Executive lifestyle

Somehow spending an evening poring over my innermost thoughts led me to something like a nightmare involving an art dealer I saw on the telly the other week. The following events are utterly fictional and bear no relation to any persons living or dead and dear boy, if you are reading this, go back to perving over your Gauguin books. Creep.

Anyway, he's a fidgety, dead quiet, upper-class sort of guy in his mid-forties who likes windsurfing and has a leonine hairdo with a full beard and glasses. I've never once heard him raise his voice, even after the finance director left an empty can of Guinness standing on his desk. He's kind of like the guy in yakuza film fight-scenes who stands at the back in a white suit whilst everyone else is getting stabbed and mutilated. Except that this guy has all the smack-fu of a petri dish of degenerated rennet.

But he does have a laptop, and like most businessmen who have laptops, he doesn't really understand it. This gives us something in common, as I don't understand laptops very well either. True, my real-world job is IT engineering, so I'm intimately acquainted with most forms of computer-based misery and suffering, but I hate dealing with laptops, because my customers either buy the slim poncy Powerbook wannabes that don't work, or the heavy, clunky cheap-ass ones that don't work either. So realistically, it was only a matter of time before I had a nightmare about one. Bloody hell.

Thus: it is a warm autumn day in London. I am waddling amiably along Piccadilly. It is quite beautiful outside, being briskly cold, sunny, and about noon. I take a left at the Ritz, and in due course, wind up at the front door of this gaff in Berkeley Square. There's a bag slung over my arm with a bunch of cardboard boxes inside with a couple of painfully stylish personal organisers inside.

(I hate these things even more than I hate laptops.)

Now I'm up in this guy's own office. Being an art dealer, it's decked out in horrible Edwardian chintz, with floral carpets and big old teak furnishings and probably an elephant's-foot umbrella stand. Crouching over this laptop and trying to make the Crappié talk nicely to his laptop.

This is made more interesting by the fact that all the while I'm trying to do this, he's packing to leave on a seven PM flight to somewhere like the Cayman Islands. So I'm stooping over this desk rather than sitting down so he can get to the cupboards behind me, which contain front-loading washer/dryer machines. From these he is retrieving great musty bales of clean-but-badly-in-need-of-airing laundry and stuffing them into big Samsonite suitcases. And then swarming around the desk and pulling out drawers to retrieve stacks of blank bank-drafts and they go in his carry-on. It's really quite freaky, and I'm having one of the bad afternoons I occasionally have where I literally can't think about what I'm doing. It's like a physical impossibility.

...the slightly underwhelming long-and-short of it was that in making the organisers talk to his computer, I completely fucked his email storage, corrupting four years worth of un-backed-up messages forever; my *family* turned up, deposited themselves into armchairs, and started arguing and cursing at each other; I somehow made his computer look like it hadn't just been raped by an incompetent blubbering halfwit; and got the hell out of there just before the building blew up.

Somehow, the fact that all of this took place in bright sunlight only made everything worse.

wha?

we are in a building. deep in the bowels of its twisty corridors. they are carpeted, and there is a nice chrome handrail. one side is generic office-style wallpaper, the other is bare, dank stone with torches burning in rings. we know we have to get out, so we begin walking up stairs, through corridors, around hairpin turns. eventually, there is a door, but it is going downwards. we argue amongst ourselves; some believe we must keep going up, others think we should go down and chance the door. it is a heavy door, ironbound dark wood gleaming in the torchlight. eventually, we decide to try the door.

we emerge onto a cobblestoned walk in what we suddenly know is boston during a historical festival. the streets are filled with re-enactors in colonial dress. we are in colonial dress. we begin to wander around boston (although it looks absolutely nothing like boston), until we get caught up in a skit, enacting british soldiers confiscating the colonists' shoes so they can recycle the leather and make shoes for themselves. after trying to explain that even though we're in costume, we're not part of the skit, we give them our shoes anyway.

then someone remembers we have to meet his parents at 7pm for dinner. so we run off in colonial dress with sock feet back to our hotel. we leave behind the historical festival, and first walk past a hispanic cabaret where the women are singing in spanish about antonio banderas (what?) then we walk along a street full of hotels in the late-afternoon sun of early summer. when we get to our hotel, i realize the skit performers took my only nice shoes, my high-heeled boots, and i can't go out to dinner in sneakers. it is now ten minutes until seven.

i make my apologies and run back, past the hotels, to the cabaret. i have to go to the park where the skit took place, but i can hear the boston symphony orchestra, and i know somehow that they're playing on the same stage that the british soldiers were using earlier, and i can't go there until they're done performing. so i sit at a table on the street outside the cabaret. someone, who i somehow know is a slimeball lawyer, comes over and asks me what i'm drinking. i say a gin and tonic, because it's summer. the waitress comes over and re-fills his drink, but doesn't bring me one, which confuses me because i think to myself, usually when someone asks, "what are you drinking?" they're going to buy you a drink.

then i realize that i still need to meet my friend's parents for dinner at 7, and i still have no shoes. so i apologize and run upstairs (upstairs?) to the park where the symphony is playing. an employee of the festival notices i'm looking lost and comes over and asks if she can help. i explain that we were in costume earlier and some of the actors took our shoes and now i need to meet people for dinner at 7, and i have no shoes. so she tiptoes around the side of the audience and comes back with paper bags full of shoes that we can look through. she's horrified that the actors are not only including tourists in their skits, but also treating them as though they were employees and taking their shoes. as the symphony is playing its final chords, we find my boots, and the employee offers me some free tickets to something i don't discover, because then i wake up.

i'm so confused.

Ok, wtf? Now I'm an action hero?

Whoo boy, it was another one of those impressive, full-length dreams last night...

So at the end of my recent trip to the United States, wizgeneric & s.o. dropped me off at the British Airways check-in desk. For some dream-logic reason, the check-in desk is actually in Market East Station in central Philadelphia. Right between a Starbucks and a guy selling "pretzles" out of a wooden cart. So. I'm standing here in the queue for check-in and I'm rifling through my bags for no particular reason other than to establish that if I have left something behind, it's far too late now to do anything about it.

What is less than obvious is that before I left to come to the United States, some friends and I held up and robbed a bank truck at gunpoint in northern France, making off with around $50,000 US dollars. I have about $1000 of these in my pocket, in fifty-dollar bills. Or, rather, I should have. After hearing a news report on the WizG's car radio, I had elected not to spend any of them. But counting the notes in my wallet, I realise that I have. And they're being tracked. Crap.

So here I am standing in the check-in desk, fumbling trying to separate out two pairs of Beyerdynamic and Sennheiser headphones because I somehow know that the Sennheisers will give me away. It's as if I can hear the intelligence officers' radio service broadcasting distinguishing features to the grunts I am now convinced are prowling around the station looking for me. Then I look down at my feet because I have stubbed my foot on something next to my hold luggage.

What appear to be two assault rifles in cases. What luck. But I'm sure I didn't have those when we packed the Volkswagen.

The grunts are behind me, suddenly, I know. Worse still, they've seen the headphones. I stoop to my knees, grab my new black jacket, zip it up, and check the rifle cases. One contains a big shiny silver thing with a shoulder-butt and a little label that says it's a pulse rifle - whatever the hell one of those is - the other is a hand-cannon with a ridiculously long double barrel.


From thereon, things get kind of hazy. I'm turning around, standing up, with the hand-cannon in my arms and the incriminating Sennheiser headphones around my neck, and look up to see three agents in trenchcoats (really, could my dreams be any more cliché?) staring at them. Watching them, I fan out the banknotes, and then toss them into their faces. I'm away, running through the Starbucks and knocking over a barrista. Normally I run about as well as a moth gives head, but today I have no problem. Not even with a firearm in either hand.

I've also clearly had some firearms and combat training, because the air around me is erupting with small-arms fire and some sort of terrifying sonic weapon that leaves Matrix-like traces in the air; and I'm returning fire from the cannon. The barrel of the sodding thing must be about ten inches long, so clearly the dream has done nothing for my penis dimension inadequacies. I must confess, I didn't get time to check.

By this point we're legging it directly out of Market East to end up outside the Greyhound terminal. Or at least, that's what ought to be here, but instead directly across the street we have a cheap hotel and directly next to that, a little Episcopalian church with a very high belltower. That'll do nicely. Bam.

Inside and up the tower, switching to the cheerful silver rifle. I appear to have run IDKFA at some point because the thing shows no signs of ever needing to be reloaded. It is at about this time that I realise that in addition to shooting big red bolts of glowing plasma, it also shoots concussion grenades. Boink, they go down the staircase, and then make dust fall from the rafters. Wham.

As I advance up the bell tower, its structure gets forcefully perforated by what seem to be blasts of superheated air that practically vaporise the stonework and would presumably do a pretty good job on my body, cool jacket or no. It's at this point that the dream loses all contact with reality, when I find a pair of sunglasses in my jacket and put them on. Thank you, ma'am.

As I reach the top of the belltower there is a deafening clang as the bell is forced out the side of the tower, where it falls more than eighty feet to the street below. This happens, I discover, because the pursuing authorities have lodged what looks like a torpedo through the windows at the summit of the belltower. It is decorated like a Chinese firecracker in gold and red and black and has the trade-name Axolalotl picked out on it. It is ticking. I suspect when it detonates, I will be very, very sorry if I'm still around.

Climbing to a window, I attempt to scale the tower and the roof, but it's seriously hard work and all the lead has been stripped from the tiles. I hear someone shouting my name and look around: Beat Takeshi is parked below in an AMC Pacer and waving at me. I vault gracelessly to the ground and leap inside the back, poking out the enormous rear window and take up firing positions. "Ok," I say uncomfortably, realising that I've torn the crotch of my jeans, "Go."

Beat starts his engine and takes off towards the Delaware. He drives with a true maniac's disregard for the red light, and insists on playing a tape of Greek mandolin music very loudly. At some point around the Hilton at Penn's Landing, I hit my head very hard on the roof struggling into the shotgun seat, and forget much of what comes after.

A woman is getting ready for a bath. She looks like Hedy Lamarr. In her cramped, dingy bathroom she strips and hangs her overalls on the closed, locked door. Her two small children are outside playing quietly with toys before the fire on the stove. They also wear small overalls.

Naked, she climbs into the tin bath and proceeds to lather herself, scrubbing, etc. Having done so, she reaches for a loofah. We're now looking down directly above the bath. As she moves the loofah over her skin, she disappears beneath the water, and then above it.

i am...not sparticus...

the other night i dreamed that i was oprah.

well, ok, it was more like i was dreaming from oprah's perspective, but that's pretty much the same thing. so oprah's walking through this neighborhood that looks like it's been designed by a gingerbread person and she sees these two little kids (maybe 5 and 3 years old) beating the snot out of each other. she's already upset and disoriented (because a) she doesn't know where she is and b) something about an arranged marriage that she doesn't want to be involved in) so this sight disturbs her. she breaks up their fight and decides that she should take note of their address because she has a suspicion that they're being abused. so she starts walking away and turns the corner and goes into the woods and then the two little kids and their psycho father start chasing her and kidnap her.

the best part about this dream? the father's name is "pussy gaver."

o.O

Resolution 303

In dreams last night I was a fly on the wall, figuratively speaking, of the United Body Organs, which turns out to be a non-governmental organisation with a very specific remit that convenes inside my abdominal cavity while I'm asleep.

So, a broad, low cylindrical wood-panelled room, filled with circular desks. And lots of little versions of me with different haircuts and wardrobes, most of whom were bitching about how they've all just about had it with my sinuses (I have had the flu since last Saturday. It truly is getting kind of old.)

They were drafting a resolution on whether my brain should be removed from its present position (on the grounds of inefficiency) by means of direct chemical strikes.

I think my body is telling me to take more of the right kind of drugs. Except I wasn't really clear on which type of drugs to take because I started laughing, which made me cough, and then I woke up and walked over to the bathroom thinking it was time to go to work and brushed my teeth and threw up and brushed my teeth again and shaved before realising that it was ten to two in the freaking morning.

So I'll just take every drug in sight from now on and see how that works out. Rah.

memory.

i had a weird dream last night involving the new FedEx-Kinkos hydra. except now i can't remember it. which kind of sucks, although i do seem to remember it was a stupid dream to begin with. and really, if you're keeping a dream diary, do you want it full of stupid dreams about trying to ship something from a copy shop? pfft.

not-quite-mile-high club?

last night i dreamed that my girlfriend and i were desperately searching for our plane tickets in this strange little-house-on-the-prairie house and there was an old man there (somebody's grandfather?) who had also lost his tickets so we were tearing the place apart looking for tickets and his social worker showed up and wondered what the hell was going on and then she went away and the old guy went away and then we were in our bed, except it wasn't our bed (it was too small) and it was attached to the ceiling by ropes so i hoisted us up to the ceiling and then one of the ropes broke and i almost fell off and so i hoisted us back down.

and then i woke up.

Cribbage

Apparently Cribbage is a very popular game in the United States, although it does not have a high profile in Britain, where it is widely assumed to have been invented. I have never played it before in my life, until last night. In my sleep. Uh, yeah.

For the uninitiated, it's a card game which uses a wooden pegboard for the purposes of scoring and looking cool and intimidating. I was the uninitiated. I have no damn idea what I was doing, but I appeared to be holding my own.

I was playing against a big African woman with a head-dress who appeared to have six fingers on each hand, but she shuffled her cards constantly and I found it impossible to keep count. Another problem was that each time I placed a peg in the pegboard, it made the sound of a different musical chord. This didn't happen for my opponent, which was also highly distracting. I was probably putting the pegs in the wrong way up or something.

I think the holes in the pegboard represent lifestyle decisions.

and for my first post...

i will humiliate my gorgeous and long-suffering spouse, who the other morning answered my question, "are you going to get up now, honey?" by wailing "STAMPS!" and then rolling over and beginning to snore again.

now there's a dream.

"Zzz..."

I'm so sleepy. Five hours sleep in 60 hours. @whee.

From such inauspicious beginnings come ideas like this. Starting with a couple of people, I got the idea that a collective blog for dreams and dream-derivatives might be kind of cool and fun. So here we are! The admins for now are myself and wizgeneric. Have fun, peoples.