The One Where R-Patz And I Find Our Way Out Of Highbury

So, I’m at Highbury, Arsenal’s former ground (and now a millionaire’s playground, filled with offices, apartments and fashionably moulded garden ornaments, which themsleves are being gently and gracefully shat on by class-ignorant pigeons). Anyway, I’m back in the time when Arsenal still played there (when they preferred to win trophies, rather than view them as shiny distractions) and a game has evidently just finished, because I’m leaving the North Stand and heading south down the Avenell Road side of the ground. For some reason I’m still inside the ground and all of a sudden I have a companion.

From where he’s come I don’t know, but I turn around to see exactly who it is and it’s no other than the pasty-faced vampire/young Hugh Grant, Robert Pattinson. As we make our way down to the south end of the ground, we start to realise we don’t know the way out. Suddenly, I’m holding a half-full pint glass,I’m assuming half-full of beer, but this is a dream and I’d rather not sample what could frankly be anything.

For some reason, I’m of the opinion that sturdily patting the glass on the rim will somehow bring up google maps on the side of the glass. After several attempts at this, I give up and spot a hot dog stand to my left. As I make a bee-line for the stand, R-Patz wanders off in a southerly direction.

I tuck into my hot dog and manage to finish what’s left of the still-unidentified liquid in the glass. I try my patting-the-rim trick again (not half as dirty as it sounds) and all of a sudden, hey presto, google maps pops up on the side of the glass and I’ve soon got my bearings. I look up from the glass in time to see R-Patz walking towards me, smiling and declaring that he’s found the way out.

It ends there. I’m not saying this is a classic, but I can’t conjure up gold every night…I’ve said that before….

The One Where I’m Chased Through Hitchin Market By A Man-Elephant

So, I’m just wandering through Hitchin market, they way I used to with my mates, back in the school days (which I imagine as better than they actually were). I’m with my old friends, Nick and Ian.

Nothing much is happening, until we turn a corner and, looking down, I notice there’s sand on the ground, while, looking up, I notice that there are all manner of rugs hanging from the slanted rooves of the market stalls. Everything has gone very middle eastern and, just to confirm this, a camel wanders past (probably with a ‘I’m only here to reinforce what you had already twigged’ look on its face).

It all seems very exciting and vibrant, with the appearance of stall holders and sellers trying to entice us in to parting with some cash for rugs that probably smell like someone’s dead gran…who was rolled in camel dung before being buried. We’re still together, the three of us, when a man riding a horse turns up. He’s wearing the stereotypical clothing you’d expect in this part of the world (the middle east – not Hitchin, so he’s not a 14 year old wearing jogging bottoms, a too-tight Inter Milan shirt and pushing a pram), i.e he’s wearing a caftan and the usual Arab headdress arrangement. He’s overweight, his skin has a leathery-tanned look to it and has a normal and wholly unremarkable nose (that’s important, read on).

He seems very friendly and is enthusiastic for us to press on into the depths of the market/bazaar. He falls in behind us and follows us deeper into the market. It’s about now that I start to feel a little uneasy about the whole thing. Sure enough, I turn to look at our friend on the horse and he’s no longer smiling. Most notably, though, is the fact that his nose has changed in its appearance. It looks as thought it has doubled in size and has become detached at the nostrils, which themselves have closed up, making the end of the nose completely smooth. If I didn’t know better, I’d say he had a penis hanging where he once had a perfectly inoffensive nose.

He’s angry now and knows he has us cornered. We run. However, we soon realise we are now caught in a kind of Gladiator-esque arena, about 100ft long and packed with a baying crowd. I turn as I’m running and see our penis-nosed pursuer has a kind of slingshot weapon which he is now whirring around his head with a view to hurling its contents (I’m guessing it’s not a fluffy teddy bear) at me. Sure enough, it’s a very hard looking (possibly concrete) ball, about the size of a grapefruit. God knows where he’s getting them from, but he continues to load up, do the whirring thing and then launch these things at me. He looks very angry and the Mr-Nice-Bazaar-Guide act is a thing of the past.

We continue to run, knowing there’s no way out, but we run anyway, if only to avoid becoming casualties in what surely must be the worlds first ‘concrete grapefruit dodgeball’ match. I keep looking back at ol’ knob nose and his anger levels are rising by the second, he’s apoplectic with rage now, firing down the projectiles at an alarming rate. I’m actually dream-scared now and thankfully, it’s at this point that I wake up.

Nothing…I’ve got absolutely nothing.

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.

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.