The One With the Cricket-Playing Burglars

So, I’m talking to my friend. He’s telling me about how he’s won £150,000 in a competition and he’s looking to put it towards a house. Apparently he won the money by winning a running competition at his gym, running a certain distance in a record time. He then goes on to show me how fast he can run and darts off. For some reason, I run after him and end up running down residential tree-lined streets and eventually into a town centre that I don’t recognise.

I notice that, even though it’s dark and apparently quite late, there is a tiny shop still open. Or at least that’s what I think, as the doors are wide open. I run into the shop and call out for the owners, as Asian couple that I now realise that I know. The shop is no bigger than your average-sized kitchen, with a door to a small back area at one end. A man holding an armful of something, I can’t see what, walks through the door from the back of the shop and greets me, before getting down to his knees in a sort of controlled collapse. Evidently, whatever he has in his arms belongs under the counter. His wife then follows him, nagging him about something or other. I tell them that their doors should be shut because you never know who’s around at this time of night and they should be careful, considering the large amounts of money they have on the premises. How I know this, I have no idea.

Now I can see through the door to the back area of the shop. The back door to the premises is made mainly of wood, with a large frosted glass panel in the top half. As I’m looking at the door, I get a feeling that someone is just outside that door and I try to warn the couple that something’s about to happen.

Then the glass is smashed from the outside, an arm reaches in, grabs the inside handle and swings the door open. The first person through the door is wearing a mask, although the mask is simply the face of a perfectly ordinary person rather than anything particularly scary, although it’s clear that it’s a mask. There are two people with this first person but I never get to see them properly. They don’t scream at us or make any demands. Instead, they tell us to come out to the area out the back of the shop – a large loading area, the kind of area where delivery lorries can turn around. The burglars then insist that we play cricket for the contents of the shop. I run back into the shop and search around for a ball and come out with a dog’s play-ball, the kind that squeaks when you squeeze it. I bowl at the burglar and he bats it back at me. I bowl again and he flicks it away ‘off his pads’ as the professionals might say.

Then I wake up. The very beginning kind of makes sense because I recently posted a time in a rowing contest at my gym. Everything else, though, is as always, a mystery.

The One With The Scary Game at my Old House

So, I’m at my old house, the one I lived in when the family was all together, before my parents got divorced. I’m standing on the stairs and there are a couple of people with me. Although I never see or hear them, I know they’re there.

I’m standing on maybe the third or fourth step of the stairs and am looking down into the hallway, towards the front door. There’s a grandfather clock on the right hand side of the hallway and I can see the front door is a solid wooden one, not the glass-in-wooden-frame one we had when I lived there.

Then I jump down from where I’m standing, take a few hurried steps towards the front door and immediately start thumping the wall, about seven feet up to the left of the door. It’s no surprise to me that after a few thumps, the secret compartment, previously invisible beneath the wallpaper, springs open and I reach in to grab the ‘clue’ that’s hidden there. It’s a piece of paper with some instruction written on it. I never get to see the instruction, but I still shout what we should do, to the others.

After what I can only describe as a prolonged feeling of panic and tension, I find myself back in the hallway. This time I’m facing the wall opposite the grandfather clock, with the front door on my right. Again, I start thumping the wall, about seven feet up, and once again, a secret compartment springs open. I reach in and pull out the ‘clue’. This time I do get to read it properly and it says, ‘Asking the same question more than once will result in multiple possible answers’. I have no idea what this means but decide to fold the piece of paper up and put it in my pocket.

Then I wake up. All the way through the dream, even though I never saw anyone or heard any other voices, I recall there was a constant threat in the air. It was pretty clear that me and my unseen colleagues were trying to work out how to escape from where we were by solving riddles and following the ‘clues’ that we were hunting for. I was also surprised that I recalled what was written on the second ‘clue’ so precisely, as those types of things are usually just vague or blurred memories by the time I wake up and come to write them down.

The One Where I Break Back Into Prison

So, I’m in prison. But this isn’t a normal prison. My cell, in fact the whole prison, is made not of concrete or bricks and mortar, but mud and sand. It’s all set hard and seems pretty sturdy, as you’d hope for a prison, but it puzzles me, as I have no idea where I am. Or what I’ve done to get here.

Anyway, I want to break out. But I don’t hatch a complex plan or meticulously pore over blueprints of the prison. No, I just open my window, which is about six feet up one of the walls. It’s about two feet in height and six feet wide and is one of those open-from-the-bottom, letterbox types. Anyway, I crawl out of the window easily enough, leave it slightly ajar in preparation for my return and off I go, into the night. Exactly where I go and what I do, I have no idea because my dream kindly skips all that and fast forwards to the early hours of the morning. The sun is just coming up, it’s getting light and I’m standing outside my window, trying to figure out how to get back in. The window looks about two feet higher up than it does from the inside. With time pressing on and morning inspections due at any moment (I don’t know the time but bizarrely I do know that ‘morning inspections are due at any moment’). I decide to jump up and get a hold of the outside ledge, hoping to pull myself through the window. The ledge, however, being made out of mud and sand, has been smoothed into a slippery and grip-resistant lip, rather than a lovely squared-off ledge. What purchase I can get gives me just enough time to try and heave myself up. I don’t have the upper body strength to pull myself up and I fall back to ground. I start to panic as I can hear the inspector’s keys jangling in the distance as he opens and closes the doors of the neighbouring cells. With next to no time to spare, I look around for something to stand on. I run across the small courtyard in which I’m standing and (now this is weird) I find a stash of about half a dozen dust covered traffic cones. I grab one and run back to the window. Wasting no time, I stand on it’s tapered end and manage to heave myself up to and through the window. As I’m lying face down on the ledge, I pivot so my top half is now hanging out of the window, reach down for the cone and throw it back to where I found it. Of course, it lands exactly where I want it to, why wouldn’t it?

I pivot around again and I notice that there is now water flowing under my door and into my cell. I then hear the jangling of keys and hear the lock click in my door. As I jump down from the ledge, splashing down into the now ankle deep water, I just have time to balance myself after landing before the door swings open and the inspector looks into the cell. I demand to know why there is water flowing into my cell in a show of mock outrage.

Then I wake up. Prison cells, mud huts, traffic cones, floods, crawling through windows. None of this has happened to me lately. Go figure.

The One With The Dingo Steak

So, I’m in a country setting. Well, I’m in a forest to be exact. It’s late afternoon and I’m standing on a well worn track that runs through the forest. The surface of the track is basically compacted earth that, probably due to the volume of traffic that uses the track, is very solid and thus makes the track easily discernible from the forest floor either side of it. The track itself is covered with brown and orange leaves, so it’s autumn.

Now I’m just off to the side of the track, although I’m also behind what can best be described as a dark coloured sheet hung up between two trees. The sheet shields the area where I’m now standing from the track and the passing traffic, itself consisting mostly of horse-drawn carriages and people wearing dirty rags, travelling in either direction. With me behind this sheet is another man, although I can’t remember anything about his appearance. I do, however, know that he’s Australian as I can hear him talking and his Antipodean accent is clear. He’s challenging me to do something but I can’t make out what the challenge is at first. Then I see that there is a crude cooking hob in between us, with two heated rings on it. He’s challenging me to some kind of culinary cook-off.

He then sweeps away some errant leaves that have found their way from the branches above onto the hob and are slowly beginning to glow and burn. Then I notice that we both have frying pans. On closer inspection, it actually appears that I have a normal frying pan and my Australian friend has a kind of frying pan/skillet hybrid, basically a frying pan but where the surface of my frying pan is smooth, his is ridged, perfect for getting those griddle marks on steaks.

He tells me he’s going to go first, which I remember thinking was good because I didn’t know where the hell I was going to get any food from. Then he slaps a piece of meat, about the size of large dinner plate, into his pan. He then starts pummelling it with a tenderising mallet. Sparks start to fly out of the pan and I ask if he should have done the tenderising before putting the meat into the pan. This is met with a scowl and a brief explanation – ‘This is Dingo meat and it needs to be tenderised while being heated up’. So there it is, the Dingo steak being cooked and tenderised simultaneously. He pounds the steak a couple more times before declaring that it was nearly cooked. I find this hard to believe and go in for a closer inspection. He suddenly becomes very friendly and enthusiastically tells me that Dingo meat is best served rare. He slices into the meat and folds it back on itself to show the red inner. The steak is so thin by now that you can almost see though it, so quite how he managed to show me any of the inside is a bit of a mystery.

He slaps the steak onto a plate and holds it out to me, as if asking me to try it. Then I hear a voice from the track, beyond the sheet that’s shielding us from the view of any passing traffic. It wants to know what’s going on behind the sheet.

 

Then I wake up. Australians, Dingo steaks, cooking exotic steaks in the middle of a medieval forest…I’ve got nothing.

The One Where I Run Away Lop-Sided

So, I’ve just come out of a shop on Hermitage Road, in Hitchin. I brush against a guy who’s in his late teens/early twenties and is with a group of his friends, consisting of boys and girls of around the same age. I don’t recall offering an apology or even an acknowledgement that I brushed against him. Which may be the reason for the abuse I’m about to receive.

I’m ahead of the group now, heading up the top of Hermitage Road and I’m almost at the traffic lights, at the junction with Queen Street/Walsworth Road. I’m aware that the guy I brushed against is speaking, a few paces behind me, but I can’t make out what he’s saying yet. I increase the pace of my walking and start along Walsworth Road. The direction in which I’m walking reminds me of the route I used to take when I walked home from school.

Now I can hear what the guy is saying and he’s basically calling me a loser for not apologising to him when I brushed against him and that I should turn around and acknowledge that he’s behind me. Of course, I don’t turn around and instead try to speed up again. It’s now that my walking becomes lopsided. It’s as if I’m a car and both my driver-side tyres are flat. I’m listing so badly to the right that if I don’t correct my stance, I continually crash against the rugged five-foot high ,ivy-covered stone wall that runs alongside the pavement. I end up walking with a very pronounced lean to the left; in fact I’m virtually leaning at 45 degrees to my left. Obviously, walking like this attracts more abuse from the group behind me and so I start to jog and then to flat-out run. Well, I say flat-out but suddenly my body becomes so heavy that, even though I’m putting everything into it, my efforts at running see me making as much progress as I would have made if I’d have carried on at a walking pace. The guy behind me shouts that if I had any balls then I’d turn around and face him.

I stubbornly refuse to turn around and put more effort into my lopside running and I eventually reach the church at the junction with Highbury Road. I dart (as much as I can dart) right into the gravel-lined entrance to the church. Only now I’m hardly making any forward progress at all. I grab the wrought iron gates that are forever open at this entrance and use them as an anchor to stop myself going backwards. With an almighty heave, I drag myself forward. Both my feet leave the ground and and I fly forward about six feet. Taking this as a good sign, I adopt this method and take multiple leaps, which take more and more effort with every attempt. I am, however, making progress and the barracking from behind is beginning to get more distant. I get through the church grounds and end up on Highbury Road, opposite the junction with The Avenue.

Then I wake up.

I think there’s a bullying aspect to this one, even though it’s borne out of my refusal to acknowledge that I brushed against someone. Why I’m running lopsided, I couldn’t say. The route is familiar as it’s the route I used to take every time I walked home from Hitchin Boys’ School, during my time there. So maybe there’s a shooldays aspect to all of this. Oh, I don’t know, but I might try that lopsided running thing at the gym tonight.