After school activities

Weird dream last night: I dreamt I was at school at about age fifteen - my friends and I were all in uniform - and we were heading to the main hall after the day's final lesson because The Orb were doing a gig. (Because, obviously, my old school's main hall is a prestigious venue that often attracts big name music groups.) The support acts were some industrial rock band - not Pop Will Eat Itself but someone like that - and, bizarrely, Ant & Dec.

My chums and I turned up to the hall entrance, bought our tickets (that looked like raffle tickets) from a dinnerlady and went in.

The hall was about half full of younger pupils all in uniform, sitting cross-legged and waiting patiently. A few teachers were milling around the edge of the room chatting in pairs while roadies were setting up equipment on stage. It had the pre-show atmosphere of a recital by the school orchestra or, worse, a morning assembly.

"God, I hope it won't be one of those gigs where everybody just sits there not moving," I whispered to my friends (for anything louder than a whisper would have probably resulted in my expulsion from the hall).

After a short wait the lights went down (or, more accurately, the hall curtains were closed) and the first support act, the band like Pop Will Itself but not, came on. I was relieved to see that many of the kids in the audience did stand up and started dancing, albeit in that endearingly uncoordinated way that toddlers do.

It was at this point that I realised that I was not wearing my blazer. I reasoned that I must have left it on the back of a chair in a classroom although I was sure I had it on as I made my way to the hall. Never mind, I could pick it up later.

The band were thrashing out some song or other and a bit of a moshpit was developing in front of the stage. All of a sudden the band stopped and the lead singer began to explain something about how the song they had been playing was structured. He turned on an overhead projector and displayed a series of transparent plastic sheets covered in crudely written notes to illustrate his points. The band would then strike up for a few bars and stop again to allow the singer to make another point. The audience would jump around for the few seconds the band played and then listen attentively while the frontman talked.

It was at about this point that I realised that I was not wearing a shirt and tie but just a t-shirt. I did not recall having changed out of my uniform but... oh well.

The performance continued with bursts of heavy rock music interspersed by discussions of music theory and the physics of audio. The prepubescent mosh pit persisted as best it could but my little gang were beginning to resent the constant interruptions in the music. How dare they try to teach us stuff while we were trying to have fun.

It was at about this point when I realised that I was topless and my t-shirt was being passed over the crowd. I forced my way through the my fellow pupils and retrieved it.

I then woke up feeling frustrated and unsatisfied.

Twin casualties

Last night I dreamt that I was in an episode of Casualty (a British TV hospital drama, for the benefit of my foreign readers). All the doctors and nurses were running around as usual looking after the sick but the weird thing was that each patient was the spitting image of their attending nurse or doctor, as were any friends or relatives accompanying them. It was strangely creepy like that scene in Being John Malkovich when the eponymous actor enters his own head and ends up in a restaurant where everyone sports his face.

I can understand why I might have dreamt about a TV show that I watch only occasionally: My chum Paul Campbell is going to be writing an episode for the show (well done Paul!); but what the whole twin thing is about, I know not.

Sunday babble

About 100 pages into The Life And Opinions Of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne. Hard work but I think I've settled into it verbosity and mad digressions. Keep telling myself that I've read Ulysses so, hey, I can fucking read anything.

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I went to the The British Fantasy Open Night last night on the flimsiest of pretexts - my chum Jai Clare invited me. Got drunk, talked to some interesting fantasy writers, chatted up a nice auburn-haired film producer, joked that I could be the next Hugh Grant or Jude Law, gave her a phone number, possibly mine. Feeling a bit sluggish today.

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Had a dream that the house I lodge in was some sort of boarding school except the internal layout was completely different - but it was the house I lodge in. Anyway, the cleaner managed to utterly humiliate me in front of my fellow pupils by pointing out that my bed linen stank of cum.

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My resolution to stop buying books until I substantially reduced my "to read" pile has failed abysmally. Awaiting my attention once I have concluded my business with Mr. Shandy are:

• Other Voices by Andrew Humphrey
• The Complete Enderby by Anthony Burgess
• The Famished Road by Ben Okri
• A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
• Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
• The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
• L'Assommoir by Émile Zola
• La Bete Humaine by Émile Zola
• Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
• On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt
• On Truth by Harry G. Frankfurt
• The Turn of the Screw / The Aspern Papers (Omnibus) by Henry James
• The Great Shark Hunt by Hunter S. Thompson
• London Orbital by Iain Sinclair
• Nature's Numbers by Ian Stewart
• Continent by Jim Crace
• Pesthouse by Jim Crace
• In Search of Schrodinger's Cat by John Gribbin
• Schrodinger's Kittens and the Search for Reality by John Gribbin
• The Major Works by Jonathan Swift
• Palm Sunday / Welcome To The Monkey House (Omnibus) by Kurt Vonnegut
• The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell
• Two Tall Tales and One Short Novel by Lucy Fry, Heidi James and Kay Sexton
• The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
• Plays And Petersburg Tales by Nikolai Gogol
• The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks
• The Black Book by Orhan Pamuk
• Luis Bunuel: New Readings by Peter William Evans
• The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick
• River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life by Richard Dawkins
• The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
• Coin Locker Babies by Ryu Murakami
• Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
• Writing to the Moment: Selected Critical Essays 1980-95 by Tom Paulin
• How Brains Think: Evolving Intelligence, Then and Now by William H. Calvin

Utterly ridiculous, isn't it. Still, it makes for an artificially long blog post.

Interpretations

The literal minded among you may interpret the dream related in my last post as an anxiety dream about my hiring a car to drive 100 miles to a wedding in Dorset having not driven for three years.

Maybe, but it all came back to me in seconds. I'd forgotten how cool driving is. I had my homemade Amon Tobin compilation CD blasting out the speakers and there wasn't too much traffic around so, apart from getting lost briefly due to confusingly labelled signposts and the odd obligatory muppet driver getting in my way, I really enjoyed myself.

Oh, and the wedding was quite good too: some blonde Welsh tart of my acquiantance was marrying some American fella. And if Suw Charman (for it was she) wasn't already queen of the blogosophosphere, she damn well will be when the photographs of her gravity-defying burgundy corset hit the interwebs. We are talking Cleaveage Of The Decade™. The geeks of the world will gawp in amazement when those puppies hit their Macbook screens. Oh, and a good time was had by all, yadda yadda yadda.

But I'm pretty certain that my driving dream was not about driving at all.

No parking

OK, seeing as I have been inundated with... um... two requests for disclosure, here is the dream I dreamed the other night:

I was driving a big family estate car through a typical residential suburb. I turned into a cul-de-sac of five or six generic detached houses that all sat upon raised ground with sloping driveways running down to the road. I turned into the driveway of the house in which I apparently lived. I took the car up the driveway, allowing gravity to slow the car down, put the clutch in and pressed the brake pedal. The car came to a halt in front of the garage door but instead of staying put the car began to roll back down the drive and into the road even though my foot remained on the brake pedal.

The car came to a gentle halt by the opposite curb. Frowning, I gently moved the car forwards, mounted the driveway, took my foot off the accelerator when I reached the garage door and firmly applied the brake pedal, but yet again, once the car had stopped it began to roll back into the road.

I tried again but this time, once the car rolled to a halt in front of the garage, I applied the foot brake and the hand brake. No good: the car rolled back again. This time, though, a neighbour was pulling into the cul-de-sac and had to come to an abrupt stop to avoid a collision. I looked out of the side window, shrugged and mouthed an apology. My neighbour waved and manoeuvred around me to reach his own driveway.

Annoyed now, I attempted to park again, this time slamming down my foot on the brake pedal and yanking up the hand break, but still the car rolled back into the road even faster than before. More neighbours were driving into the street and I had to swerve to avoid them mouthing sorry at them.

Again and again I ascended my driveway, slamming harder on the brake pedal, yanking up the hand brake with all my strength and every time rolling back faster and further into the road, dodging my neighbours' cars, rolling up the pavement, onto their front lawns, across their driveways as they themselves were parking on them, skidding and dodging. It was Cars On Ice.

The car eventually slid to a halt. I clung to the steering wheel, breathing heavily. I didn't know what to do. The car would not stay on the sloped driveway. I couldn't leave the car where it came to rest across the middle of the road. I could not park at the roadside where the car could not roll away - that was somehow not an option - but I could not leave the car until it was parked. I was stranded, helpless.

My dad emerged from the house and strolled over. I wound down the window and said, the brakes have failed. Dad nodded and said nothing. He looked away, stared into space. It's not my fault, I wanted to say. Dad sighed. His eyes tried to communicate sympathy but they could not disguise his disappointment, his resignation, as if to say, he can't even park the fucking car.

Enigmatic blog post title that gives no indication as to what the post may be about and is quite possibly longer than the post itself

Last night I did something that I haven't done for a very long time: I awoke from a dream and... wrote it down.

Leave a comment if you wish to know what the dream was about.