The One Where I Shoot an Asian Woman in the Face With an Uzi

So, I’m standing in a field and it’s looking a little familiar. It’s not long before I realise that it is in fact Pinehill playing field in Hitchin, where I used to spend many summer days playing football, cricket (and other sports I was no good at) during the school holidays and weekends when I was a kid.

I’m with someone, although I can’t make out who it is. We’re chatting about something, probably thermo-nuclear physics or Jordan’s breasts. Anyway, the conversation is cut short when a missile appears out of nowhere and lands in the field, about 100 metres away from us, and explodes. My friend has seen enough and plain-old disappears. I wonder to myself what the immediate threat is, as whoever fired the missile is obviously a crap shot – if they’re aiming for me that is. My theory swiftly comes back to bite me in the arse as my unseen enemy then sends over about half-a-dozen missiles, obviously going for the blanket-bombing, law-of-averages approach. They rain down, a lot closer than is comfortable and I decide to leave, post-haste. However, unsurprisingly, I’m a little slower than the missiles and one explodes so close to me that I’m blown into the air, clearing the tops of the trees that line the edge of the field. From my hastily arranged viewpoint, I can see my old primary school, William Ransom JMI, the school playing fields and the railway line that runs alongside them.

Then I start falling, although I don’t experience that falling sensation that you normally get in ‘falling’ dreams – where you jolt yourself awake just before you hit the ground (unless you’re in a Gary Larson cartoon) – and I land really quite gently behind the trees, in a shallow trench that runs parallel with them. I run, bent double to keep out of sight, along this trench until I meet a group of people huddled together, sheltering from the air-attack. One of them, an Asian lady, although I couldn’t be country specific, is making a God-awful noise, wailing at the kind of pitch that would give Mariah Carey a run for her trucks full of money. I quickly ascertain that this wailing would clearly give away our position to the enemy and that she has to be silenced.

Then, although I have no idea how it got there, I suddenly have an Uzi in my hand. Alarmingly, I have no hesitation in pointing it directly at her face, holding it about a foot away from her nose. After a couple of seconds of hoping she’ll get the point, she doesn’t and I open fire, peppering here contorted, wailing face with round after round of rapidly-delivered ammunition. After a few seconds of this, I’m informed by one of the other people huddling in the trench, that shooting her in the face won’t help. They’ve apparently tried that already, together with, bizarrely, stuffing her mouth full of cakes…which didn’t work either.

Then I wake up.

OK, Pinehill playing fields – from my childhood and all that, so I get that.

Missiles? Open warfare in Hitchin? Uzis and attempted murder? – Sometimes you’ve just got to admit that you’ve got no idea…and this is one of those times.

The One Where The Emergency Kit’s Full of Weird Stuff

So, I’m in a small car, the make of which I can’t determine. In the car with me is an old work colleague (again, but a different one to the one in the Angry Dwarf dream) and we’re driving along a road in what looks like an industrial estate. There are no other cars around and we can see no people either. Suddenly the car starts to handle really badly and a warning light on the dashboard lights up. The picture on the display is a basic side view of the car with the rear passenger-side wheel flashing, indicating that that tyre is flat.

We pull into a driveway that leads to a few small industrial units – garages, lock-ups, that sort of thing. I get out and see the tyre. Although we’re in a road-going car, the wheels are no bigger than those you’d find on a pram or pushchair. I squeeze the flat ‘tyre’ and compare it to the other tyres. Sure enough, even though it’s just a pram-sized wheel, it’s somehow flat. Then I realise the car we’re in is so small, there’s no boot, no back seat; in fact nowhere to store a spare tyre, no matter how small. My friend suggests it’s stored in the back of her seat. I grapple with the back of the seat and manage to prise it open. Lo and behold, the back of the seat, or rather the body of the upright part of the seat, is basically a storage space.

It’s about now that I look up and see there are people approaching the car from the units surrounding us and they don’t look too friendly. In fact they’re carrying things like wrenches and lengths of pipe and eyeing up the car with envy. I start to panic and rip off the back of the seat. Then I see the ‘Emergency Kit’ – a white plastic bag with a big green cross on it. “This must be useful”, I think, and tear it open. Inside is a mixture of first aid materials and just downright odd stuff – odd because they have no place in an ‘Emergency Kit’. Alongside the likes of the plasters, bandages and paracetamols are things like (and obviously I’m going by memory here); vials of blood (B+, my own brand coincidentally); empty, capped test tubes; a set of floppy disks (the kit must have been packed in the 90s); clear sandwich bags and a set of top trumps, although I forget the brand/subject.

And then I wake up. The one thing I do recall from having this dream is a very real sense of panic once the people appeared. Why the Emergency Kit should be full of pretty useless stuff, I don’t know. And thinking about it, my friend wasn’t too useful – she didn’t offer to help, in fact she didn’t say a word after suggesting where the spare tyre might be – the spare tyre I never got around to finding. I’ll hold my hands up and say I have no idea what’s going on here.

The One Where Planes Drop from the Sky and I’m Australian

So, I’m standing on a bridge…a very high bridge by the looks of it because when I look over the edge, the ground is about half a mile below me. The bridge spans a motorway and there’s a wide grass divide between the carriageways.

While I’m standing on this bridge, I notice a plane, an easyjet sort of size, making what those in the aviation industry might call its final approach and it’s flying quite low overhead. Then I notice another one close behind it and I start to think that something might be wrong. Then planes start appearing from all over the place, all heading in the same direction and seemingly jostling for position in the sky and all desperate to land. There are about a dozen of them now and the immediacy of their problems is made more apparent by the struggling noises that their engines are making. Then it happens; one of the planes just drops like a stone. I follow it’s descent and I have to look over the edge of the bridge to see it crash onto the grass divide between the carriageways below. It doesn’t crash as if it was an emergency landing, it lands ‘belly down’ as if it just dropped perfectly vertically. Then I look further along the motorway and three more planes do exactly the same, landing, or rather crashing to earth, on the grass divide, ‘belly first’.

Once I see this, I’m suddenly on board a fire engine and, for some reason, I’m Australian. We tear along a motorway, going down a steep incline and we stop to help other firefighters who are digging up the earth to the side of the road. They’re all covered in wet mud and the mud is only getting wetter and more slippery as they’ve managed to unearth a huge water-pipe and have smashed it to the point where water is now gushing out of it and pouring down the hill. I imagine that it’s destined for the site or sites of the plane crashes but this is never confirmed.

Then I’m standing next to the fire engine, which is now parked up alongside other fire engines in what I can only describe as a rural setting, like a village green and there are the odd bits of hay being blown across the street, as if there are bails of the stuff lining the street. Strangely, I’m seeing everything in a sepia colour. Anyway, the fire chief fella comes and tells us that one man has to take a fire engine to the crash scene and fight the fires by himself because he can’t afford to throw too many firefighters at this incident.

So, the best way to decide apparently is to play a game of football, the type I used to play as a kid. The game we used to call ‘Wembley’ and which involves one person playing in goal and everyone else playing for themselves. There are about a dozen of us firefighters, tackling each other, fighting for the ball and getting in our shots at goal in an effort to score and thus be eliminated from the round. Amazingly, although I don’t see how, I manage to score the first goal and I go and sit out the game, happy that I’m out of the running for the ‘certain death’ assignment. And then I wake up.

Planes, Australia, Firefighters, Motorways – none of these things can be connected to anything I’ve seen, read or done lately. Which just leaves me with nothing. Although I do now have the opinion that all Aussie firefighters are: a) bad at one-player ‘Wembley’; b) all too glad to send a brother firefighter to his death and: c) forever trapped in a sepia coloured rural world…in my head.

The One Where I’m Walking in the Amazon with Angelina Jolie

So, the title would suggest something sexy, something adventurous a-la Lara Croft. Unfortunately not, it’s all too mundane.

I’m looking down at the Amazon river from what seems like a mile up and can see the ocean and the river estuary in the distance. Obviously, from this height, that coast could be miles away. I slowly sweep down, like an opening shot in some Hollywood film and eventually land at the riverside, where I become part of a group of people lugging backpacks full of some sort of kit, although I don’t know exactly what sort of kit.

We can see which way the river is flowing and we’re following it, hugging the shoreline as we navigate our way towards the coast with our heavy loads. Then we round a tight bend in the river and it’s suddenly dry. The entire riverbed is as dry as a desert although there a few outcroppings of vegetation here and there, like persistent weeds on a garden path. Even though the river is now dry, we continue to hug the shoreline and I put forward the suggestion that we could just walk along the riverbed, making the whole experience easier. The woman in front of me shouts that it’s a stupid idea and that we’d all either drown or be eaten by piranhas or crocodiles if we did as I said. Although she doesn’t turn around, I know instantly that she is, for some reason, Angelina Jolie, probably on her way home from trying to adopt an Amazonian baby or something equally as humanitarian.

Anyway, we struggle on and I get more and more annoyed at this insistence that we stay off the riverbed. Eventually I give in and jump down the dry riverbank and start walking along the riverbed. I announce that it’s perfectly safe and that it would make more sense to make the journey this way. However, my suggestion is met with more oppostion from the Jolie woman, who shouts at me to get back on the shore before I soak the kit. Obviously I don’t understand why she’s being like this so just ignore her and eventually end up overtaking her. I say something, although I can’t remember what, that is, in equal measure, witty and childish. Whatever I say, it royally pisses off Jolie and she shouts her face off at me until I wake up.

Is this what it’s come to? I have a dream involving Angelina Jolie and it involves neither fine wine, silk sheets, or a Dad’s Army DVD box set. Instead, I’m heaving half a ton of god knows what through South America and being shouted at by her ‘cos she’s convinced a dry riverbed is actually a raging torrent. Stupid bloody cow.

The One Where David Duchovny Delivers the Post

So, it’s an overcast day, the clouds are a depressing dark grey colour and look as though they could deposit their load at any moment. So what am I doing? Of course, I’m playing tennis.

I don’t know who I’m playing against but I do know the ball, when I can get it both over the net and in play, is always returned to me. I’m struggling to unearth any semblance of tennis-playing talent from within and am just embarrassing myself with my consistently terrible shots. When I try to put topspin on the ball, I just succeed in hammering the ball straight into the ground, making it bounce around 20 feet in the air and come to rest about 6 feet away from me. When I try to put some wicked backspin on the ball, slicing at it with what people in the forties would have called ‘admirable gusto’, the ball just glances against the racquet face and then pops to the ground rather apologetically. So I try a ‘blast it and see’ approach, resulting in around half a dozen tennis balls ending up in the insanely tall fir trees which I have just realised are surrounding the court on all sides.

Then I hear a voice shouting at us to stop playing for a moment. I stop hitting tennis balls into the trees for long enough to see a postman, carrying a sackful of post, the strap straining on one shoulder and his gait is trying desperately to compensate for it. He makes his way to the right hand end of the net, as I’m looking at it, and empties the contents of the sack onto the court. It’s then that I realise that the postman is David Duchovny. There’s nothing particularly ‘Hollywood’ about him, he’s just David Duchovny, delivering post and wearing the usual Royal Mail uniform. He’s got a bit of stubble going on and is wearing glasses but it’s definitely him. He says something about me having to up my game if I want to ‘make it’, although I don’t recall his exact phrasing.

He wanders off the court and I hit a few more balls into the surrounding trees before waking up.

OK, I watched a bit of tennis yesterday and had a conversation with my housemate about how terrible I am at the game, so that kind of explains why I was dreaming about tennis. The postman link could be explained by the fact that I saw ‘Looking For Eric’ at the cinema last night, in which the main character is a postman. The David Duchovny link, however, is a harder one to explain. I can’t remember when I last saw Duchovny in anything or read about him. Why is he delivering post and why is he delivering it all to me, on a tennis court, with inclement weather moving in? And why is he so concerned about the development of my fledgling tennis career? That one, I can’t explain.

The One In the Poorly Lit Frozen Food Store

So, I used to work for Iceland and that’s where I find myself now, back there and as some type of management person. There’s nothing about me that immediately identifies me as management, I just know I am. Anyway, for some reason the lighting in the store is on the blink and much of the place is in semi-darkness. Still, the customers don’t seem too phased by it and are shopping away happily. In fact, too happily and I’m just noticing that there are hundreds of them, far more than Iceland is used to, in fact. The queues at the checkouts are growing fast and I notice that there seems to be a bit of a situation developing at one of them. I go to the checkout to find a queue of annoyed customers wanting to know why there is no-one working the till. I look around for the absent member of staff and end up asking the lady who’s shopping is halfway through being checked out. Although I don’t remember what she says, she is gesturing angrily behind her and, as the rest of the queue move out of the way, I see the offending member of staff. She is, for some reason, up a stepladder that is situated about 30 feet away, with a worried expression on her face, as if she’s spotted a mouse and has climbed the ladder to avoid it. Why she’s really up there, I don’t know. She’s not doing anything in particular although I think to myself that she could at least try fixing the lights while she’s up there. After a bit of coaxing, she eventually comes down and explains that she’s not serving ‘that woman’ at the head of the queue, although the reason is never made clear. The two women obviously don’t like each other, so I send the member of staff off to have a break and calm down. I jump on the checkout and set about serving the customers. I look under the checkout for carrier bags to hand to the first woman but all I can find are Tescos bags – hundreds of them. Not being able to find any Iceland bags, I bite the bullet and throw the Tescos bags on the back of the checkout and start scanning the shopping. Surprisingly, no-one says anything about the bags and the shopping gets scanned and packed swiftly and the queue gradually gets shorter and shorter until I can finally come off the checkout and get on with the rest of my jobs.

 

But before I can get on with those jobs, I wake up.

 

Now, I can see the Iceland connection – I used to work there, made it to Supervisor/Deputy Manager level and jumped on the checkouts when I needed to. Why the lights were on the blink I don’t know, why the member of staff was in the middle of the store, up a stepladder for no discernible reason, I don’t know and the Tesco bags conundrum also has me baffled. I’m also a little annoyed at the fact that I’m not having a dream about parachuting into enemy territory on some life or death mission for Queen and country, instead of this dream about working in a second tier food retailer with faulty lighting and another store’s packaging.

The One With the Racist Kitchen Manager

So, I’m working as a trainee in a kitchen at an old people’s home, for some reason, and we’re cooking up hundreds of roast dinners for the residents. For reasons that aren’t explained to me, we’re making each meal individually, apparently to train me properly on how to make this kind of meal. When I bring up the ridiculousness of this approach, it’s laughed off by the kitchen manager who’s supposed to be training me. I never actually get to see the kitchen manager, I just hear a voice and I know he’s there, I just can’t see him. He’s like that annoying wasp that hangs around just behind your ear that you never seem to be able to get rid of.

Anyway, we’re in the kitchen and facing a big hotplate/oven combo type of unit that looks like it’s big enough for a person to crawl into comfortably. There’s a head chef working away at the hotplate. He’s a black guy with a completely shaved head and the stereotypical tea towel thrown over one shoulder. He looks about 5 and a half feet tall and for some reason he reminds me of Olivier Dacourt, the ex Leeds Utd player. He’s working quietly while the kitchen manager yaps away to me about hygiene etc.

Then the kitchen manager takes me to what I can only describe as a crawl space, about ten metres or so in length, just to the right of the cooker. When empty, I reckon one person could walk in it if they did so sideways. But it’s not empty. It’s full of dirty crockery, stacked up to about 5ft from the floor. Why it’s there, I’m not told, but I’m shown it nonetheless. Then we go back into the kitchen and the kitchen manager explains to me why we’re able to prepare each meal individually. Apparently, each resident is called down to the kitchen one at a time to collect their meal. The kitchen manager then informs me that it takes them so long to get to the kitchen, on account of them being so old and slow on their feet, that by the time they get to the kitchen, the meal’s ready for them.

Then, with this bizarre explanation given, the kitchen manager turns on the head chef. No reason is given for this and I’m not aware of any bad blood or history between the two people. He tells me that I can speak to the head chef any way I want because he hardly ever talks and won’t fight back. Then the abuse starts; the ‘N’ word comes out a couple of times and the head chef doesn’t bat an eyelid. The kitchen manager urges me to join in, telling me to call the head chef ‘Samba’. It’s clearly a word that he likes to use as he starts shouting it at his colleague and keeps nudging me to join in. Thankfully, even in my dreams I’m no racist and I don’t join in. While all this abuse is going on, the head chef doesn’t even look like he can hear the kitchen manager’s voice and happily goes about his business, preparing individual roast dinners for all the residents. That’s when I woke up.

This dream wasn’t as weird as it was a little alarming. While I’m glad that I didn’t join in with the racist name-calling, I’m a little perturbed at the lack of the physical presence of the racist kitchen manager. This could lead anyone to jump to the conclusion that the voice is actually my own and I’m a closet racist and any ethnic minority that turns up in my dreams is in for some serious abuse. I’m sure this isn’t the case because I remember having a dream, years ago, where I met a Chinese man and he taught me how to speak Chinese for some reason, I forget why. Anyway, we ended up as friends on that occasion, so I’m sure I’m no racist. Although this dream’s got me worried.

The One With the Beansprout Hair

So, I don’t have any hair, this I have come to terms with over the past decade. Which makes the dream I had last night a bit weirder to me. It was a very brief and to the point dream and involved no-one else but me.

I’m looking in the mirror and rather than seeing the stubbly slaphead that usually greets me when I stand before such reflective substances, I see that I have something akin to hair growing on my bonce. Admittedly, the hairline starts about 6 inches back and I can just about make out in the mirror where it starts, just where the top of my head meets the back of my head. Then I notice that I have what can only be described as an abundance of hair on the back of my head. I can see it when I turn my head to the side and the slightly dishevelled locks extend below the level of my ears to around the nape of my neck. The thought even enters my head that it looks quite good, in an indie I-just-got-out-of-bed way.

I grab a hand-held mirror to get a better look and hold it behind my head. Then it gets weird. Rather than the flowing locks that I saw from the front, what I see now is the familiar baldness at the back of my head. And then I see it, the strangest ‘hair’ I’ve ever seen. It’s not the thick dark brown stuff of a few seconds ago but around a dozen single 3-4 inch strands of yellowing hair that, quite frankly, looks like dried Beansprouts that are somehow attached to the back of my head. For the life of me I can’t explain the difference between the front view and the back view but I decide to get it all cut off and return to my usual Mitchell-Brother look. But before the clippers come out, I wake up.

This puzzled me as I have no issues with my hair, or lack of it. I noticed I was my father’s son in that department in my late twenties and hastily did something about, getting it all off and beating mother nature to it. Why I would worry about it now is a mystery to me, if that’s what this dream is saying. All I know is that I had a vegetable growing out of my head that made what hair I did have look like the kind that adorns the head of an old man who’s spent too much time smoking cigarettes and not washing. That’s ridiculous…I don’t smoke.

The One With the Angry Dwarf

So, I’m walking through a town and minding my own business when I bump into an old work colleague. Why it’s this old work colleague I don’t know, but I went with it. She told me about how her and her friends had been signed up to help modernise the town centre and their brief was to simply paint a continuous horizontal line, about a foot wide, one floor up, along every building in the town centre. The line would continue around the town, perhaps as something for people to follow, I never did get the full explanation.

Anyway, she then told me she was also working on a hotel project and asked if I’d like to see it, or specifically inside it. I said yes and off we went around the corner to a half built hotel. I can’t remember seeing much of the outside of the building but I do remember scaffolding, a couple of people in hard hats and seeing some of that plastic orange mesh that you get hanging off scaffolding sometimes. We went into the hotel and up some stairs to the ‘show room’, the room designed to win people over, to persuade them that this is the hotel for them. Whether or not it would have won me over, I couldn’t say as I don’t remember a thing about it apart from a bathroom sink unit with a mirror above it, that’s it. Then I noticed that my clothes were covered in dust, hardly surprising in a half finished building project. That’s when my friend disappeared and I started to change my clothes (where the new set had come from I have no idea). While I was getting changed in the ‘show room’, I glanced back down the stairs that we had come up earlier (they came directly into the room) and noticed a child walking up them. He suddenly started shouting at me to hurry up, that he was waiting to see the ‘show room’. It was then that I realised that this ‘child’ was in fact an adult and was a dwarf. Clearly, the rate at which I was changing clothes was not fast enough for his liking and he continued to shout at me. So I started shouting back, my main argument being that the more he shouted at me and distracted me, the longer it would take. This didn’t work and he continued to harrass me. I tried to speed things up and while trying to hastily put on a pair of trousers, I leant against the wall which seemed quite flimsy at first touch. Once all my weight was on it, however, the whole thing gave way. While it didn’t collapse, it did buckle and give way enough for me to see through to the next room, even making enough space for me to walk through if I’d wanted to. I glanced through the gap and was able to see a fully appointed luxury hotel room, complete with a flat screen TV on the wall and not just a drinks fridge but a full size, 6ft tall fridge with champagne, wine, beer and soft drinks in it. I took my weight off the wall and it regained it’s shape and former position. And then, rather annoyingly I woke up.

I was rather annoyed at not finishing the argument with the angry dwarf as I reckon I could’ve taken him. I mean, I had the high ground, from a stairs perspective that is, not in an anti-dwarf-I’m-taller-than-you way. I was also puzzled at my friend’s disappearance. She’d been so eager to show me the project she was involved with and then just disappeared without saying goodbye and left me in the company of a very ill-tempered hobbit. And to rub salt into the wound, she clearly had not shown me to the best room in the hotel as that was obviously the one next door. I didn’t see it but I reckon if I’d peered even further into the next room, I would’ve seen a monkey butler on roller skates, carrying a tray of ice cold beers, and Zooey Deschanel laying seductively on the bed.

Literally…in my dreams.