"In a hypothetical model of a human, you would expect the brain to sleep along with the rest of the body; for it to work away all night was bizarre. Because we dream from infancy... we accept the function as axiomatic, but in fact it is against objective probability. And mechanisms which survived millions of years against logical expectation did so for only one reason that he knew: they were favoured by natural selection because they served a purpose. Non-dreamers had become extinct."

- Sebastian Faulks, 'Human Traces', Chapter IX

Dreams

6-7 November 2005    School gig

I’m about to do a performance in a school, where I can’t help noticing there are lots of fit teenage girls. I go on stage with another performer (Diego?) but some rap music comes on as we are about to speak so we start to do a silly dance, at which point all the students leave the theatre as one. I go to a football dressing room and take a shirt from a peg but when I run out to play I see that my shirt is bright lime green while all the other are wearing fluorescent orange.

(This was the week I was about to debut The Guiri and, before that, Fluff Jackson… a typical theatrical anxiety dream).

 

10 – 11 November      120, Longsight

I’ve bought mum’s house but there are big problems with the drains. We’re watching work go on, which involves a huge magnet being lifted on the end of a crane. Janette is there and says that the magnet alone could set me back 250,000 pounds.

 

15 – 16 December       Asturias

Some gipsies are pursuing me down a snowy hill in a sleigh. They lead me to an ambush in the form of a gipsy camp half way up the snowy mountainside

  

1 – 2 marzo, 2006.

I’m at a party ina house made of metal. There are lots of intrigues and plots going on and I’m with Marga, who is talking to me in a very polite and civilised manner. I realise it’s not a metal house, but an aeroplane waiting to take off, but it hasn’t got any wings. This is a dream I had while I was breaking up with Marga.

 

9 – 10 marzo, 2006.

We are getting ready to do a Club Desastre in the Auditorio of  Zaragoza. There’s a lot of tension and a lot of people waiting, but I can’t even find my way to the stage. There are some footballers from Peterborough United trying to fuck up the gig. One has gone to the mixing desk and is messing around. Everything becomes very chaotic. This is almost a nightmare.

 

18 – 19 septiembre (Worcester)

Zaragoza Celtic have won 1-0 away on a crap pitch with a crappy gal that bounces over their keeper’s head. Even so, Jason is pissed off for some reason in the showers. We get in the train to go home – a double-decker like in Amsterdam – and it sets off fast over some water as if it were a jet foil.

 

25 – 26 septiembre (First night back in Zaragoza)

I spend the dream visiting nubile women in their houses on various pretexts. I end up having ot run very fast between one and the other and end up almost flying, sort of scooting along the tarmac using my hands and wishing I had my bike.

 

27 – 28 septiembre

A repeat of a long film-like ream I´ve had  before. I arrive at an airport in the USA with no oney and no idea why I’m there. I wlak around and make riends with a grl. She invites me to her home, where her father and 2 or 3 brothers obviously hate me. I wander round dome more and return to the airport to explain my situation, accompanied by 2 of the brothers who are a bit calmer with me now they know that I’m fucking off.

 

2 – 3 October, 2006.

I’m on a bridge watching Marina play in the water. I’m pretty frightened that she’ll drown or something but she tells me not to worry, as she’s actually standing on stilts.

(A mixture of the tragedy of the 3 Sikh boys who drowned in the Lake District and a film I saw last night on Canal + about a little girl’s bodyguard + the way Marga shouted at Marina and made her cry within 5 minutes of me seeing them both for the first time this ‘season’).

 

24 – 25 October (in a hotel en Almagro)

Some black guys dynamite a hole in my wall and I’m convinced they’re planning a sort of Hip Hop revolution so I go to warn some guardia civil, but they take no notice of me. Then I go to a school where I bump into Sue collecting her kid. She mentions that so and so hasn’t been to school today and I say ‘As I suspected... he’s one of those hip hop people, isn’t he? They’re planning a rebellion, I’m telling you, but no one will believe me’.

 

25 – 26 October (Almagro)

I’m listening to football on the radio with Frank and he tells me Liverpool are beating Chelsea 4-3. There are some mnutes left and I say ‘I still think we’ll win’ and in the end we beat Liverpool 9-5 (very credible).

 

15 – 16 November (first day of illness)

John and Janette entrust me with keys to a house to look after. As I’m going to open it up ( a suburban semi in England) a proto-hoodie horrible little fat devil child follows me. I don’t want him to know anything about the house and the keys so I try to shake him off by pretending to make phone calls from a telephone booth, but he just keeps hanging around outsied,

 

16 – 17 November (second day of illness)

I’m playing 11 a side football and make a superb pass to some French guy who seems to think I’m the dog´s bollocks. I wake up almost sad thinking that I used to be quite good and never will be that fast again.

 

17 – 18 November (third day of illness)

I go for a bike ride, ditch the bike and start to climb a hill (like last Sunday the other side of Farlete) but it gets too dangerous so I come down and decide to go home. John and Janette join me here and we follow a track which takes us to a viaduct, under which we find a systme of ramps and passages. John decides to knock on an old wooden door that’s fallen off its hinges and an old tramp comes out. He’s good-mannered and we all sit down at a table in the rubble wth him while he regales us with tales of his war experiences in the Pacific and Burma.

 

(John had a dream about me that night – me and him and Bryan in a cheap hotel in Russia wth an enormous Russian woman that wants to shag all of us).

 

3 – 4 March, 2007

I'm asked to leave a library because I have dirty and bitten fingernails. I do so.

 

22 - 23 April, 2008

I'm at home in the house I grew up in (No 120) and want to store some screens (the balck biombos from the Club Desastre) in our house's external coal cellar. My mum says I'm not allowed to but I sneak out of the back door to put them there anyway. I open the door to the coal hole and there's my mum inside wagging her finger in an 'I already said 'no'' sort of way.

 

The next day I dreamed about the old house again. This time I was in the back garden looking for somewhere to have a piss where no-one in our house or any of the neighbours' houses would see me. This is also a period of John dreaming about me (stealing his too-small suit and then sleeping in it and rumpling it up, to his annoyance)

 

 

11 – 12 th May, 2008

Me and Katy are collecting money on the door of the Cerbuna Monologue competition but the passage is very wide and thousands of people are just brushing their way past without paying. Then I'm told I have to get on stage so I go running to a door at the head of a few steps (entrance to the Cerbuna?) where I'm waiting to be let in. Someone tells me it's in another building so, already late, I set off running there in a panic.

And that's where I woke up.