. At one point I was in a huge lift/elevator with lots of doors around the walls. Whenever the lift stopped someone would have a key for their door and go and get their car and drive it into the lift. It was all some kind of bizarre multi-story parking arrangement. Later I was sitting in a chair outside Clifford’s Tower in York, England, watching some fighter jets practicing manoeuvres for an upcoming air show. I made a joke to two middle-aged men behind me about whether or not they’d include an amateur experimental class to this year’s air show, which they thought was hilarious as they considered images of men with wings strapped to their arms like the experiments of the Victorian pre-flight era. I had my own image of getting a drop-ship from the Mothership and startling everyone at the show by making it gently hover a few inches from the runway then suddenly accelerating to 10,000 miles per hour along the runaway and into the sky.

8-January-2006: I dreamed that I was a detective chasing down some armed teenagers along the riverside. It was a beautiful sunny day and there were groups of men and women bathing in the river at intervals. I wished I were playing in the river with them instead, especially as some of them waved at me to come and join them. The people in the river thought my partner and I were playing a game, chasing the teenagers through the willow trees on the bank, but it all changed when we cornered them and a boy shot me with a revolver in the leg and arm. We both leapt on the two kids and arrested them and I was a hero for the rest of the dream just because I’d taken a bullet or two. I wanted to use my superior dream technology to remove the bullets, maybe even get Catface to beam them out, but thought the police doctors would be suspicious and perhaps even think I hadn’t been shot at all.

7-January-2006: I had a dream that my waking life hometown was some kind of open-air museum, or visitor attraction with the citizens being the exhibits. The exits out of town were blocked and everyone was under a kind of hypnotic trance while they were within the city walls of York. I learned of an actual exit where you could escape if you ran through quick enough but I never got a chance to try it because the military sent in an army of zombies to weed out myself and some other revolutionaries. At one point I was up a tree with a sniper rifle, picking off the enemy zombie army one at a time until they noticed me and surrounded my tree. I remember a particularly disgusting moment when a zombie was about to bite me – I bit the zombie instead, completely removing his chin and feeling my teeth grind against his as they crunched through his mouldy lower jaw.

6-January-2006: I dream that I was sitting around a little table with Marcia, my wife, and a guy called Jason Carlton I used to hang around with when I was a kid. Jason was kind of a rough, tough guy when I was a kid, and probably still is I guess, but in this dream he was talking all posh like an aristocrat. The three of us were discussing time, space and the universe in general and we were drinking cans of beer. None of us were really enjoying the beer, it was making me feel a bit sick. We went for a walk outside in the night, looking at the stars, and Marcia said she was going to turn the sky upside down for a minute. I asked Jason if he thought we would be sick if she did that, then figured we’d soon find out but woke up before we did.

5-January-2006: I dreamt that I was at the house I grew up in with my stepfather who I haven’t seen for about 10 years in waking life. I was being all brave and telling him to shut up and poking fun at him, I guess to make up for how horrible he was to me as a child. It was a bit odd like I was there in the 1970s again only grown up like I am now. My contemporary friends kept coming around to the house like I lived there and Brian (stepfather) was kind of rude to them, but it only made me poke fun at him more and encourage my friends to do the same. Marcia was also there wanting to change her underwear, but there were too many people around for privacy. Brian kept talking to her saying that she didn’t have to flash her tits for me, as if I’d just met her that day and had some kind of hold over her.

A woman came around to the house and said she was here to see me. She was there to install the underground bunker, forcefields and anti intercontinental ballistic nuclear missile defenses that are secreted around the house, garden and my bedroom in dreams of the future (from my perspective in this dream). I let her in and told Brian that she was here to check the gas. He suspected something was up after a few minutes but it was too late, the woman was from way in the future and installed the devices almost instantly – they had been molecularly preformed for my needs in a laboratory and attached themselves to all the right places within seconds. Shutting the forcefield on the bedroom door just as Brian came to bash it down, I stood on the other side and watched him beat at it with his fists like a dumb ape.

I went and opened a window to make him think he had a chance of getting in that way. He took the bait and when he got outside I jumped from the window and grabbed him, intending to send the fool to another time with a magic ring I was wearing. Something went wrong, in a flash I found myself in the middle of London, England, with a friend from now called Wendy Schneider. I started talking to her about whether or not I should feel agoraphobic being suddenly transported so far away from home, but we both decided that I should not. As we walked along Regent’s Street Wendy’s brothers walked past us in the other direction, then we realised something was really amiss. Wendy’s brothers were just little boys, one of them isn’t even alive anymore in waking life, so we figured we must have been sent back in time for real, not just like the sort of back in time from earlier in the dream. I was quite excited about the prospect of exploring the 1980s as an adult and getting on an old-fashioned train to find my way home.

4-January-2006: I dreamt that myself and a bunch of other guys were being hunted down by Daleks, the evil robot things from Doctor Who, through the back streets of London, England. Can’t remember too much but we met a sort of monster/man who called himself The Cyclops, though he had only one eye it was because his right eye was missing. I poked him in his remaining eye with a stick and he said ‘oww’ then went to rub it and knocked off an artificial skin covering over his other eye. He was just a normal man after all.

3-January-2006: I dreamt that I was in a kind of ‘new age’ store that was really just someone’s house. At first I was looking around the place with my wife but I also bumped into my friend Ché and his brother Carl, who were also out shopping with their partners. I seemed I was in the place for a long time so I sat down on a chair for a rest, an assistant asked me if I liked the chair and I told her that I was only sitting in it because I was knackered. She smiled and said,  ‘Oh, you’re like those two.’ When I looked up she was pointing at my two friends who had also collapsed into chairs.

I eventually got bored of waiting for Marcia, I’d lost sight of her for about half an hour, so I went to see what she was doing. I found her in the back yard of the house, which was no longer a new age store at all, joining in a game with a bunch of people and having fun. I decided that seeing as she was enjoying herself I’d wait a bit longer, but something strange happened so that everyone came inside and Marcia had disappeared completely. The rest of the dream I was asking people where she was, if anyone knew what had happened to her and desperately trying to find her. Most of the people I met were too afraid to answer my questions, there was a large wolf (possibly a werewolf) prowling the streets of the Victorian terraced houses.

I kept getting glimpses of the wolf and the wolf kept getting my scent and prowling a little closer. I wasn’t at all bothered about the wolf though, with my magic dream powers I could float around and climb up the sides of walls, so that every time the wolf got anywhere close I was soon well out of its reach on top of a building or whatever. The creature was always trying to find other ways to get to me though, but I hardly cared because I just wanted to find Marcia. As I awoke from my dream I wondered if Marcia might have been the wolf trying to get to me and dispelling her wolf form.

2-January-2006: I dreamt that I was part of a TV show hosted by Scott Baio, the guy who played Chachi in Happy Days. He first came and sat next to a lady in the audience from behind the rows of seats, as if he were part of the audience himself, and started asking her dumb questions about life and such until she asked, ‘Look, who the Hell are you anyway?’ He then stood up so she could see him, the audience applauded and the woman nearly fainted. Scott then went on stage to give a demonstration on how to make a home movie with the latest digital video camera you can buy. He put the camera on a table and set it up so it would be pointing at his face if he were about ten feet away. When he’d got it just right he turned and walked towards the audience and the position he was going to film himself from. It was at this point, when he was facing away from the video camera, that I rushed on from behind the curtains and stole the video camera. The audience laughed hysterically and Scott feigned shocked dismay for a moment until I came back with the camera. It was all part of the show, demonstrating how one should never take their eyes off expensive electrical equipment when outdoors, because you never know who might come along and steal it.

1-January-2006: I dreamt that I’d invented an engine that runs on steamed vegetables, with the only by-product being steam that came from the exhaust. Some major car manufacturers were having a meeting to discuss my invention and how they could make a car that was half fuelled by petrochemicals and half by steamed vegetables. They wanted to keep the oil companies happy and the fact that oil was no longer needed for fuel a secret from the public. They even tried to fool me into believing that oil was still necessary, I was meant to give a speech on international television that backed up their theories. When I did my speech I read out the text they had given me but used psychic powers to telepathically tell everyone in the world that they could convert all the cars to run on my steamed vegetable energy and never use gasoline or diesel ever again.