Letters from My Subconscious

Cake in Pizza Express

Sat, 02 Oct 2010 11:58:00 +0100

Last night’s dream was mostly ‘normal’. We went to Pizza Express in the South Bank centre. There is one there but this was a dream version that had tables it served on higher level that were generally less busy. We only had two slices of cake but the downstairs was pretty busy so I said I’d go upstairs to see if I could find a table up there and would ring down if I did. For some reason I also took the cake.

On the way upstairs I spotted a guy with glasses on his own at a table and our eyes briefly met. As I continued my journey I realised the guy in question was Arnie. Anyway, the journey was too long: up an escalator and round, and all the time I couldn’t see much in the way of quiet spaces. I also realised I kept not thinking about the plates I was holding and bits of cake were falling on the floor and on to my t-shirt (my yellow ‘Procrastinators…’ one, if you must know) making me realise it would have grease stains.

Eventually I went back downstairs admitting defeat and very sad that I’d lost about half the cake in the process (and taken about 20 minutes running around or something). Yeah, suck on that DiCaprio!

Last night I dreamt I bought an iPhone

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 08:23:37 +0100

I don’t even want an iPhone and I’m not out of this contract for another 6 months. I walked into the 3 shop with a load of money I’d just got out and told the guy I wanted a new iPhone. He proceeded to ring round and check and then become incredibly nice, pulling out free food while trying to convince me I had to get the £45 a month contract. I woke up before I parted with my money.

Fishes in the lift

Tue, 30 Mar 2010 17:53:28 +0100

This was a weird one. I was at work but work was not how I remembered it - a much bigger and more spacious building, something like modern university buildings tend to be. It was a big company meeting week and we moved from lecture hall to lecture hall to learn stuff about the company and everywhere we went people brought sacks of rice for the post-meeting meals.

This rice had some strange creatures on it that grew into fish and large (double hand span sized) butterflies that flew at my face and disturbed me. Then the place filled with water up to my head so the fish could swim around. When the butterflies went into the water they turned into something like an angel fish and worried me.

Noel Edmonds

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 08:58:11 +0000

Last night’s dream involved a bomb of some sort and a bunker and a train station. It’s not entirely coherent to me but I am fairly sure I was going to Colchester to look at somewhere to live. When I arrived at the train station I went into the waiting room and realised someone had left a lot of stuff behind - a briefcase with papers and some sort of electronics. They’d left their driving licence meaning I could see her name and I reckoned I should hand it in to the station.

For whatever reason, I elected to wait until the next train pulled in some 15 minutes later until I acted but in the meantime I realised that what had been left was some sort of explosive device to let me get under cover in the bunker under the train station. I rounded everyone near by up and we went into the bunker and then I used the bomb to to close up the door way behind us and wait.

In the bunker was an OLD video of Noel Edmonds from the 80s where it became apparent that he had been involved in the bomb in some ways and new how to set it off perfectly. Watching the video we saw how to move the big filing cabinet aside in the office above so we could get out.

Two forms of flying transport

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 15:26:11 +0000

Last night’s dream didn’t make a great deal of sense. Two groups had independently come up with some form of personal flying transport over in the US. One was Microsoft, no idea what the other was, but someone I knew in the States (I don’t know anyone in the States) had them both and wanted to sell me one for the bargain price of £600.

I went over there like a shot to get it and found that one was like a pair of flipflops that let you float and the other was more like a huge metre long by 30cm square box thing that you held hold of and it flew you around. I tried out the flipflops and realised that I couldn’t really use skates so this was quite tricky. I was having trouble really using them until I tried just sort of pushing with one foot and seeing how I went.

Afterwards I considered getting a wetsuit and attempting to use them both to get back across the Atlantic instead of a plane, but decided it would be too dangerous as I might well run out of power halfway and it would probably be pretty uncomfortable.

My Wife's Fairground Dream

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 10:29:24 +0000

I was queuing for a fairground ride with my husband and I was feeling quite nervous. The ride was massive ride with thousands of people on it, a bit like a grandstand. People were sitting in rows with only a basic metal bar to hold them in place, no seatbelts or anything. We hopped on the ride and it began spinning at all angles, throwing everyone upside down every so often. There were loads of crazy people who weren’t holding on at all. Some guys were even jumping as the ride flipped upside down and landing on people on the other side of the ride. We were holding on for dear life and I had my legs and arms wrapped around the bar.

The ride stopped after a while and two teenage girls who worked at the fairground drove onto the centre of the ride in one of those little “Getz” cars. It was bright blue. They took their seats and the ride started again. I turned to my husband and said “that car is going to fall off and crush everyone” and he was like, “nah, they work here they know what they’re doing. Don’t worry honey”. But of course we were soon upside down again, hanging on for dear life and the car lifted off the ride and fell back onto people. It didn’t seem to actually hurt anyone though.

Then the ride was over and we were in an internet café. I got an email from my friend who was holidaying in the Lake District. It said she had just heard some most distressing news – Nick Cave had drowned himself and his 8 children in a lake in country Victoria. I was then reading a newspaper that had pictures of the 8 children and a comment from his wife saying that she was really sad and that not all of the children were hers.

Then I woke up.

Cider Canal and Big Talks

Sun, 31 Jan 2010 18:43:01 +0000

Last night’s dream flitted between a strange LOTR like journey through the English countryside to some big bad meeting at a UN type of affair. I know that going along we found a shallow canal or river that my companion assured me was actually cider not water and I tried it and they were right.

Meanwhile I was also present at some massive negotiations where my liberal, thinking the best of everyone type of attitude was marking me out as a massive troublemaker. There was something about me being related to a member of the secret service too. Deep.

Torchwood USA

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

First of four dream sequences from last night. I was in a big brash bar/pub, in the style of Dingwalls in fact, with very few people there. The TV started showing a weird American show that felt familiar and, after a few mins, I realised I must be watching the pilot of the US version of Torchwood. I texted someone about it.

Jamming

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

In the second sequence of the night I was jamming with my wife and an Aussie girl who I think only existed in the dream. We were in a rehearsal room I only went to once, about 6 or 7 years ago, down in New Cross, that was long and low and underground mostly. We swapped instruments a lot and tried to write stuff and were having a good time, I think.

Mole and Cat

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

So, in Friday night’s final dream, we were in mum’s house that was for some reason ENORMOUS and quite amazing. In the garden there were a couple of huge cats, really huge. They were the size of Labradors and quite friendly.

As I was stroking one this mole popped up out of the earth next to it and then ran over and put its arm round the cat’s head. Both mole and cat beamed at me expectantly so I pulled out my phone and tried to get a picture but it was all going wrong and by the time the mole buried itself again I knew I’d failed to capture the best picture ever!

Scarecrow Camden Weirdness

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

We were going from Holloway to Camden because there was something I needed to do. It was cold weather and Camden seemed like how I remember it from 20-odd years ago, narrower and dingier. We stopped at someone’s flat down a small side street near to Camden Road station but I had to go and do whatever it was and that required I take my little netbook with me. I left my other stuff but I wrapped the netbook in my orange and green hoodies to disguise it from any robbers.

As I left their house I noticed a man with the other strangers walking towards me who was walking strangely in a sinister manner and had a sacking hood over his head rather in the style of Batman’s Scarecrow. I tried not to catch his eye and walked on quickly but I felt a tug at my arm and knew he wanted my netbook so I kicked back at him really hard and got running…

Blues Covers

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 10:24:12 +0000

Last night I dreamed I was with a load of old classic American blues musicians and for some reason we were trying to cover the Beatles’ Come Together. Except my guitar was completely awful and kept going out of tune so I was doing my best to play all the guitar parts without having a clue how to get it to work properly. For some reason this was all being filmed.

Arnie and the Moving Odeon

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 09:16:32 +0000

I dreamed they were relocating the local Odeon where I grew up. It didn’t look precisely how it does in real life, probably more like an old train station with a single high curved-ceilinged huge room, reminiscent of the place where he’s putting his play on in Synecdoche, New York. Anyway, they were moving it up the street, constructing the girders and getting it ready to be relocated and we investigated the old building where they were moving things about.

A friend went down into the main chamber at the bottom where the big diggers were and dodged around them to read some old graffiti, which was funny but I can’t remember why now. Then we went back to our flat.

We couldn’t find the Lamb jacket, not a jacket made of lambskin but an ordinary jacket made by a company called ‘Lamb’, it seems. So I asked Arnold Schwarzenegger if he’d seen it as he happened (!) to be staying with us. He was drinking an enormous can of Pepsi for some reason - it looked like a can scaled up to take about four pints of the stuff - and he put it down to consider if he’d seen the jacket, but he hadn’t.

Too Many Christmas Presents (among other things)

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 16:47:19 +0000

Last night’s dream got a bit complex. We were staying with relatives somewhere for Christmas but then this also turned into some sort of strange slightly new-age, slightly junk furniture shop, the sort of place you get wooden coffee tables with metal finishes that lie somewhere between Morocco and The Middle-Ages.

There was a very cute cat that lived in this place and there was (of course) a secret door that led down through the floor into a long hallway off to a music club that was pretty cool. The cat got into the secret passage bit and we had to go and rescue it.

In the days at work between Christmas and New Year my colleagues gave me a load of Christmas presents but I remember thinking this was odd. I took them back to the house/shop and we opened them but they were all things like cushions and posh looking fat quilts like something from the 30s, stuff we didn’t need. At this point I remembered I’d already had Christmas presents from work so I’d have to take them back but that meant embarrassing people (yeah, weird ways your dream mind works) so we put all the stuff in the shop to sell it off.

Bully Boy

Tue, 12 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Not much to say about last night’s dream except that my old Primary school bully was bullying me in the street somewhere. Kind of odd.

A Bad Trip

Sat, 09 Jan 2010 09:28:39 +0000

Final dream from last night involved going to visit a friend in Dublin who actually lives in Melbourne. We drove with my family over there and because we drove we took the telly and too much stuff but the plan was they’d drive back early and we’d fly back. Yes, that’s right, we took my big old 24” widescreen tube television.

The holiday bit is vague but suddenly we were looking to go and I realised we still had the TV, it hadn’t been driven back, so we were going to need to get an extra seat on the plane for it. I started trying to pack everything and stuff was coming to pieces so I was using my phone’s light to find little screws and cogs but the phone kept showing me all these pictures it was picking up from the internet there for some reason. Meanwhile Whitney Houston was irritating me massively by singing some god awful ballad as only she can…

The only other thing I remember is that we had a pie we’d mad in one of the china cat bowls - ew!

Cinema Invisibilité

Sat, 09 Jan 2010 09:24:34 +0000

Next last night, we were investigating a list of small local cinemas and we found there was one round the back of Mile End station (I’m blaming this part on a friend’s photo on his Twitter background) so we decided to go and look. In this version of reality Mile End station is built into the bottom of a massive abandoned church, though not exactly an old one, just a conventional brick one. Looking at the directions we could see it should be behind it somewhere but couldn’t quite orientate ourselves. There were a group of guys sitting on the bench looking at us and I saw someone I knew but when I called out to him he just stared at us and didn’t respond. In the end we didn’t find the cinema.

Wedding and a Table

Sat, 09 Jan 2010 09:23:00 +0000

Last night’s dreams were all quite strange. In the first we were at someone’s wedding and we must have been good friends of theirs from how I remember it. There was a small wooden round table somewhere with a table cloth on it that we al kept raising so that we could sign the table for them. God knows why you’d do that…

Cats and Military Software

Fri, 08 Jan 2010 09:20:36 +0000

Lats night’s dream was an odd mix. It was happening before Christmas and at first I was at a relative’s house except it was someone famous but I don’t remember his name. I think he might have smoked cigars. We discussed the software the company we’re with were making - something military - while a lot of cats wandered around. None of these were cats I own or have owned, a couple of ginger and white ones that were cuddly and liked to roll on their back on blankets.

After this discussion there was a period where we were going along a road but some sort of futuristic underground round, vaguely reminiscent of Termight from Nemesis the Warlock I suppose but without the flying cars or secret police.

Then it was Christmas Eve. The cats were around and I was trying to solve another work thing, something to do with a periodicity of something over a year that we weren’t sure was working. I asked another colleague who’d worked on it and he seemed to think it would be fine then showed me the stuff he was doing to control these little armoured cars, about the size of a fist. The cats wandered about and were stroked a lot.

Finally we were back on the road. We moved in front of a huge battle ship because we needed to do a sharp U-turn into a road that led further down and the battleship followed us round the turn by having a series of hinges that allowed it to wrap around the U-turn very easily.

More Work Related Dreaming

Wed, 30 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Presumably my imminent return to work is affecting my dreaming state. Anyway, in this dream work had become mega-technological. We entered the building only to find the lifts had totally changed and the building was huge (odd enough one might say) but we couldn’t work the lifts at all: the buttons wouldn’t press properly or something.

In trying to get to our floor we overshot and ended up on the 13th floor. Strangely someone who’s never worked with me, doesn’t do my line of business and lives in another country was one of my colleagues. We set out over the incredibly big and open thirteenth floor. There was a whole weird train bit running through the middle with water moats on either side of the track. This is hard to describe but it was a beautiful construction in a sort of spearmint blue marble and a figure of eight design such that when the train stopped you could walk right across the water and the flat bed bit of the train to the other side. It was wildly impractical and this was really where the dream ended.

Dreams like this always remind me of Iain Banks’ book ‘The Bridge’.