My Latest Weird Dream

So, in the depths of my subconscious, I’m sitting on a bus.

Now, that’s already a bit strange, because I haven’t been on a bus for years, not regularly, not since an encounter with some trollish passengers finally tipped me over the edge into learning to drive. But that’s not the best of it, oh no.

See, I was sitting on a bus, explaining to a friend why a remake of Steptoe and Son was a bad idea.

For younger readers, Steptoe and Son was a classic British sitcom about a pair of rag-and-bone men, trapped by life and aching with pathos. For American readers, I acknowledge that the show was already remade into Sanford and Son. I have no idea whether or not this was artistically successful, but it can’t be any worse than the concept my brain spat out. Because my dreamworld’s hypothetical cast for this misbegotten project was Elliott Gould and Ed Norton.

As casting goes, it’s brave, although as this was a dream I should be grateful that I cast people who are actually alive. And they’re good actors, so they could actually have a stab at this, although I struggle to imagine Norton saying “You dirty old man!” with the requisite disgust.

And as the Steptoe’s horses were named after religious and folkloric figures like Samson and Hercules, would the new horse be called Bunyan?

Aye caramba, I want to see this now.

I need less sleep.

Script Idea Free To A Good Home…

Back in September I posted about the weird dreams I have. Well, last night I had another one, one that could form the basis of a sci-fi movie or TV show or comic or whatever. Any budding writers out there can have it for free, just name one of the characters after me…

The scene – Houses of Parliament on the day the aliens show up. Everyone’s panicking – after all, the people expect a response from their leaders when the aliens turn up. However, after we see the Prime Minister marching towards a meeting room, we cut to the people making the coffee and sandwiches (because this is going to be a long, stressful meeting, and the great and the good need their coffee and sandwiches). So it’s an alien encounter movie (from the dream, I didn’t get the impression we were being invaded as such) told from the point of view of the caterers and cleaners. I’m no screenwriter, so if you can do something with this idea, then fine, take it. All I ask is that one of the teaboys is named after me.

Now, I appreciate this may not sound the most exciting story of all time, but all I can say is, at 7:00am this morning, when I should have been thinking about getting into the shower, it was awesome and epic.

Especially when one of the caterers dropped a plate of sandwiches.

Dreaming Ties All Mankind Together…

…said Jack Kerouac. If that’s the case, the whole of humanity must be going as crazy as I am. Sorry about that.

I don’t usually remember my dreams, and often the ones that do stay with me into the waking hours are fairly dull and mundane – me sitting at my desk working, for instance. Any psychologists out there may now be stroking their chins and going “hmm…” in a bored sort of way, but it gets better.

For instance, the first nightmare I remember having was about a dinosaur. This would have been understandable had it been about a real dinosaur, but no; it was bad stop-motion effect, a comedy Harryhausen creation towering over an unconvincing city, crying out in existential horror “I don’t want to die! I don’t want to die !”. I woke up freaked out, thinking an asteroid was about to hit.

Then there was the time I woke up, convinced I’d heard a voice saying “IF YOU GO TO NEW YORK YOU WILL DIE!”. This was only a couple of months before I was due to fly to NY, and while it was probably a subconscious reaction to 9-11 the previous year, it still left me terrified and aerophobic.

And then there was the time I woke up realising that I was going to fail my degree because I hadn’t handed in my dissertation. After a few moments I remembered that I’d actually graduated four years earlier. I got a 2:1 with honours. My dreams are weird; I had a similiar one after which I was wandering around around the house thinking my girlfriend had disappeared. She was fine, but safely back at home forty miles away.

Sometimes I have awesome dreams that would make me a fortune if I had the ability to turn them into screenplays. The best of these was a Deliverance-style story of a patrolling Home Guard unit being stalked by a vicious alien – Dad’s Army vs Predator. I’d watch it.

All of which leads me to last night’s dream, in which I was trapped in a secret underground toilet. I discovered a crack in the wall and managed to pull it apart, ceramic blocks scraping away from each other as I squeezed my way into sunlight, and…

Oh Sweet Zombie Santa, it’s an obvious birth metaphor!

Eww.

This actually makes the next part interesting, as left on the site of this hidden exit were a hundred different pieces of graffiti, all of them esoteric, all of them enigmatic, as if somehow they contained the secrets of the universe.

I am aware that this is complete piffle, but you have funny thoughts go thtough your head when you’re stuck in an underground toilet.

(If you live locally to me, I think it may have been underneath Stourbridge.)

So, what’s your weirdest dream story?