MY DREAMWORK DIARY

16/ 08/ 2025

Last night I had an amazing dream that down the valley in Thwaites there was a guy who sold me a comic book collection and a bike. The comics were digital, or even like geometrically perfect philosophical papers. There was something numinous about them. I think in short I had gotten to sleep resigning myself to having 16 books in print, 16 books that are terrible and which no-one reads, and about 9 amateur albums online. Very often the subtext of my dreams is my creative output. I remember the comics in the dream were like tokens and a collectors’ item. I had about 16 of them to collect. Towards the end of the dream there was an agonising feeling where there was no closure because I had failed to collect all the tokens, and we were reaching the end of the dream. I woke up this morning almost bereft of ideas as to how to continue my chain of self-publications and thought to resurrect my dreamwork diary. I have been through several, both analogue and on a laptop. I first came to dreamwork when I came home from a band in Cambridge feeling bedraggled in my youth and needed something self-help wise. I also took up meditation, exercise, detox and large scale reading. Now, because of changing computers, I don’t have a dreamwork diary to hand. I do however have an old draft of a novel into which I had copy and pasted a small fragment of a dreamwork diary.

The novel was called Action Thriller. Its premise was that I write a book then, like Jackson Pollock making an Action Painting, disturb it, cut it up into myriad pieces and make an Action Painting of it on a screen – and still call it Action Thriller. So chance collocations churn up evidence like the operation of a game. So I have just been through the hundreds of pages of Action Thriller finding scattered dream work diary bits, and pieced them together again!

Disappointingly there was very little dreamwork writing – but I intend to make my dreamwork diary great again. They have been great in the past. Just wasted on dead computers. The bits from Action Thriller don’t always fit together that well, in my recapturing process, and now as I type, there’s an Australian psych-rock band on in the kitchen.

BITS RECAPTURED FROM ‘ACTION THRILLER’

They say we still inherit dreams of fighting wild packs of animals from ancestors who had to rehearse for that real life situation. My mum says the brain only heals when it is asleep and even nightmares are healing. It is possible we are dreaming all the time except when asleep without sensory stimulus. Some say if we can train ourselves to lucid dream, then dream-meets are possible; that you should, in lucid dreaming, focus on a local McDonalds. In my dreamwork, that dream-meet experiment already went to Heaven, where we all got high on particles of dirt. I kept a dreamwork diary for many years, but lost it. It was in part about smuggling language out of the unconscious.

One of the first dreams I can remember

was of my brother’s face, no motion,

just staring, all through the night,

and I was so scared he had died

all through my sleep, that it was

a nightmare. When I woke up

and found him still in the land of

the living I had never been as happy.

I remember that bedroom – in my head before I went to sleep I would imagine a ball – a bouncing ball in my head. It would only bounce when I said “stop” and only stop when I said “bounce” and so through inverse logic I regained control.

One dream I can remember from more

recently was about a bullet to the top

of a telegraph pole as a wedding ring

to wed me to the mating queen, whom

it would seem was Flora. I do not recall,

I cannot remember, if it was the same

dream, but I also had sex with her

whilst reading liquid computers,

to whom you seemed to be able to

save all the liminal-space, oneiric-

textured dreamwriting, but who

upon waking seemed to have crashed.

I intend to resurrect my dreamwork diary. At one point I had embarked on a prodigious, counter-Rimbaudian program of meditation, dreamwork, detox, reading and exercise all at the same time. I inspired my whole family to give up smoking. That summer I was placed under an evil curse. It was placed in a way that I could not see it – and took the guy about half an hour.

The last dream I can remember having

was with Dedalus. Dedalus is the persona

of a poet and musician called Simon

and we dream-meet with EASE.

Last dream-meet we were at the top

of a mnt in Italy observing a contraption.

As it fell apart, Simon’s lesson for the

day was that “you make your own emotion.”

I remember so many of the dreams from my old dreamwork diary but not enough for a whole book. In one the Black Infinity Guru conjoined a bunch of objects into a relay – and it being a dream the objects included things like an astro-turf pitch and a toothbrush. He said “the perceiver of voices in dis circuit is like the bat in the game of cricket. He takes all the strain. So you - who is the perceiver of voices in this circuit?” I said “I don’t know Sir.” He said “correct” – and before he could say “and all these objects are for sale,” I woke up. I woke up thinking “all these objects are for sale.”

In another dream we were all locked

in a post-apocalyptic bunker underground,

and our alien overlords allowed us pages

of paper divided into a tablature

arrangement of boxes, with one word

in each box – with which to communicate.

No two words were connecting, until

“who from the 20^th Century,” popped

up and had three in a row: The. Neutral. Eye.

Well, the answer was Einstein, and

so I woke with tears in my eyes.

In another dream I played football against aliens and there was some kind of levitation thing happening. After wards Stone Henge itself levitated and then I had sex with an alien of both genders. It was very sxc and at the same time like positing my semen in a jar.

Taking a thought-camera back to the

edge of sleep and wake, is a little like

following a bright, deadly, northern

beck back to its source, to find cave-

paintings that dance like fire – but sometimes

there is no film in the camera and

you simply fall asleep. I don’t know

but I would say you don’t need

a passport for customs on the

conscious/ unconscious border. And

as Dave Morley contends: “our best

work is lost on the shores of sleep.”

As Hugo Williams says – and I think it his best ever line – “when you lose someone in the night you still have to go back to bed.” I might’ve misquoted it slightly but that is just one of the best lines of poetry I have ever read. So it was when my father passed in the early hours of the morning nearing Christmas in 2014. My second brother, who had been reading to dad from The Book of John, came in and said dad has died, and I gave him a hug and went back to bed.

Medication enhances the resolution

of dreams, and therefore of night-mares too.

I have had some fairly terrible nightmares

since I was cursed… before the loss

of my dad, I had a dream about

graffiti on the walls of Hell, which

included the line FIRREN RUNES HOLL.

I was as stated going through a

phase of smuggling language

out of the unconscious. I also

had a dream where my nearest brother

and I were inseparably connected

in physical terms, where I was

giving him a piggy back but he

was directing me to the medicine drawer.

I had to open it several times before

I could wake, and go for my medicine.

In Monopoly Jail one time, I had a dream of pressing my feet to the floor, and I woke after doing that – from a horrid, horrid dream – around seven or eight times. That’s how deep I was embedded in the unconscious. I literally had to wake seven or eight times from a night mare before I could press my feet to the floor.

When I was with one ex I had

a few scary dreams of her

cheating on me and as if

to show that information-

exchange in dream-meets

is possible she really was.

She was denying it a lot, but

my dreams were right, and

nightmares too, and were

often faithfully recorded

in my dreamwork diary

which is lost, for all I gave

away my old laptop when

I was in Sheltered Accommodation.

I have had recurring dreams about flying to the Isle of Man – one time to retrieve a poetry book the size and shape of a remote control, made of chocolate and from a white garden table. There are several dreams I have had of the Isle of Man – and I thought it was to do with my mate Mark coming from there – and also a kind of arduous poetic training – like Ted Hughes speaks of – which the poet of yore had to undergo before he could provide that property ‘fir’ akin to our word for ‘truth’ for the king. One time the Isle of Man had opened several shops like coffee shops in Amsterdam but which only sold stalks – and my London friends and I all went over there on a boat to try out the stalks. There were many gypsies on the island.

Another recurring dream has been

of a Syd Barrett rarity circulating

the undersea of dreams below -

and you can feel it as well as

hear it, can appreciate it, in

the dream, and it came back

for ages in different disguises,

and was always a sad one

to have to go and wake up from.

I had one dream – after reading Kaveh Akbar – where I woke up and in that instant thought of the line “I lick the honey between the stars!” It was clearly embedded in his verse and augments something else that has been knocking around that goes:

“thank you for dialling 911,

you are through to the Velvet Underground.”

Another time was another dream-meet with Dedalus and he posited a poem in my dream-world. He said:

“I’ve been writing about bifters.

Here’s one for you:

Hello my name is Pirripa.

[sucking in sound of insufflation of smoke.]

that’s my boyfriend.”

So obvs he was writing

from the POV of the spliff itself.

My dad used to say dreams are merely bureaucratic work. They are the unconscious sorting itself out. Freud meanwhile said dreams were “the royal road to the unconscious,” placed more emphasis on it. The paradigm of psychoanalysis has by now, though, given way to the paradigm of neuro-science. All illness is seen as chemical imbalances in the brain, so it can be treated with chemicals. Some people think this very crude.

I used to think no-one on Western medication

could write a good poem because a poet

is a translator of feelings. It was a similar

hippy idealism that made me believe

you should not necessarily be made

to use a computer for all your University

work. Now I am on meds and have to

use a computer too. The dream is gone!

I remember having this dream when I was a kid in London and the walls were very thin. A woman took me to the end cubicle of a public toilet in a service station, and got me inside the cubicle and pulled down her pants and showed me what she had: she had an enormous penis. When I woke that very morning, my dad brought in article he had from the morning paper all about a woman who had just chopped off her partner’s penis and thrown it out the window of her car. A policeman had found the penis and the man somehow managed to get his penis stitched back on and forgave the woman!

There was one terrible nightmare I had

where my family and I were being harassed

over the property of the sheet where

pictures grew – my genuine discovery -

and we all got locked in a fire engine

which was then filled up with water

and allowed to roll down hill into a

muddy sea – and I saw my family

drown – and the last thing my brother

Dr. Robert said – popping his head -

above the water – “dead!” - “dead!”.

One of the best dreams I ever had was The Drum. A drum is a dream bigger than a dream of bounding in magic circles in space in realtime. When you awake you are refreshed, cleansed – it is a cathartic dream.

an experiential interactive computer game…

it was something to do with HIM,

the guy that cursed me.

He was there, or one of the

pioneers of this new type of game.

There were channels and pathways,

I also remember this dream

that was like the wheel of samsara

expressed as a cartoon and sped up -

or was it that The Lords And

The New Creatures was turned

not into a movie but a dream -

or was it that the witness – hello -

was used – or was it that the doors

computer game kept getting

to the end of a level and continuing?

It was also one of the better ones

and made me think “Sam Riviere,

author of 81 Austerities, also had it.”

I have also dreamed of a future state – not a good one either. A French poet said “through my broken face/ I take you to a higher place.” Then we were there, and I was talking to my friend Dr. Calculator Ptom. It was night; and oil drums burned in the streets everywhere. He said “everyone is at war here.” I said “with who?” He said “with everyone else.”

Once around that time, I dream’t

of the sheet where pictures, depicting

one of mine own lyrics, grew, and

I was trying to configure an equation

for the ratio between light speed (c)

falling and Gravity (G) pulling

down on that sheet – and it appeared

in my dream a few times – and

when I woke I decided it was

something like c/G = a subjective value.

Once, long before that, when the curse was still fresh, there was a collective attempt at my life when I was asleep – a stampede of elephants on top of me – war made on my body and soul – and I just remember dozing off on some skunk and suddenly being attacked – starved of breath – physically shaken and rattled with extreme intensity – and I think my gf Stefanie – who had her hand on my chest next to me – saved my life – for I think I did at least wake up.

In Sixth Form I began many texts

and one was about dreams. A realist

narrative about a stoner was punctuated

by his penetrations of a little shop

beneath the sea where our dreams

were stored on disk. It was called

The Dream Film Store. Down there,

the shop was run by a Muse called

Calliope – same as the muse of epic poetry -

and he kept waking up, no seaweed

in his hair, befuddled, eyes encrusted

with sleep’s glue, and saying to his

dealer mate “I just has the weirdest

dream.” It was never finished.

Years later at Lancaster University we had among many other tasks to write the beginning of a novel and I asked my mother and she said “dreams.” I re-started a dream-meet novel as a campus novel where a band – because of the telepathy of music – tried a dream-meet experiment – and it was working – and then a burglar entered! And it was the burglar who was killed not the dreamers! For that way round it was an allegory of September 11^th! If you have read my previous two long concept poems, you will know I spoke against September 11^th in the year 2000, in a brilliant speech, the year I left school. (Indeed, the day my A-level results came through – and I found out I had written the highest-marked English Literature A-level exam essay in the nation, I went down south to Cambridgeshire to stay with my friend Paul, and make some friends, and form a band, The Flood, who only recorded thru’ state-of-the-art, binaural earphones.)

When I was very young,

I had a dream about the girl

across the road in London,

Maya, who was a friend,

and we went to a large

arena with a swimming pool

full of killer whales in

the centre and under our

feet too, and I was desperate

to save Maya, to be the hero,

but there was no need for a hero.

Last night I was in a submarine with my Finnish relatives – and Bob was there too. A little later I was in a boarding school bed and a little later still was woken up at 6 am – still within the dream – to walk around a British public school with enormous posh buildings. We got into the open and there was a bunch of people playing with a rugby ball. The ball came to me, and I tried to show off my long throw – for I used to have the longest throw in the team – but it went badly wrong when I tried to unleash a long pass and was dismal in the end. The ball fell between myself and the person to whom I was passing, like I had lost a lot of muscle power recently, and I had, and I woke and thought my long-passing days are over.

Time passes and I awake againe

with a song by my mate’s mate

Clive Pig in my head but instead

of it going “the hawk flew over

the mountain,” it went “the fish

flew over the wrist of the valley

down below.” I think it was another

Syd Barrett rarity dream, that

had previously been about guitars,

and even acoustic double basses,

played by people from boarding

school, upright, who snapped their

strings. I think in the dream I was

Syd Barrett. The fish flew over

the wrist of the valley down below.

I dreamed I was in an open house full of tigers. It was a tiger zoo, but instead of cages they were allowed to roam freely about the house. I was trying to sneak upstairs to a secret room with an older woman who wanted to show off her pussy to me and I managed it too… I went in the room with her and she showed me. Then we heard the sound of her husband coming up the stairs and I left the room. I stood outside the room and heard the sound of him beating something, and wondered if it was her he was beating. Then I realised he was trying to beat a tiger. A tiger had snuck in the room in the middle of the dream and the husband was thrashing it. I woke and eventually came round to thinking the meaning of this dream was to do with the ongoing narrative I have regarding the ex-England player John Barnes, who scored the best ever England goal, against Brazil. It started years back when I thought to myself “Barnes has scored a chicken,” and as recently as a few days ago it was the case that “Barnes has scored a liquid donkey.” The day leading up to this dream about tigers there was a change in the narrative: Barnes has scored a liquid tiger.

I once falsified the Nirvana barcode,

tapped out the rhythm of ‘Scentless Apprentice’

|| | |||| | || | |||| ,

in vertical lines then falsified

the notion of there being a Nirvana barcode.

I showed it to Alistair in Monopoly Jail

and in this dream last night he was there…

he had now read a book by my brother.

It was funny and well-written and called

something like How To Use Music

To Defend Yourself. Alistair and my brother

(both left-handed) were stranded in

some post-apocalyptic adventure, using

my brother’s book against the baddies.

I think in the dream I was jealous of

the book but it all worked out in the end.

Last night the last thing I can remember was being a professional footballer and doing kick ups at a train station. There were several balls granted us by our manager whom I think was Arsene Wenger. I had strayed off to a separate platform at the station and was doing kick ups while a train arrived in-between me and the rest of the crowd, separating us. I remember the kick ups went absolutely ludicrously high, and the camera would follow the ball, up to the aerial view, in among the weather.

Tonight, I woke from a long, long sleep

at half past midnight having

slept all day. Just before I woke

I seemed to find myself a time traveller.

I am a time traveller awoken in a caravan.

I was being kept there against my wishes.

Some people had been looking for me.

“What year is it?” I asked and they

told me it was the year “1965.”

I started to converse with my

capturers who had been after me

for a long time, and eventually woke.

Hmn. 24/ 07/ 2023. Jim Morrison said “all games contain the idea of death.” Last night it was a computer game of a dream. I was locked in a room and everyone was trying to help me get out. Or was it that they placed bets on the likelihood of my escaping. I think I died in the dream. This was only one part of it too.

Later there was a foreign place where young students were doing their dissertations – a great Romantic place far away from reality – and I fell in love with one of the students and helped her with her dissertation. For some reason I was a great expert on many of the topics in this dream.

Later still Man United were playing against themselves. All the football teams were Man United versions. I was in one team and we played abroad on a great adventure against another Man Utd team and won. There was an enormous ship involved in the dream with a great hall where people could go shopping. I remember throughout the dreams of last night being aware of my needing to remember something from the start, the computer game dream.

There is a Romany gypsy line that once came to me in a dream. I thought it was alright and wrote it down without any knowledge that it’s a gypsy saying that’s rude to write down. I still don’t know that it is, but as I say it came to me in a dream.

06/ 08/ 2023. I think I have been asleep for 3 days and 3 nights. The only snippet of a dream I can remember is to do with cars, really long cars, that we would deliberately crash as part of a game or sport. Actually I tell a lie: I can also remember a snippet of a dream whereby the old, gay maths teacher from Prep School built a machine as a present. You put a coin in a fruit machine, but it’s a special coin, a coin loaded with information, and it tells you something about the game of chess. It seemed to make sense in the dream which was a time-travelling dream whereby for a second we couldn’t tell if we had really time-travelled back to our old Prep School down south or not. Some teacher came out and said he’d overheard the conversation of my brothers and I and there was a little debate between us as to what to do. Our shoes had been taken off at the correct place. It seemed we had timetravelled through the use of the fruit machine and could only time travel back to Cumbria with it, and wake up.

10/ 08/ 2023. I dreamed last night that my dad was an assassin. It made sense. I started to ask the extent to which this was true. After all those fights we had about whether he was a pollen smuggler or an art smuggler – after all those speculations I would make with my siblings and friends. I really wouldn’t be surprised to find out – dad was an assassin. He had a gun as well as a nine bar under the floorboards.

I went back to sleep after the dream of my dad and dreamed some more – maybe once maybe twice. The dream-meet experiment with whomsoever turned up came on to a football team or maybe rugby team or maybe both who had to play against another school! I was appalled to find myself not in the football team and yet found myself in the rugby team who got down to a scrummage exactly at the moment I woke as if it were reality itself against which we played.

So what if the Lords And The New Creatures (that says “a creature waits out the war”) went and happened because my dad said he sold his art dealing business at the fall of the Berlin Wall – even though it was just a dummy, a cover and really he was an assassin? The story would grow ever more interesting and enriched. I am starting to entertain that the sheet where pictures grew which I discovered upon my father’s death really does prove him to be an assassin. You could with enough stamina and a sorted-out plan probably make a novel out of the plot.

How was I going to verify or confute

that my father was an assassin?

I asked my mother who denied it

and nodded at the same time -

as if the house were bugged and she

could not delimit what the truth was.

11/ 08/ 2023. I dreamed of an exciting musical computer game, which was interactive and demanded your whole body, your lifestyle choice. My old friend Ben was there and we went around climbing up walls in rooms to sit ourselves on shelves at their tops and admire the view down below.

Same night. A second dream – fellatio. I dreamed of a free and easy hamburger attitude to sex among heterosexuals, of being able to get a blow job when you want in just about any male or female toilet. I think I was pursuing a particular woman in an underground club. By the end of this dream I had realised all amorous concerns had to be surrendered to my younger brother James who traditionally is the one that gets the girls.

Indeed-y, I was the one who was supposed to get all the academic success, while James pulled all the birds. I would say that while I got excellent grades at A-level and University, it hasn’t entirely materialised yet for me. How to proceed – now that I don’t know about my dad’s job even more than ever before! I might quite like to write a novel and in fact was working on one, whose opening dream-sequence will tell you all you need to know about my life – as a character called Johnny Hypothalamus – and my previous assumption about dad’s business – an assumption that I no longer hold too dear!

18/ 09/ 2023. Dreamed we all went, following

my sister and her Australian bf off to Australia.

When we arrived, Bob and I went running

with her bf to the beach. We ran barefoot

through a forest where there were snakes.

Later the whole family, the whole party

were going to bed I think in only one or two

beds overall, and mum was saying to someone

Australian how we like the music of Pink Floyd.

I dreamed of Paul last night, probably one of those epic New Beat adventures we used to so enjoy. Actually, all I can recall of it is that it was of Paul – nothing else comes to mind.

In my dream last night, we followed in the tracks

of the acid-casualty Syd Barrett or

was it the fictive character Colonel Kurtz

who dug deep into the earth like psychic explorers

in post-apocalyptic territory and all alone.

There were dream-tourists following

the paths that were trodden, filled with

land mines and accidents. I was one

such dream-tourist of many, inside

the earth, where acid casualty damage

formed a psychological geography to explore.

There were even bus routes where before

was acid casualty damage and terrain

but before we could explore the whole

of mapless space my brother and I

joined the football team and it was

time for a casual game away in Spain

which I happen to believe we went and won.

24/ 10/ 2023. This time someone came to me – was it Dr. Robert? - and said he had found my true poetry. It was computer generated and included topics such as whether or not Lucy in the soul with demons is an actual substance. Topics I go on about it. So whomsoever it was had just typed in a likely John F B Tucker subject and let the computer do the rest – so I had these A. I. generated poems and they were good. I was reading them in dreams. One of them was about a long mountain waterfall. Was more pastoral than inorganic. My mother’s maiden name was Bergfors meaning mnt waterfall in Swedish, so again it suited me to have a poem about a mnt waterfall. Again to wake was to face the real world where I more or less want to die and haven’t found my true poetry yet.

One dream was that we were racing around

inside the bowels of the earth

as part of a real live computer game,

deep underground in the guts of the earth.

We raced around them as much as we liked

but there was a risk, and that was death.

I also dreamed that I had gone back to where I used to work selling Timeshare - Brockwood Hall – as a besuited slave – and that I still lived this innocent life like I did before I was cursed – and I rented a room and slept in my suit and even within the dream I drifted off into a dream within a dream – maybe of love – in a high and far off landscape.

16/ 08/ 2025 AGAIN

So that is what I recaptured from piecing together bits of Action Thriller. I have more recently written a poem about something that happened in a dream or in fact two or three. Even in the absence of my keeping a dreamwork diary for years I am still in the habit in my writing world of remembering my dreams and they infiltrate my poetry. So picture an absence of several years between the last entry and these ones, which come in the form of poems.

DREAMWORK POEM

The thing about Jonny Wilkinson

is that after the World Cup

victory he still exists.

The thing about grammar

is that there is no Chinese K.

The thing about walking

to the top of a very tall staircase

in a dream is that it might be flames.

The thing about talking

like this is that it might be James.

The thing about the woods

is that the bird was made

to look like a hoax but

still exist in meaning.

The thing about waking

is taking medication before

you submit your mind to the written word.

The thing about dreamwork

is smuggling language

out of the unconscious.

The thing about language

is that words are best just before

you find them even when

you get them dead on.

WOKEN EARLY ON A MONDAY MORNING

I’ve woken from a shocking dream.

I went back to Harecroft Hall -

the school I attended when small -

and looked in the woods for a game.

When the government drove me away

at the end the monster I’d seen

in that dream-kingdom of green

and clear as the light of day

had been understood the result

of nuclear testing nearby.

It left its death on the eye.

I felt the shame of the insult.

When I woke it was but the bird,

that monster, nothing more,

and still against the Hollow Claw

in spirit or was it in word.

That’s why I’d gone back to check,

to hunt for my discovery,

in dreams, where we’re free

as the running of the beck

but in dreams the bird became

that monster, in the wood,

and doing what they thought they should,

the government silenced my name.

The last thing before I woke,

I was driven off in their van.

For I’d seen upon my return

the monster they couldn’t shake.

They didn’t want it leaking out,

that there’d been a nuclear leak,

of which we could not speak,

with either sadness or doubt.

That’s why the monster came

in dreams but not the bird

in wake when still unheard

the witness was not to blame.

RECORD

We were at Mark Velarde’s house

a river in the back garden

I travelled up it against the grain for a song, singing

“wreck beck, wreck beck,

whole note like oval stones,”

and other lines, shaking

the multicoloured pebbles, splashing

the white water as I went

the song was recorded

in a little brown hut

though mostly water anyway

and most of it got away

my voice was gravelly

the words were sweet as water

I made a song of the river

Going back before that

I was taking acid with Tom and Ben

who look like they belong in the Kinks

in the backstreets of London

16/ 08/ 2025 AGAIN

There are also two bits about my dream-life in my recent rewrite of a book of songs and trons:

Last night in dreams I started writing a song with the line:

“I was walking through the clouds.”

The rest of the dream was an option for a second line. There were many options. I went back to University where the whole campus was out and crowded around and was offering help with options. Some of them came in the form of drugs. Some were written on the whiteboard. Whenever I chose an option, continued the song, everyone would find out. In another scene one of dad’s poet friends articulated two floating balls as the correct option. There were many scenes, bulging with options, bulging with medication, bulging with resolution in the dream. It was while I was singing that song in my dreams, a song which definitely elongated enough to be sung, that I felt free in dreamland.

********

“After a dream where the whole world was flooded and we were as a family trying to not get broken apart, I woke and started to check my tracks. I remember organising a singular album from the whole new da Vinci circle sequence, containing only the 8 best songs, so that when I looked back, I had only done 3 albums, like Nick Drake, meaning the binaural one, the solo album done with Grant, and the new one. I remember that before I went to sleep I listened to it and it was strong but not to be. I think I deleted it before the soporific sleeping pills dragged me under the waves like a problem so big I was dragged to sleep by it.

I had the dream about the whole world being flooded by water and when I woke, in the early morning, started to blog documents to see which is the most popular: philosophy, science, poetry, music and more: but it was settled on that I would sacrifice myself and my science to bring the new <BEE> sing-along out instead. Nobody even reads my books, or seems concerned that special perceptions are not being preserved in scientific records.”

- The above dream surely occurred because I had written a book about The Flood, my old band who only recorded on binaural earphones. This reminds me of dreams of radio snippets, plant cuttings, photographs, stills, snapshot-fragments, that appear like films – and one in particular where there was a mathematical function called Infinity like the monolith from 2001 A Space Odyssey planted in the middle of the series. It was mega, this mathematical function and rearranged my brain but was only in the movie that the dream was about. What I am doing is trying to make up for lost time, recapture bits of old dreamwork diaries I no longer have – and still remember that powerful dream of the Infinity Symbol taking a physical form in the middle of a movie, as a still.

********

Since writing the bits of dreamwork diary that were in Action Thriller, I actually found and typed out my old Sixth Form novel The Dream Film Store. It’s alright and only as long as a short story, because I never finished it. It would be interesting to see what would happen if I copy and pasted it in to the present text which was a blank file only half an hour ago!

THE DREAM FILM STORE

A sad and seductive female voice is saying things to me. I cannot focus or see her face, it refuses to appear in my mind.

“Oh, I’m so glad you’ve finally come, I’ve been waiting for you for lifetimes.

- Welcome at last to the Dream-Film Store, I can’t believe you’ve awoken here after so long -

Did you have a long day? What can I find for you tonight – that’s right – anything you can imagine – a Thousand amazing thoughts preserved – or perhaps just a bottle of red wine and a dream about the swaying sea will rest you well tonight?”

Of course in dreams you never know you are dreaming. That is why they have control. Certainly this dream harnessed control enough to disturb me & leave itself lingering behind the back of my mind when I finally awoke.

In my sleep I was wrestling w/ heat & the covers, & frightened by the lady’s continuing voice. All I could see was blue.

“I know you can understand what I’m saying. Don’t be afraid” -

I felt her stretch out her arm towards me and I jumped in panic.

All around me I could see blurs of deep colour merging & swirling, a moving chaos of images and shapes. Still I could see no face.

“I know you can hear me, please, I’m your friend, look! I couldn’t bear to see you waste this now. You know me already please just trust me.”

********

II

I awoke shaken and wretched, grappling with the duvets, rubbing my stinging eyes. Already the terrible fear of my dream had subsided considerably; simply because waking instantly cancels out what was previously merely dreaming. Now I just had a headache & a longing to return to that strange scene and assuage the curiosity that always accompanies fear. I suppose the fear when you dream is because you don’t know you’re only dreaming. It seems real. I lay there thinking.

What troubled me most as I lay there in bed was that I never saw the woman’s face, though I could sense it was desperate to appear. Oh well, just a dream, as they say.

Refusing to let a dream trouble my thoughts all day, as had happened before I decided to get up and wash my face.

The flat was crazed by disorder & rubbish. Clothes, papers, books & boxes which should’ve been locked in some attic were at war w/ the floor. I trod w/ care to the bathroom & stood looking in the greasy mirror at a face full of grease; the eyes that once rewarded me w/ strange smiles were laden w/ sleep, heavy with the impurities that sleep had filtered. The Drain in my Brain.

“I’ve been swimming

in a sea of sleep,”

I began singing to myself in a hoarse groan. Wanting to give myself a shock, I dunked my head in a cold basin decorated w/ floating limescale, pubic hair (for some unknown reason) and toothpaste. How I could call that much of a wash I don’t know. Nevertheless, I felt fresher; so, as always, I started to prepare my morning spliff, which helped me decide what to do today, or if to do anything at all.

I used to take great pleasure in rolling huge reefers, just for the hilarity of seeing something unusual & absurd, I suppose. Recently though, since moving in to the flat, I’ve been rolling the swiftest & easiest joints possible, & filling them w/ more weed than the big old ones. Being stoned now fits into the same category of Time & Tedium that it once was the escape-route from.

As I lit the spliff, & fell softly back into the sensuous web that stonedness weaves, I felt a longing for the fantastical times I used to have w/ friends & girls & laughter & ideas – whereas now I just felt numb, in a blunt trance. Not wanting to linger on the past, I took a deep long drag, like the spliff was a sacrament, & pulled some stolid clouds of darkness into my lungs. Holding it down, I imagined counting some numbers but couldn’t get it together, so just waited - & then exhaled, releasing the smoke in a grave grey sigh, watching it fumble, disperse & vanish into cushions & curtains & air. My head was heavy. I knew what I needed now more than ever. To get out.

********

III

After dressing in some jeans & T-shirts, I took my weed, some skins, a pen & paper & various other articles of minor importance, & hid them in places in my big jacket. I’ve never been too bothered about what I wear on top - trousers, I just wear jeans, so I’m not fussy there either. Shoes, however, I’m very particular about, seeing as I have to walk in them etc. Shoes are rare allies in life. Also, I have a tendency to turn a jacket into a home.

So, finding a particular pair of boots, I left the flat w/ a feeling of the promise of the Day.

But where could I go?

I’d abandoned my friends a few months before, fallen out with them all except one, Gabriel, who I don’t speak to anymore, anyway. It was a strange series of incidents involving my previous band & some magic mushrooms. The details escape me & give me pain trying to remember them. We were called ‘Open Poem Opium,’ & we split up; that is all.

(“Beat through the veins of the city in madness

Revolving doors in your mind & sadness

Cities crawling in your brain

streets of mystery and of pain,

I’m leaving town on the underground train.”)

I put my hands in my pocket to instinctively protect myself from the knuckle-gnawing cold that hung around outside. Feeling what I thought was a £10 note in my jeans, I pulled it out to find only a little scribbling of lyrics written some days ago in a dull hash-induced trance.

I often scribbled things. I enjoyed the freedom of scribbling & doodling. The pen can move exactly where you want it free of direction, w/out the obligation of having to form restricting letters & words. I have pages & pages of doodles, strange shapes, & occasionally some lyrics appear in the mess. That’s what I did for the band – wrote songs & sang, though I don’t play any instrument.

Noticing a growing rumble in my stomach, I felt that food & coffee were the best options, & would give me more time to consider how my day of activity could be filled.

Rounding a corner, I saw the parade of shops ahead, dead faces facing me, w/ cheap dimestore smiles. In the middle was the cafe, called “The Rat & Vessel” to my amused bewilderment. I opened the door. Inside it smelled of sad people, old times clinging in smoke to the walls, sad paint and sad light. The door was still ringing from those crazy bells that crash together on opening , & make me cringe every time. Those bells should be banned from sad cafes. They exacerbate the dead silence that awaits you inside when the door slams shut & the bells stop clanging.

“A large strong white coffee please, & a Danish.”

£1. 90. I couldn’t believe it. I realised then that left me w/ only 10p for the day – a rare day of Activity. Oh well.

The coffee was bitter & the Danish was over sweet. I was fairly stoned & therefore felt a heightened sensitivity to things like taste. After a few mouthfuls, I realised it wasn’t quite late enough for breakfast yet.

Well, what could I do? Where could I go? 10p is less than having nothing, because it just irritates you with niggling little time-consuming questions.

I decided I’d be freer if I threw it away my last change. Why I didn’t bring any money w/ me I haven’t a clue – pen, paper & weed must have seemed like a more useful currency to remember this morning.

So On discovering that I finally had something to do (albeit only disposing of 10p), I thought I’d turn it into a ritual & perhaps waste an hour of the day. I was finding it increasingly difficult since realising this money shortage to tell myself that I was even capable of activity this morning. Spending an hour of one’s morning throwing away short change, & taking an hour to decide how to do it in particular to add a pretend sense of ‘fun…’ I realised a dead-end frustration possessing me. The town was in abeyance, time was trapping, what could I do to rid me of the cruel bindings of post-youth, expulsion from university, confusion, unemployment, & worst of all, sheer boredom? Where could I go, & with what purpose?

The 10p dilemma had started to annoy me. I thought in vain for ways I could make a ritualistic point of getting rid of it, but soon realised this sort of time-consuming thought was exactly what I wanted to get rid of the 10p for – like I said, to be free of it. This realisation of my own frustrating, mind-cycling stupidity annoyed me greatly. I decided I’d give it to the next tramp I saw.

It was now 11. 00. Which meant nothing to me, because w/out anything to do or anywhere to be, it didn’t matter what time it was. The street stretched ahead of me crawling w/ insect-cars & insect-people, all busily rushing around swarming sick and feversome. I often wondered exactly what the term “crowd-neuroses” means, & laughed that I felt detached from the clinging time-table lifestyle. Walls of grey rose either side of the road to complete the dull-grey prison of the street. People flocked & assembled, briefcases merged into madness, mute timetable agony, flaccid lovers limp by, smiles fail, children congregate in backstreets to escape, everyone around thinking they have something to do & somewhere to go! I felt dizzy so found a bench to sit down upon. Watching the parading fools & this procession of sadness brought out a sadness w/in me too. I was sitting motionless on the bench, feeling the flux & thrum of the city, the dead beat of London; & I heard the beat of my heart clash w/ the rhythm of the streets. I felt suddenly cold and alone. If London had a voice, it would be a blunted and dead-pan voice like Lou Reed’s.

I must have sat on that bench for about 2 hours. The time was spent coming to terms w/ the fact that I felt estranged from my environment – the first time I’d realised the alienation of being poor in a city. Perhaps if I lived in Cornwall, say, I’d have a job, a community in which I was known, maybe even some friends. The city is a great culmination of sadness & alienation. No-one in town is conscious of their extreme self-consciousness. Everyone in town is homeless.

Pleased w/ the thoughts I had accomplished this morning (& thinking was my poor equivalent of a morning’s work), I decided to roll up another spliff & go for another wander. My hands were cold & it was too windy sitting outside, so I went to look for the nearest phone-box. Phone-boxes were excellent for skinning up in, because a) you were off the street & out of people’s way b) there was a nice little platform bit to rest the Rizlas upon c) no-one disturbs you in a phone-box, because they assume you are looking for change, or about to make a call etc. One felt a slight degree of safety & protection inside.

The nearest phone was just across the road. I loved crossing roads, felt it like a game, a dare, a thrill. One of the things I felt most confident about in life was dodging traffic & crossing roads w/ what I liked to portray to the driver as being a fearless & disdainful nonchalance. I’m constantly occupying myself w/ little challenges & wars, that I suppose I create for my own amusement. Walking along a pavement, I often ask myself a question of importance then tell myself that if I reach that lamp-post over there before the next car passes me, the answer is so & so, & if not… I’m sure everyone plays the same game, just ask different questions. It’s amazing how something as utterly pointless & unfounded in anything apart from my own mind has the power to excite & possess me.

I can honestly feel a terrible suspense sometimes as a car grumbles & groans & approaches blind behind my back – I walk quicker, desperate for the answer I want. Sometimes, if I fail to reach the object in time for the right answer, I change the question or say I meant the previous lamp-post anyway. It is by no means a game I enjoy playing. I become frustrated w/ myself after a while, but at least it distracts me from frustration of having nothing better to do.

So crossing the road, I reached the phone-box, & entered its heavy door. Inside I felt how truly separate I was from everything else around me. There is a certain mysticism about phoneboxes & telecommunications. I remember having a fascination w/ Dr. Who, & the way he travelled throughout space & time in the blink of an eye. How I longed for such possibilities now, standing stoned & alone in a phone-box surrounded by strangers & the dizzying thrum of life. I wanted adventure, change, discovery – but I was stuck. Where was there to go?

I emptied my pockets on top of the phone & extracted the various bits of paraphernalia needed for skinning up. The spliff I rolled was terrible, due to what I noticed was a growing distraction in my mind.

Standing there pulling on the spliff, I tried to locate the exact area of my mind where the negativity was emanating from.

‘Right,’ I thought.

‘I know I don’t want to be here, but where do I want to be?’

Something was certainly on my mind, but I let it go as the smoke melted into my blood & sent diamonds rushing up my neck.

I started to gather my belongings, & noticed among them the 10p which I’d forgotten about.

“I’ll leave it here for some lucky person to make a phone call w/” I mused.

‘Or, I could make a phone-call myself..”

I didn’t own a phone & the thought of making a phone call was quite big news to me. Who could I phone? I had no friends.

Except for maybe Gabriel. It had to be Gabriel. 0171 385 6603. I only had 10p, so I had to plan carefully what I would say. Even better, I thought, I could invite myself round to his.

I don’t know why I suddenly had a desire to be w/ someone. I don’t know whether I even liked the guy. I alienate myself. Perhaps the guilt that loneliness brings, had stirred me finally into communication.

“Hello?” came the cautious, questioning voice.

“Gabriel, man, it’s, uh, Franco, could I come round?”

I spoke nervously & stuttered a little, out of practise w/ conversation.

“What! Hey Franco, how’s it going? What are you doing? Come round!”

“Yeah, I will, I’ve got 2 credits left, so I’ll - “

The line went dead & the dead sound came up in my ear & hung around in a tone of despair.

“Shit,” I thought. “Where the fuck does Gabriel live.”

Typical, that for once I’d actually wanted to do something that involved someone other than me - & it wasn’t going to be possible.

I left the phone-box still sucking hard on the joint. “I suppose I could go home, get some more money & - “

The phone was ringing. I lifted it. It was Gabriel.

“Man you should’ve just said & I’d have called you back.”

“Oh, yeah, I didn’t know – shit, sorry. You know how I am w/ phones, clueless.”

“Ha ha ha ha ha ha – well, shall I meet you somewhere then?”

“I have no money & I’m down to my last few smoke’s worth.”

When I said earlier that phones fascinate me, I also meant to say that they terrify me. I’d probably prefer telepathy.

“I’’ll tell you what Franco, where are you – I’ll come and pick you up.”

“Um, well, I’m in a phone-box in Baron’s Court. I’ll meet you outside the Oddbins.”

“In 10 minutes, I’m close.”

“Alright man, that’s perfect, cheers.”

“See you then Franco.”

“Bye-bye.”

Wow. I’d never known anyone so efficient at phones. If I’m ever forced into using one to make arrangements, I faff around for hours being indecisive & calling back & hanging up.

Gabriel was a person of admirable sagacity for his age – 2 years older than me, 22, but w/ a sensibleness that empowered him to be utterly assured and self-confident. Decisive & wise, the kind of friend everyone wants & fears abusing.

I could already see Oddbins. I approached feeling slightly ridiculous still for my telephonic incompetence.

‘I could have done any number of things,’ I thought

- ‘reversed the charges, borrowed 10p off someone… oh well, I’m just useless, no matter.’

My thoughts were interrupted by Gabriel’s voice.

“Franco, jump in!”

Elliot Smith was playing on the stereo. I didn’t like Elliot Smith very much. He finds it too easy to write fairly good songs. I couldn’t respect that.

Gabriel had a spliff going. “Have a smoke on that man,” he urged. “How are you? Tell me about your life.”

“Well, I’m O. K I suppose. To be honest I’ve been quite dazed for ages. I don’t really know what’s going on man.”

“How’s the band?”

“We split.”

“Oh, why”

“Dunno, just crap really.”

“Just crap sounds about right. So what are you doing w/ yourself?”

“Oh, nothing much, nothing at all really. I’ve got virtually no money, & none on me.”

“Any girls?”

“Ha ha ha you must be joking.” The thought of me having the time, money, energy & effort for a girl was hilarious. I was not ‘boyfriend material’ – I never have been.

“Man, I’ve met this amazing girl, she’s at the flat at the moment – you’ll meet her.”

“What’s her name?”

“Mary.”

“What’s she like?”

“Oh, amazing man, you’ll see, you’ll see.”

“I’m not sure if I want to believe you or not. I mean you know how sceptical I am about girls. If she’s not perfect, not the Absolute One, then she’s not worth any waste of time bothering w/.” This was my arrogance. Suffice say, I had never found the One Perfect Girl.

“Franco, I’m telling you man – if you’d just stop being so fucking particular & arty farty, & just accept things, you’d be happier. You’ve probably already met your Perfect Girl but were too busy moaning about existence & lack of money & fucking weed to even notice her.”

“you think?”

“Yeah, I do think. You can’t get perfection, so then take what’s best.”

Elliot Smith was starting to annoy me, so I turned it down. The car pulled up & stopped.

“Here we are then, this is the new flat.”

“Cool, which door.”

“Here.”

We entered.

I stood waiting inside the door wondering what I was doing. A blond girl w/ a subtle face & medium sized breasts came to the bottom of the stairs w/ an open smile on her face. She was attractive. Very. She wore only a long robe-like dressing gown that revealed tempting patches of skin when she moved. She looked at me for a strange second, then Gabriel & her were full of kisses & smiles. I felt a little bit small, an outsider. Gabriel introduced me, & we went through to the lounge for a smoke & some coffee.

I always admired the way Gabriel could mix women w/ friends. We shared a flat at University, so I knew him well & had witnessed many of his previous ‘mistakes’ & ‘successes.’ I felt rather uneasy being in the room w/ my old friend & his beautiful new girlfriend. I felt alone.

We sat for a while & Gabriel & Mary inevitably drifted into the usual fresh-lovers type of conversation. There was certainly a silent communication between them, a sign of their genuineness perhaps.

I looked around the lounge. Shelves groaned w/ the slow old weight of books, heaving piles of books, pages of words compressed & preserved together in slumber, long centuries of books. Gabriel had no doubt read them all. He thinks books hold the answers. I think they only hold the questions.

I became distracted from the books by the sudden movement of Mary putting on some trousers. She stood up & had to jump & pull them up quickly while she was in the air. I caught a glimpse of her pussy through her knickers. & then I was hooked. I couldn’t help but cast glances at that soft pleasure-triangle that women posses, knowing there was a cunt lying in her lap, just lying there unattended. I felt an angling, wincing agony.

Uncertainty and mystery was what sustained me, kept my curiosity strong.

I wanted now to solve the cunt-mysteries hiding in Mary’s knickers.

“Franco! Wake up man. Where’ve you been? Cloud cuckoo Land?”

“Shit man, sorry, I’m a little bit stoned, well quite stoned actually.”

Everyone laughed.

I suspected that Gabriel was feeling excellent about himself now – it was obvious that I had been staring at Mary.

“Yeah & I’m a little tired as well. I had a really strange dream last night.”

Gabriel & I often discussed our dreams when we were stoned.

“Yeah? Tell me about it.”

“Well, it was terrible, frightening. There was a woman.”

“Ha ha ha ha ha! Yes! That sounds just like Franco – terrified of women, even when it comes to wet dreams!”

Mary gave me a look of intrigue. Gabriel laughed at me more.

“You couldn’t understand unless you were there in the dream. It was terrifying.”

“What did she look like?”

“I’ve got no idea. I couldn’t concentrate enough on her face. It was everywhere, all around me – lots of deep blue green colours swirling & all the time there was the Voice…”

“...and what did it say?”

“something about the Dream-Film Store or something.”

“Wow. ‘The Dream-Film Store’. Sounds exciting. & what happened that was so scary?”

“I don’t…. I don’t really know…. It was just…. Um….”

I trailed off into oblivion. The T. V. had been put on & it flickered its bright ugly faces around the room. I felt dizzy & needed suddenly to lie down. Chaos was swarming in my head, I took a deep breath….

& a strange blue colour pervaded the scene.

“I’ve been calling you all day, why haven’t you been answering -

Look, there’s something we should get straight now & here: you WANT to be here, w/ me, so please make it easier on us both.”

“Who are you?”

“Oh you already know all this, it’s the same questions every time – in time you’ll remember everything, but I need to -”

“Where am I?”

“Why, you’re at the Dream-Film Store of course..”

I felt the softness of her presence, the lure of her maiden’s voice, a strange sense of having been here before in another time – still I could not see her face, just an oceanic blur.

“Is there something wrong? What is the matter?

What is the matter?”

she kept repeating

& repeating

her voice dispersing

& drowning as I

floated away

slowly upward towards

the surface again

through the big blue

until…

---------------------------------------------

IV

I awoke panting for breath on Gabriel’s sofa, w/ 2 impending heads above me – stoned expressionless faces.

“Man, what the fuck happened,” I joked.

Their smiles told me they were relieved.

“You suddenly started hyper-ventilating, & moving your limbs manically, & then you feinted & just lay there looking still & peaceful, &, uh, almost… dead!”

“Shit, that’s never happened before, I never feint, that’s weird.”

“Probably just the weed.”

“& the crap company,” added Mary w/ a smile. “Let me get you some water,” she continued.

“Please,” I agreed.

I watched the ripe shape of her body as she moved away, watched her casual motions sway. Disorder Lust & Loneliness. ‘There is no room for love in my life,’ I thought ‘or perhaps all I have is room for love.’

“Gabriel,” I slowly asseverated, suddenly snapping back into the room, “when I feinted, just then, I had the dream of the scaring woman at the bed of the sea.”

“At the bed of the sea?”

“Yes, yes, it was at the bed of the sea first time as well. I remember. I wasn’t aware of it at the time. I haven’t seen the woman yet but I spoke to her.”

“What did you say?”

“’Who are you?’ & ‘where am I?’”

“Ha ha ha ha ha. & this was supposedly a nightmare?”

- “Um, well, no, not as such, no definitely not a nightmare, just a strange, scaring dream.”

“’Who are you?’ and ‘Where am I?’ That’s what people in 3-rd rate Hollywood PG’s say when they miraculously arrive at some fantastical place. Sounds like pure cheese to me man! I can’t believe you’re letting yourself get bothered by a dream as cheesy as this!”

“No, it wasn’t cheesy, it was crystal clear & pure blue & cool on my naked skin….”

Then there was an uncomfortable silence that hung around waiting to strangle me.

“Gabriel shall we have another bifter, I could really quite do w/ a J to sort my head out.”

“Yeah, man, that’s a sound idea. I’ll skin.”

I turned my head to look out of the window.

Grey streams pervaded the sky. The street outside was full of sadness, lined w/ windows, desperate & nothing. The street goes nowhere. The pedestrians are going to places that I refuse to call anywhere.

Mary had returned now w/ a glass of water & a cup of herbal tea.

“Oh, cheers, that’s perfect, thanks.”

I was never myself w/ new people. Strangers gave me a nervous edge. You could say that they excite me – or perhaps that was just Mary.

She sat down next to me on the sofa. I always sit forward w/ my hands clasped. (My mother used to say I sat like I was praying & I used to tell her that I was.) Mary sat back relaxed & full of presence. This made me feel uncomfortable. I couldn’t see her face behind me, & now felt sure she was sitting back so as to look at me w/out me noticing.

My stoned mind focussed out & dispersed & my thoughts began to spread into detailed crevices of indecision.

If I lent back it would be blatant that I’d either noticed her, if it’s true that she is looking at me, or, if not, it would be either a nervous action or a rather full-on, arrogant one; so I shouldn’t just sit here & feel comfortable w/ her looking at me from behind.

I considered my position w/ Mary agonisingly behind me, & Gabriel, my friend who was beginning to bore me a little, reading in front of me, quite engrossed. He had the spliff & wasn’t even smoking it. I didn’t want to ask him for it, because it was his, but the rude bastard hadn’t even passed it once.

Suddenly, in a moment of decision I sat back next to Mary, our bodies pressing. At this stage, w/ the threat of Gabriel there & the tendencies of my edgier thoughts getting carried away, I began to feel excited – I began to get an erection & my jeans were tight. “I could really do w/ leaning forward again,” I thought. “Though what would Mary think of me rocking back and forward like a monkey?” Paradox. The only solution I felt was to ask Gabriel for the biff & lean forward to take it.

“Gabs man, the bifter has extinguished itself in the absence of you smoking it. Have a light.”

We often spoke to each other in burlesque tones using highly pretentious diction to mock the people who assume we are being serious or genuinely ostentatious. A silent cruelty, & a disdainful one. We enjoyed deliberately confusing people. I know that of course it’s a manifestation of personal insecurities, or something like that. Enigmatic people, though, have to cultivate their enigmas, play on people’s curiosities. If people knew this, however, the enigma, the mystery, would cease.

I suppose you could say I suffered from a dreadful arrogance that played games w/ my autonomy.

W/ all this thought taking place & consuming my stoned mind, my erection subsided. & Gabriel passed me the joint.

“Cheers man. What you reading?”

“Turn of the Screw.”

“Henry James. I’ve read it.”

“What do you think?”

“Frightening. Frightening to think that the entire novel is related through the eyes of someone so subtly mad… psychotic… that she doesn’t know it and neither do we…”

“Yes, yes, the scary thing is that when you’re insane of course you wouldn’t know about it.”

“Where are you at?”

“The Governess has just been visited by her second horror.”

“Oooooooooh… it’s just getting good. The insanity accelerates from then on.”

I often spoke of insanity. The idea of it attracts me. It’s in the same boat as all the things which attract me like dreams & angels & myths & magic, symbols, Mystery.

I often used the word ‘insane’ as an adjective. I’d never told Gabriel (& he was the most likely person I would tell anything) that I don’t actually believe in sanity. Or intelligence. I just believe in minds.

I needed the loo.

“Mary, where’s the bathroom please.”

“Upstairs.”

That’s all I needed to know. Bathrooms are self-evident & usually exactly where you expect them to be. Still, you’ve got to ask.

“Right. Do you want the rest of this?” I offered the joint.

“Oh, yes please. Thanks.”

On leaving the room, I realised how much I’d wanted to leave it since entering it.

“I’ll take my time,” I thought.

Halfway up the brown carpeted stairs I heard Mary & Gabriel exchanging aggressive but hushed remarks w/ each other. They were squabbling. Shit. Was it something to do w/ me? No, don’t be arrogant Franco, of course not, they just waited for privacy.

I reached the top of the stairs slowly, straining to hear what they were saying downstairs.

“Don’t be so nosy Franco, go & take your piss,” I said to myself, imitating the sense of morals & responsibility that I recognised I inherently lacked.

Four possible doors faced me at the top of the stairs. I chose the one I was sure was a bathroom; but it was a bedroom. “Shit, oh well, another one of my immaculate notions ruined. Bathrooms are not self-evident after all.”

The door next to it was the right one. As I pissed, I looked around at all the fancy bottles of sprays & scents & creams & whatnot. My bathroom, in comparison, was utterly empty.

I decided I’d stay in the bathroom a little longer to give the two downstairs a fraction more privacy. Their relationship, on first impressions, was strange. They possessed a silent communication which I’d seen in other couples, but never experienced.

In front of me, they ignored each other. & Gabriel had definitely changed. I realised then, staring blankly in the mirror, that Gabriel was not a friend anymore. I no longer needed him for the public confidence he inspired in me. I no longer needed any public confidence. I had no friends. I had to get out, leave as quickly & politely as possible. W/ as much of Gabriel’s gorgeous skunk as possible.

Returning downstairs it was clear that all the fuss had subsided. Entering the living room, Gabriel had now moved to sit in my seat next to Mary on the sofa. He had his arm around her. The skunk was on the coffee-table, where Gabriel was previously sitting. I moved over & sat down. The couple were full of smiles.

For the next ½ hour, we chatted idly (except for Mary), & I was given the opportunity of rolling a spliff. Little did Gabriel know that it was also an opportunity for me to steal about ¼ of his ounce of skunk. Having convinced myself that there was no longer the same connection between us, that he wasn’t a friend, & that it was his fault as well, I reached a guilt-free state of mind, which excited me. Ah, the potentials of being guilt-free, amoral. All you needed was to be good at lying to yourself. So, skinning the J, I subtly spilled the bag under the coffee-table while the couple were smugly engrossed in some embrace. Under the coffee-table, I put a substantial handful into my left boot, then brought the rest up in the bag, laughing and apologising.

“Gabriel. After this biff I’m gonna cruise.”

“You’re going? Already?”

“Well, I’ve been here ages &… to be honest, I still don’t feel too good after that feinting episode.”

“I thought we’d do something today, go to Camden maybe.”

“Gabriel,” I joked like a friend would. “You know we never do anything if we’ve got enough weed.”

He was reluctant to agree. I knew it was because of Mary. Being w/ her changed him.

We smoked the spliff, & talked some more. I couldn’t be myself w/ him. He had become a stranger. The way he was so – insensitive about my dream as well…. That was what first alerted me to his new persona. Oh well. I managed friendly chatter, & by now had realised he probably wanted me to go anyway, & was probably experiencing the same friendship crisis between us that I was. At least he had Mary there when I left. What would she be like then? What were they really like together?

“So,” I said, standing up, “I’m off, man.”

“Cheers for phoning & coming round, it’s good that we’ve retained our friendship and are still in touch…” etc, etc,

Bullshit.

After the crap & the strange half-falsity had finally gotten too crappy to bear on both sides, I smiled at Mary.

“Pleasure to meet you,” I said looking at her intensely in her sea-green eyes, as if to communicate something more than my words actually said.

“you too,” she smiled,

“see you again.”

& then that was it. I doubted if she ever would see me again. Or Gabriel for that matter. It didn’t matter.

The door had closed behind me. I faced the street. I was free.

********

V

W/ my confidence fuelled by the safe knowledge of having something to smoke in my possession, I strolled briskly away. “Even if the worst comes to the worst,” I thought, “I can just get utterly cained & escape, pass out in a miserable gutter.” But I could not accept this as being the outcome of the day. “Decisions must be made,” I said decisively out-loud, to no-one. “I must choose.”

I turned the corner, not knowing where I was, or where I was going to. A woman w/ a pram passed me & deliberately averted her eyes from mine. I don’t know why but this fuelled my sense of drive further. My stride began to extend.

A moment later, a fragment of sun scattered through the clouds that had lay in the sky all day. A ray caught me in the eye. I began to feel quite exultant, happy to be alive, & to be me. I continued walking in a strong rhythm. My feet penetrated the street.

I started to hum; then I fitted words to the tune. I was walking directly into the beam of sunlight, which seemed to be exclusively shining on me. ‘Wow,’ I thought, light-headed & dreamy, ‘I am indeed a very special person, blessed.’ As soon as I’d felt this elated sensation float through me, the grey clouds covered the sun again, as if to punish me for my arrogance, or simply just to ruin my mood.

Angered by this, I felt like getting myself involved in a conflict against the sky & sun. I decided, in the mess of my mind, that I would will the sun back out from those clouds.

Soon my concentration faltered, though, & my thoughts maundered into silly crevices. I had turned onto a little side street, & at the end of it, I saw there was a fenced grassy opening w/ a gate. A cemetery. W/ my thought now on a level of confusion, it would be a good idea to sit down & think for a while. Maybe I could write a song.

The cemetery was virtually empty. Furthermore, it appeared to be more like a park than a cemetery. Nicely mowed lawns. Cosy gravel paths. Each tombstone lined up immaculately & forgotten about. I couldn’t believe for a minute that any of the people lying under this ground had specifically chosen this cemetery as their place of rest. Of all the places of rest on Earth.

I wandered down to the bottom of the path & sat by an unusually small gravestone under the trees in the corner. Leaves were scattered around me, fragile and crumbling.

“In loving memory of

Mary Calliope,

died 2^nd April 1882,

aged 26 years.”

That was what this curious gravestone said. It was faded & looked out of place, tucked away at the side under this tree. It seemed almost lonely. I leant against it, sitting on the damp ground, forgetting to respect the dead.

I noticed a robin hopping around the base of the nearest sycamore tree. He, or she for that matter, looked rather impoverished, skinny & tired. I immediately took pity on this little robin & felt helpless that I couldn’t give it something to eat. Instead, I smiled at it, & said “hello” in the tone of voice you’d use w/ a baby. “You can be my friend” I said wistfully, trying to put some genuine enthusiasm into my voice. I sounded false. Almost inevitably, the robin bobbed away. ‘Oh well.’

I sat there engrossed in an evolving day-dream, unable to find a single thread of productive thought, wallowing in whatever arose.

I was beginning to feel nauseous. My guts felt like sludging snakes writhing inside me. “Shit,” I thought “I haven’t eaten yet today.” What time was it? I hadn’t a clue. How long had I been sitting there? I began to panic a little, & feel light-headed. ‘Shit, I’ve got some weed, shit I forgot, wow, I’ll have another smoke and calm down.’

W/ my face down to my lap, & my fingers absorbed in the process of rolling a spliff, I did not notice the elderly woman approaching me w/ a little joke of a dog scampering beside her. Just as I lit up, & lifted my face up, she was there.

“Morning,” I said, slightly shocked.

Her face was heavy w/ old skin but could have been attractive before about 50 years of weathering set in.

“Why are you sitting on that grave?” she said abruptly.

“Well, um, actually, I am here to mourn my father’s grand mother.”

Her nosy rudeness annoyed me, & I was in the mood for retaliating on the offensive.

“She died while giving birth to my grandfather,” I continued, enjoying the freedom & spontaneity of lying, enjoying the fact that I had gained the upper hand.

“Oh,” she said solemnly. “Oh I am sorry,” she continued humbled and apologetic. I was suddenly hit by a great wave of guilt, at seeing how easily I had defeated his poor old woman, who was in the right anyway. I wanted to tell her that I was lying, & had actually stopped to roll up some illegal substances, & that yes I was a typical youth, & that you were right to question me… But she had already tottered off, w/ her little tottering dog. Oh well, no point in pitying the weak, I thought.

W/ this incident over, & seeming to have taken place hours ago, I continued with the spliff.

Slowly, I began to enter a state of mind that I’d never encountered before. My stomach seemed to expand & expand into space. I closed my eyes & felt the walls of my stomach moving outwards. I felt as if a universe was being created inside me. I felt a huge space within the entire of my body, which I felt no longer existed. I imagined seeing stars explode & planets being born &

********

VI

& I plummeted to the Dream-Film Store again…

“Here is where dreams are stored on disk,” said the friendly female voice as if on autocue. “Anything that can be dreamt, any dream sequence, it’s stacked on the shelves here in The Dream-Film Store, this shop beneath the waves.”

I felt less afraid than before.

“What’s the meaning of this?” I asked.

“Well,” she said, “I can explain.”

Her face, her physical form now appeared, a nubile and pulchritudinous sylph.

“Hi,” she said, resolving from the colour.

“Hi,” I said back, breaking that rule that women don’t like you copying them.

“Your loneliness, disorder and despair leads to LUST. Your agonies are self-inflicted. ALIENATION is one of them. You have escaped into The Dream Film Store. You have accidentally slipped into a crevice of your own mind and landed awake in the subconscious.”

“Really?”

“Either that or you have created a world here at the bottom of the sea symbolising mystery, women, penetration, drowning, hallucinating, dreaming, the subconscious.”

“Well which is it?”

“Your LONELINESS is a fantasy world that is the subconscious reaction to and sanctuary from the alienation, waste & disorder of your waking life. You are at war with yourself. Your subconscious is offering you peace terms.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Come with me while we plummet,” she said; “plummet with me while we sleep.”

********

STILL 16/ 08/ 2025

I think with the novel opening I should’ve taken it in the direction of psychoanalysis. Maybe he goes to a psychiatrist and opens up. “I helped invent the net at 7. At 8 I was the witness from The Lords And The New Creatures twice. At 11 was incrementally marked by an experiment into the maths of the new colour as a cellular mark. At 15 I attained the face of stars. At 18 I spoke against September 11th in 2000, also wrote the highest-marked A-level exam essay in the nation at 100%. after school I recorded an album on binaural earphones.” Then he would go on to host the Plough alignment, get a First despite mental illness, work the numinous, purple-bleeding screen, build the Tower as an instrument of philosophy, conduct an experiment into a tape with a pause where resealed in the reel, discover the sheet where pictures grew, falsify the Nirvana barcode and attain visual radio broadcasting dreams. Then it would be my life story.

20/ 08/ 2025

In a dream I had become an ace at cricket,

gone back to school, was playing

a match or at least about to play a match,

whereupon a load of school kids

including myself… well, let’s

just say my pockets were suddenly loaded

with drugs and guns and then

the police were there, and I

was trying to smuggle the drugs and guns

away, throw them away, be rid of them,

either in the school woods or the bootrooms,

which got further away the nearer I walked to them.

Before I reached a zone of safety, disposed

of the drugs and guns and got down

to some good old fashioned cricket,

I woke to the sound of voices saying

they want me to redo the one about the wall.

26/ 08/ 2025

Only a short sleep. The dream was textual. I had sorted out a way of being fair with it. I tried my hardest to clench the resolution in my mind so it was real but it still dissolved when I woke. It was just a way of structuring the text, using a comment by my mum, to frame it, and it was right first time round, then when I thought of it again in dreams, to make sure it was still there, it had changed and was Mark Velarde’s frame instead of my mum’s. Then I woke and it was gone. I think I am quite glad it was gone too, judging by what I remember of the content.

27/ 08/ 2025

I dreamed of Flora. She was with another. We went round as three. I was obsessed. At some point everything had to be named and labelled as being Flora’s. It was an action thriller and my life might’ve been in danger. Then for some reason we were at grand-dad’s house in Bedfordshire. The whole world was covered with white snow and people had come to look round grand-dad’s house. Bedfordshire is where Flora comes from. Then for some reason the house changed to our house at the foot of the fell here in Cumbria. It was an open exhibit to people come to look round. I can’t tell if the snow was still everywhere.

30/ 08/ 2027

I went back to school. There was Paul with me but that’s not the school. I went back to Chetwynde, and there was a question to which the answer was yes. In fact there were two but I only remember one. Did we win the street wise test, whose prize was a bike and a helmet? We did. I was in a group with John Foster and Matt Bray and we won the competition, gaining a bike each for pudding, I mean a prize. And so Paul was with me when I went back to find this out. There was something else a second question for the old pupils of Chetwynde but I forget what it was. It might’ve been to do with football. Later on into the dream Grant was there and I think it was about music, but maybe football again. Maybe I was playing a long ball that hung in the air for days and days.

01/ 09/ 2025

I went back to Oundle School, I think to visit my brother, and was assimilated back into the school. There was some kind of procession in a sea-side town, with industrial ships going past from right to left. The school had moved to beside the sea and as I say I think I got embroiled in being a student again even though I had left. Why is it that we have stress dreams about school?

06/ 09/ 2025

Worm-diggers of plasma writhing, wriggling into the earth, sex with the earth and a fair maiden. Some dreams are better than the movies and this one was, but describing it is impossible. We weaved our rhythm in and out of the earth, concealing glowing, electric plasma worms. We rode the worms. They were glowing and electric and went in and out of the earth.

Then I was with Steve and Tom and the band, buying spliffs from charity stores.

Later I was reading Paradise Lost on the Isle of Man with an Asian girl, who was nice.

07/ 09/ 2025

I dreamed it had gone differently with the band… we’d taken more time with the binaural earphone album and made it longer, an actual album’s length rather than the 6 songs we have at the moment. Those were days when I read a lot of Brian Patten, and when it always seemed to be autumn, at least in memory when I look back. I think in this dream we organised at least two or three albums and really spoke about it rather than just getting stoned.

08/ 09/ 2025

I remember coming briefly to consciousness and noting to myself “that’s the best I ever had” and “you should remember that” but falling asleep straight away again after I forgot entirely the content of the dream. Nothing to write in my dreamwork diary then!

09/ 09/ 2025

A troubling dream. They were trying to give Owen and Rooney’s England goals out to a wider audience, to share them, to take them away. It was a de-radicalisation of excellence, as part of some anti-septic, not allowed to win democracy and I didn’t like it. My dad was there and just like that I was violent to him and I didn’t like that either. I was violent to my dad and no doubt caused him injury and concern and that’s not acceptable. When I woke I was troubled not just by the England goals but by the violence.

10/ 09/ 2025

In the digestive system of a house poets would go with their poems. People in the audience were with me, watching, at the front I would enter back in with a new poem, deciding on what for my collection, or what for my journey. At the end we had decided on a few, though maddeningly not enough. Peter Orlov was there. I said to him “only a nutter/ would butter both sides of his bread with butter then mutter,” and he got mad and started to chase me which is when I woke. We had decided on a few poems by then for the final count, testing them in the digestive system of a house.

11/ 09/ 2025

A clamour was being made about James’s sheet where pictures grew. We were both somehow back at the same school, which I think was Oundle, and the headmaster was interested in the sheet, and dad was still alive, and the sheet was going to get us out of trouble, trouble caused by drugs. I remember someone not believing that the pictures that grew really did depict the lyric to one of my own songs and I was protesting this for a long time. Then, we were w/ Ben Fridja – James and I – in a cafe that served the food directly to the table without any plates. Later I was travelling. There was a great momentous song in my head, and I got to London, but was down and out in the Tube, and then got in a queue to phone my dad and got whacked on the back of the head by someone – some tramp. London was looking good though with great tall buildings going up. I asked the man at the ticket office how long it would take for us to get from where we were to a different part of London and he said “five hours.” It seemed a bit excessive and spoiled my plans. I was in a bad situation until I awoke.

15/ 09/ 2025

Stef Cochrane was in the dream but I don’t remember much of the content. Before I dreamt I organised a file of songs called The New Oedipus Wrecks and blogged it. During my dream I heard a friendly voice saying they got me to do that so that it could churn up some new ideas: and as soon as I heard that friendly voice I heard a plain evil voice of authority saying that they don’t want me to have any new ideas. There was at some point in the dream an opening up and plenty of new ideas, like opening a stone to find the energy compressed inside it. I’m not even sure I am free to write a private dreamwork diary without being spied on however.

17/ 09/ 2025

A band developed, a cult band, from a lonely situation where Humphrey Watson and I went round to see one of his old friends so that we could buy some weed. The friend was gay and had a thing for me and I eventually showed him my penis or rather the mark that was left on my penis by the maths of the new colour as a cellular mark in boyhood. We then joined the band and the band developed. I think it was a superhuman band and everyone in it had powers but I was exiled from it, even though a key component. In the end I think we were the Smiths.

13/ 09/ 2025

My brother James and I living here working. We went to Millom for some shopping. The most amazing dream I ever had. It was of his genius not mine. He’d made some kind of sweet dish for Flora. Was it being shared out online? We feasted on the latest of the telly series. People laughed happily, a good glad share of laughter, I think. By the end we sat in a room, cool and blue, and Paul appeared. I said “Paul! What are you doing here man!?” and he said he was on a plane on the way back from Japan! While being in the room! He had to tell me twice. So something had happened. Then one of my own songs started bleeping off on a mobile in the room. I tried to play it on a spontaneously self-organised guitar to prove it was mine but got it wrong. James and I were in the room while it lasted, and had the sweet taste of the sweet food lingering on our tongues and I seem to remember he gave it away for free, the food, and it was aligned with the sun and part of a telly series that was being watched all the way round the world. But if I look more carefully back into the dream, where the sweet things were made, as the next instalments in the telly series, James did something with the sunlight itself. That is, before his sweet food that was being shared out for free was food, it was something else to do with light. What he did he did for Flora. This might refer to the reality of him designing the sheet where pictures grew, by using Einstein’s value for light-speed ‘c’ as an author. When I woke I heard a voice say “your brother might need money man.” I heard another say something about my potentially going to prison. I heard another say something about my being done now with a poem about a heightened dream. As I started to write down my dream my brother got in the shower; as I ended the shower stopped. As the man that discovered my brother’s sheet where pictures grew, I feel I should try and win my brother the Nobel Prize. My brother is a genius: he designed the sheet where pictures grew by harnessing Einstein’s value for light speed, ‘c,’ as an author. When the shower stops he goes to bed, as I prepare myself a morning coffee for the day of work ahead.

25/ 09/ 2025

Woke at around midnight from a dream where dad gave hash to James and Bob but not me. Were we at Lynton Road or were we on holiday somewhere like Portugal? In the end I told dad, I think, he shouldn’t be excluding me from the pact, and we actually shook hands over it, and made a deal that if they got a lump of pollen I would be included. As I say I then woke up in the night-time and considered that this dream was a night-mare. I thought of my mother, then, who says for years she has only had night-mares and they’ve all been about dad.

29/ 09/ 2025

I was driving or being driven in a foreign country with my music friend Mike Eccelshall. It wasn’t a foreign country but a foreign world. There was strange terrain, it being a foreign planet. We drove a while, then we came to measure our successes, our triumphs – how many songs we’d recorded. Apparently there were two. This is nonsense because Mike and I never recorded any music together but in the dream we had. Then the car or van was in Cumbria. Mike said he was staying at the Bridge cafe in Millom which was okay because you could smoke weed there. That’s only 3 miles down the road. So he drove me back here where we found Marcus Shaw (another mate) and my brother James. I was worried that James and Marcus were left alone together because I am protective about my brother but he seemed okay did James. They had been holding the fort for a long time. And was Paul in the dream too? It’s another one where you wake and automatically think of music.

03/ 10/ 2025

Dad had found a pub in Barrow he liked and had been there a few times. There was a big jukebox with the Kinks. You could photograph the music, say it was by ‘c’, claim it as your own number in some sort of fraudulent, postmodern way. He was tea total. He had gained some friends in the pub on previous visits and was showing me a good time. We listened to the same few songs. At some point a really, really tall guy that towered over dad and I came in and said his name was something Saint; and he joined in the fun.

03/ 10/ 2025

There was a Syd Barrett rarity (I’ve heard it before). We all had bikes to evade monsters. Syd’s bike was charming. We were in an airport or somewhere. There were monsters so we each biked out of the place in a line, and Syd Barrett was one of us. We got to a beach ad there was a line of people going in the tide. We asked them for some weed and they directed us to a train station. There was a narrow window at the top of a big wall. Through the window you could get weed. The portions were too small at first then we bargained a bigger one for 20 quid. The end result was a big portion, partially through the window, partially from the people on the beach which was on our side of the window.

04/ 10/ 2025

I don’t remember the content of my dream but upon waking, or just before, dreamed that I heard the voice of Prince William visiting to say only the sheet where pictures grew should survive of all the numbers I have been involved in. Prince William I admire greatly and if it really was him, I thank him for realigning my perceptions; but I do take issue with what he said because I think there are other numbers worth keeping, like the tape that had a pause where resealed in the reel (the pause which we did away with), the Nirvana barcode and the binaural earphone experiment, all of which might come under the bracket “halfware” like the purple-bleeding screen or effervescent mobile reverberating the rhythm of ‘William Tell’ through every technological inlet in the room before it rings. I struggled for a while knowing what to do with this potential dream-visitation but found my dreamwork diary the only place for it in the end. He said the sheet where pictures grew, “that one you did with your brother about the gun,” was the only good work in among it all. I can accept this; but it doesn’t make it clearer how I am to proceed if I am to proceed. Going back to old fashioned poetry collections after discovering the sheet may not have been a good thing.

THE FALSIFICATION OF THE NIRVANA BARCODE

How best to falsify the Nirvana barcode?

Mum said it was a trick of grief.

When I made the Nirvana-barcode to be

but the beat of ‘Scentless Apprentice’ by

Nirvana tapped out in approximate

barcode shape using the tool of

the qwerty keyboard and took it to her

she said “there is no such thing.”

The shape I mention only works

in Times New Roman, thus:

|| | |||| | || | |||| 909 & 693 are wings

and the armed winged may well make

millions out of the new Nirvana barcode

as brought in by John F B Tucker but

upon writing it down I cast it on the fire

and got my mother to photograph it in flames.

DREAM WITH OPEN EYES

(by Secret Chord H originally and used as radio jingle circa 1999)

Last night it seemed we couldn't

sleep but maybe I was dreaming.

The world expands inside my

hands it's getting heavy.

Of all the treasures I could

choose I can't seem to decide.

Today the shade was washed

away where I would hide.

Dream with open eyes, come

below and we can fantasise.

Now that I’ve stopped telling lies, come

below and we can fantasise.

Last night it seemed we nearly

died but maybe I was dreaming.

It made me feel sooooooooooooo

alive and soooooooo in love.

Dream with open eyes, come

below and we can fantasise.

Now that I’ve stopped telling lies, come

below and we can fantasise.

THE SHEET

The sheet in question is my brother’s design

so about it he would be the Albert Einstein

and though some don’t know the song

the pictures depict, if I am not wrong,

the lyric to a song I myself wrote

which means I am the Barrett of the sheet -

but concede it to my brother who laid it down -

a long time ago in the den in the barn.

He used Einstein’s value for ‘c’

as an author, and suggested <BEE>

might soon ensue from the symbol @

in the international language alphabet…

THAT BLACK NATURAL E

Where once I wandered far and wide 

on a field-file, a file-field, 

a fenceless farm without 

security alarm where all hearts bleed

and all arts breed, now Hell

is very quiet, unadvertised.

McBreastmilk, 

McBreastmilk, 

don’t feed your kids.

Gentle face erasing cream,

smear it in and let it sink

down through the pores of your skin

to erase your deepest down dirt.

O stars the government

that truly speaks for us!

Get an extra kid for free

when you spend 99p.

Freefall 0800 down

your own black hole pupils.

Maybelline you maybe only make-believe

you may be the true mating queen of the hive,

may mad vampires stalk you,

stalking walls walk through

your vagrant dreams.

I see state of head

is more than Head of State.

Monster Munch can

always gobble up your food.

Cancerel can always 

sweeten the stewed-

carfume coffee we sip in 

this liminal afterlounge.

It’s getting cramped

as a tin of beans in here.

In emergency please 

break glass and exit.

Credits at the end of innocence

are falling like numberless lists

of fallen autumn leaves.

Snatched handfuls of light

come to nothing in the dark room.

There must be a use for 

this dust amounting.

There’s nothing like digging 

a meaningless hole as if to cure the 

spiralling lethargy of Hell...

and when I went into the 

woods to bury my soul, 

all the trees knelt down.

O perpetual orgasm of the sun! 

Privation is the mother of imagery.

Prayers, ghosts and 

e-mails chatter on 

the ego-loss breeze.

The chitchat in the solipsistic

kitchen of fiction is 'phatic'.

My new, motley fridge magnet

letters contain no question 

mark in the pack but the first

qualification of Modernism

is enquiry and furthermore

wilful ignorance is a sin.

Meanwhile outside the 

fallen Autumn leaves 

are where bears have 

dipped their feet in pots of paint 

and danced across the threshold 

of the paving stones.

Water clears its throat from the tap.

Gunpowder was only invented

for fireworks and a firework

is a champion sperm nosing up

blind to explode bright and wonderful

deep-sea creatures in the Ancient Night.

The world is a cool, bejewell'd

marble snug in Holy Orbit

suckling on a mother sun.

Supposedly there is soon

to be New Atlantis on the moon.

The cure for cancer 

sustains your heart.

Robbed by a bastard vending machine,

somewhere a tramp drinks paint-stripper 

to cleanse the doors of perception,

a drunkard attacks a wall

on an otherwise empty street,

a policeman forces himself

to come with a gun.

Hey salesman 

slow down 

with that

fast-food. 

I don't mind

waiting here

for a year. 

SKUNKFOOT

Portability still seems the Apotheosis of Form: sometimes I can be walking along on a sunny day when I jump from the jungle to the Arctic to the Sahara. Mutation in consciousness itself, truth too simple to understand, these are gesture-without-motion-bones, like sadness gene and dreaming gland. It's not impossible to write an anti-poem. Love is not a mechanistic set of rules. Love was once aligned with madness, fever and intoxication. Love became grouped with language not God. Love became a tough word-combination. Love has no ego as everyone knows, and so it goes and so it grows. I for one think Lucy in the soul with demons may happen to be an actual substance. Travelling south, as I read Rimbaud, a rainbow smashed a railway train window. A baby cannot trip without memories... I remember “every atom ate our eyes.” Our eyes: they are ingrown in the ocean's bellyful of wine, down in the seabed-orchard. There is angelic music inborn in the inner ear; but those whom the Gods wish to drive mad are sent the end of ‘Bike’ in their heads and madness is not something to be Romanticised as a return to Purity. Impunity seems more what the poet wants. He likes to float on the artifice of organic emotions through synthetic sounds, and is into exploring alternative histories suppressed by the overarching meta-narrative. For plastic surgery of the soul there are libraries. Poetry is the bike riding itself. Monopoly money will get us well, Monopoly money will get us bread, she picks the blue tac off the wall and says “my T-shirt is red”. I put my wounds up on bright flags; I take the angel up the arse. To plug my senses in the mains might engage [!00 %] of my brains. It’s all about a permanent reactivation of the Glastonbury Festival spirit. John Tucker is taking acid again. Money shags in the dark. Thoughts of one’s greatness only diminish one’s greatness. Skunkfoot is putrid demons excreted through stone. Love an army of fire. Fire needs some incentive to rise up. Shall I touch my heart with a red Bic biro? When all the air in outer space is consumed… The bed in the wood, it was definitely a whore’s, with solar spike I can use the Force, with R2D2 I cleanse my doors, I’m just trying to win my Star Wars. I’m starting to think in five musical parts at once. The Anon Throwaway as a new form could become an alternative currency to rival with money for the role of the real. Formal education is not for everyone. The yellow DogMuckels M atop the pole in the industrial park is the postmodern churchspire in the spiritual vacuum. Postmodernism is theme dissolved into message. Giant killers are frozen peas in the microwave. I look into the mirror though I shouldn’t pool my sources. I’m not going to die at the age of twenty seven, watch the dreamtapes on repeat from a golden seat in Heaven. The heart beats to the rhythm of one. A fiver is surely cheese and onion flavour. Cataclysm is catalyst for the old cat that sat on the map of sound, just because the world is very round. If there were paper under my heart there would be writing on it and it would be art. I might ding it in compressed Space Age seconds.

EPIPHANY

And by now, I have an epiphany -

the dream-visitation was not Prince William -

even if the voice said it was -

even if the voice made sense -

even if I took it on board -

even if it presented a new chance -

for it was but a prank by a mate -

who wanted to get on the wall

via the cleansing of the door...

WHAT I AM TRYING TO DO

Of all the bravest efficacies in the world

to just not hear voices would be a top priority…

is there anything I can do, Sir, to achieve that?

I also need to record my story, apparently,

which makes sense to me as to others too.

There does need to be written record left behind.

In terms of publication it should not be fake -

vanity press and self-published varieties.

There should be an end product that’s good.

MY LIFE STORY IN PRECIS

At seven I helped invent the net.

When someone needed

to store the idea of the net

in writing in the attic here

to give it a chance to grow

all the way round the world

it was me that wrote it.

At eight I was the witness

from The Lords And The New

You Know Who twice.

At eleven I did not know

what was going on and even

if I now did shouldn’t say.

At fifteen I attained the face of stars

which might’ve been

scripted in the Bible.

At eighteen, in 2000,

I foresaw and spoke against

September 11^th to the day.

I also got 100% in

a timed English Literature

A-level exam essay.

After school, I recorded

an album on binaural earphones, promising

I would “plug my senses in the mains,”

hosted the Plough alignment

for a rhythm change in

the White House, got

a First despite mental illness,

worked at a numinous,

purple-bleeding PC screen,

built the Tower as an

instrument of philosophy,

conducted an experiment

into a cassette tape with

a small pause where cut

and re-sealed in the reel,

and discovered the sheet

where pictures grew. Then I

falsified the Nirvana barcode

as a mathematical symbol

of what I had done, and

in doing so, attained

visual radio, broadcasting

dreams that swirl

in purple, digital

swathes about the head

of the deranged seer.

06/ 10/ 2025

Earlier on in the dream I was in a room on holiday with the poet Neil Curry. Everything had to be written on. He was mildly impressed by the poems I was writing, and as I say I think they were getting written on everything. There were other poets there too, because it was a poetry holiday. Later on into the night I was dreaming of playing rugby with Matt Bowe, perfecting the long pass and the drop kick. One drop kick was insanely long. I think Neil Curry was still around as a teacher. Stewart Falconer and Matt Bowe were both there. They spoke to me after training in a locker room, said they were feeding me clues.

09/ 10/ 2025

I dreamt my music went online in a way I would’ve liked it but it was vandalised, changed by my enemies. I bumped into one of them and beat him up. Dr. Bob had a print out of the lyrics which had changed, and wanted me to show the document to my lawyer to say this is my music. He had done something to help me w/r/t this print out. When I left the guy I was fighting alone he went back inside the house and said “see I told you he was an animal.”

10/ 10/ 25

When I woke I heard a voice saying “what we all want to know is, you’re the witness from the Doors, why are you the one that’s being forced to die?”

In the dream preceding I went to a massive party with Luke Boulton, as festival, that turned up to be my dad’s land, at the foot of the fell where the plough alignment lives. People had usurped it and made my dad to be a dickhead. It was really upsetting but he dealt with it quite well.

Before the party there was a lot of chocolate and talk of The Lords And The New Creatures which without changing name was brought out in at least three completely different editions. After the book came the festival which I soon realised was on dad’s land. I went with Luke to see dad, through the crowds and I think they started playing tennis, dad and Luke, with words. I think my dad asked Luke “what would your dad do if this happened to him?” and Luke said “he’d cry because he was made a fool out of.” So dad got on the phone to someone, maybe 111, to try and get the people removed presumably. They were waiting for the alignment. They all wanted to see the alignment of the Plough and oldest fell. And what a mess they made of our land. Then as I say I woke and heard a voice say the words:

“what we all want to know is, you’re the witness from the Doors, why are you the one that’s being forced to die?”

I didn’t know I was being forced to die but now I do. I can only presume it’s for the reason on the maths for the new colour as a cellular mark, or for knowing about September 11th. Maybe though, rewinding a bit, it’s for being the witness from the Doors. I don’t know. But I know I am being kept numb on the medication. I know I was cursed or worse hypnotised by a bad man, a maniac, a sociopath, during my undergraduate degree.

17/ 10/ 2025

I was an acid casualty and soaked in beauty and ended up going round a Jim Morrison plot of land owned by gypsies. The plot of land was Jim Morrison’s book, in its lay out, somehow and it was owned by gypsies, and I was the witness and with the help of someone looking after me – who is acid casualty as well as witness – I was dressing up the land with evidence. Snow was evidence and was white too. There was a Christmassy feel to the plot of land and the things I had gathered there which included wine. One of the gypsies came home and asked for some money. I had already cleared it with a male gypsy but now had to tell of who I was and what I was doing as witness/ acid-casualty to the female gypsy too. I remember trying to pay her a £20 note, which was a special £20 note, because it was Christmassy and realising I already paid it to the male gypsy before who already knew my story. I think Grant was there to look after me during this process. When I woke I got back to it, had paid Chipmunka to publish a Jim Morrison-esque book of poems, and was worried the gypsies would change the font.

19/ 10/ 2025

Awful dream last night. Bob went missing as a child. He was kidnapped. There was a gathering here at Cumpstones where he was kidnapped. We went looking for him. Accusations were made. Violence was done unto the kidnapper and it left a bunch of amateurs open to revenge. I think we managed to save Bob but then at the end I was in another world about to go down for some crime, even though I didn’t know it, was just tricked into being there, duped. I think my death was when I woke.

25/ 10/ 2025

I dreamt last night that I was having a physical fight with my poor old man. I only caught the tail end of the dream, where we were trying to break each other’s arms. This is most disturbing but I was numb to it so it didn’t even strike me as such a bad nightmare, just run of the mill TV violence.

01/ 12/ 2025

It was that osmotic and porous dream again where Paul had a monkey called Mr. Jones that came travelling with us and a second monkey too that went un-named. The Jeep was parked outside the barn, in the middle of a mission – where the monkeys were coming with us – but this is just the tail end of another dream – where Mark Velarde was invited to record his number ‘Papillon’ on my ghetto blaster in a foreign clime, and then I ended up giving a lecture on James’s new da Vinci circle to his mother at Cambridge University and could only just remember my lines.

02/ 12/ 2025

I dreamed of women – of smoking, drinking, taking drugs and shagging women. I had more than one on the go, but they looked quite similar, were blonde and petite. I think one of them was Polish. My old headmistress Mrs. Stones made an appearance and observed a sexual act between myself and one of the blondes. Everything was going too easily and without a catch – then I woke up and it was just a dream.

05/ 12/ 25

I dreamt that my black brethren had discovered a kind of recipe for an elixir of everlasting life. It was a mixture like muesli that you ate. The recipe itself was poetry. There was some talk about it all. There was a dispute about whether my black brethren was actually any good at poetry. Towards the end of the dream when we’d all been eating this foodstuff that gave eternal life, or elongated life, or supernatural powers, my mum was sectioned in handcuffs and cried; and my mate Niki g and I had a reunion where he licked me like a dog.

09/ 12/ 25

I dreamed that someone having a secret affair with my mum also came back to hypnotise me to commit RP. First there were some disgruntled people trying to kill me while I was at a band gathering with some Jewish friends or was it a Conference where my band were the entertainment… next you find out I eluded the disgruntled people but have to face my dad who beat me shitless. He was back in his prime, muscular and strong, and battered me while I did nothing to defend myself.

10/ 12/ 2025

My dream was a love story conducted through the medium of a handful of teenage poems. Flora was the object of desire, the Intended. The dream would work by rearranging the handful of teenage love poems. That is how it became a story.

12/ 12/ 2025

We had to work out our generation’s long poems, the next “The Lords And The New Creatures.” it was to be about Stef Cochrane and myself. There were quite a few contendors. I walked down a bus as the dream elongated, and got to Simon Pomery’s at the back. He had spelled my named “Johng”. Stef came down the bus, a school bus, and checked it out. She complained. It was really supposed to be me that was writing the long poem or even two long poems. She had written one or two long ones that were being overlooked. Then the ball was back in my court – it could be me doing the writing, seeing as Simon’s wasn’t just right. Stef would’ve preferred it if I wrote them or it myself rather than delegate responsibility. As I came to wakefulness Simon said “what you were last night was alive while I was dogmatic.” The poem was never finished.

17/ 12/ 25

The tail end of my dream was of old University friends Luke Boulton and Jamie Cooke playing games. We were racing in a small garden. I said to Jamie I could beat him in a sprint so we sprinted but he won. We also ran around the garden like an athletics track. Towards the end of the dream I informed the guys that in the last year of school I was top try scorer in the school’s rugby team, and we pulled out a ball, and I tried throwing it high in the sky but for some reason in the dream my physical faculties were affected, so it wasn’t the best throw I’d ever pulled off.

18/ 12/ 2025

Isn’t that annoying? Our best work lost on the shores of sleep. It was a poem, a really good one, about a) the house where the Plough alignment lives b) the game of rugby and possibly their relation. It hinged on a surprising rhyme that may never have been used before and that was like the discovery of a new force. I ran it through in my mind several times when asleep but upon waking it just wasn’t there any more. I remember it fitted into place like the alignment itself. I knew something about poetry that nobody else knew, but upon waking couldn’t provide evidence of it. There was a bath in the poem, a bathroom, upstairs, and some people below it on the ground floor, maybe my mum and some visiting guests. I woke to my shit life, came downstairs and typed up the dream while drinking Diet Coke. The rest of the bottle filled the glass up exactly and entirely.

20/ 12/ 25

I’ve just had a really emotional dream of Professor Paul Farley and Lancaster University. I was lying down in darkness and he suddenly came for me which is when the dream started to become charged. He took me aside out in to some kind of cloister and made me say a prayer, then made me play a game of football, a few passes, and then sang and made me sing too. The underlying moral question was whether or not I was to do the creative writing MA. It was a really difficult moral question. My life was ruined whilst I was still doing my degree by an angry sociopath who put me under a curse or even worse hypnotised me. Now it was a question of whether or not I was to even continue my education and Paul Farley seemed sensitive to the issues. Prayer, football and singing was all wedded to a discussion of poetry in the dream. I tried to praise his creativity but I am not sure it came across. I can remember, when I applied for my MA, they spent ages talking about me, miles more than anyone else: the female teachers said I shouldn’t be awarded a place, the male teachers said I should. I didn’t understand this at the time. Because I was blinded by the curse, not to know I was even cursed. What was done to me as a victim was evil and hideous. The dream meanwhile affords me room to consider what I am to do about my poetry – to take an overview. Before Lancaster I was thinking already in conceptual terms. One idea was to do to Jim Morrison what Morley did to Mandelstam in Mandelstam Variations. So make a collection all about Jim including taking some of Jim’s lines as a cue or point of departure. Another idea, was to present defaced bank notes, at least within a plot. This idea I actually realised in my undergraduate days even after the hospitalisation and what remains of that is published. I think in the dream Paul was trying to spark new ideas in me. From Paul I learned – whilst at University – that a title is a contract. But now I feel bereft of idea. It’s a job enough to just not get really angry with the sociopath that cursed me. I can see no further way of proceeding than buying some of Paul’s new poetry volumes. I did start following Paul when I was a student and read three of his volumes but things have gone to seed and I think the best way of continuing my life is to get back to reading poetry. So I have been on Amazon and ordered two of his books. I would’ve said this dream of Paul could’ve been an actual dream-meet. I suppose he’s right that I could turn to God, or to music, or to football.

21/ 12/ 25

In my dream my friend Grant trained a song we had recorded to a button on the wall outside the shed. The song was a real song we have actually recorded – and he made it so that all I had to do was press a button on the wall outside the shed to make the song start playing, resounding around. In the dream the song sounded even better than it does in reality. The button itself was caked over with layers of cement. I woke and it was the day of dad’s death, the day he passed away, which is the shortest day of the year.

22/ 12/ 25

First of all I dreamt of my ex gf Danielle, something about travelling, about taking trains, about parting, about final farewells.

Then it was something to do with Mark Velarde and how in the dream his family on the isle of Man turned out to know some hippy friends of my dad’s from Bristol.

The knowledge became a computer game, the Doors computer game, which was played inbetween scenes.

We all went on holiday together, playing the Doors computer game.

25/ 12/ 2025

How awful. Christmas morning and I dreamt that my brother killed my dad. It was I think over drugs. There was a party, and there were some druggies there. The party was here in fact at Cumpstones. There were many people. There was a dealer who let us tick skunk and hash. The Americans were pleased. The store was at the point of the line in the wall in the caravan. The caravan was a cafe. So I went along to the caravan or cafe and opened the box in the wall and took out some skunk and hash, and there was a written list of people who had ticked and owed money. On the morning after the party we were by now in our London house and I was going round the corner to a hole in the wall to get the money to pay back the dealer. By now I think acid was the drug I had taken. On the way back I heard James screaming and groaning from all the way where I was. I thought to myself dad would’ve put up a protest about the drug taking and James would’ve got physical, and the nearer I walked home, with Hannah I was, the more I could hear James’s demented rage. I never made it home before I woke to voices saying “Tucker’s in srs trouble. He’s killed his own father.” At that moment I felt sorry for my brother, and sad about my dad at the same time. I woke up from this nightmare on Christmas morning. I remember the pain in my brother’s groaning voice as Hannah and I crossed the water and approached the house. It’s a good job this is just a dream, that we still have each other, to enjoy Christmas morning with!

27/ 12/ 25

Two nameless poems at the end were like clues for forensic detectives of meaning. They both seemed like the end of the New Creatures but didn’t give the game away. What came before was a game, a wide game, out in some jungle or maybe even a different planet, I think with two teams. It was like poetry as interactive and experiential game again. Before that game, which was not new, something about Luke Boulton and football and before that dad was alive and we went exploring a desert island. It was an island we’d been to years back and now we returned and saw evidence of my infancy, and the nanny that looked after me was still there. I think dad had had an affair with the nanny first time round when we went there, and now upon our return she was happy to see him. Mum was there as well and showed me some of the baby photos.

01/ 01/ 2025

A gun went off in my dream. It was my father. First I was at a university philosophy lecture keeping quiet at the back. The lecture was no good, the university rough. At the end three philosophers who had been there before appeared and started making weird noises with their mouths and pointing to themselves. Then dad picked me up in an open top car. We drove through a town. I was telling him about the philosophy lecture. He wondered why I had become gay. As we drove near someone his gun went off. I think someone tried to take it out and shoot dad, or else dad tried to shoot him. Maybe it was an accident though. Whatever the case, I remember now, the guy got shot. Dad continued to ask me why I was gay, or else tell a stranger, for a little while, then started shouting about how we needed an ambulance. I phoned an ambulance, then woke up.

05/ 01/ 2026

I had a dream that my friend Grant published a book that was only accessible in dreams. I read it, in dreams, and found it scintillating and beyond. I was enraptured, even jealous at times. For a long time I’ve been a dreamworker. You can smuggle language out of the unconscious, I have learned. We still inherit dreams of fighting wild packs of animals from ancestors that needed to rehearse for the real life situation. Some say we are dreaming all the time except in sleep without sensory stimulus. Some say if we can learn to lucid dream, then focus on a collective meeting point like the local McDonalds, we can dream-meet. My dream-meet experiment, possibly for not having a McDonalds nearby, already went to Heaven, where we took particles of dirt like drugs and chanted “drugs in secret, alchemy in the open, ultimate in effect.” The dream-book I just read comes after sooooooooo many dreams of poetry, sometimes signed by Einstein’s value for lightspeed, c. When I woke I heard multiple voices saying “to make a book like that would cost £4, 000,” and also “they already take the piss out of the one you did when your dad died so why would you do another about James?” It’s sad, the anti-intellectualism of your every day Englishman in this day and age, sad that the great endeavour of literature isn’t more cherished. As for dreams my dad used to say dreams are merely the bureaucratic work of the unconscious mind. So there I was with a file in an unready state, when I went to sleep and dreamed of the dream-book, as if to find resolution to the problems I face as a writer. Even though it isn’t material when you wake, I think the dream book is real and corresponds to an actual language of dreams… at least I contemplate that it does. There were poems in swirling patterns, oneiric-textured language, liminal phrases… I enjoyed reading the dream-book and think we should keep it between us.

06/ 01/ 2026

Last night I had a terrible dream that my body was set alight to and in a flash there was nothing left of me but a pile of burnt, orange medication, melted and plastic, toxic and nasty. To be fair I had been thinking about death by O. D. before I went to sleep so I may have been processing that. The image of the orange gunk was probably made more high-resolution by the actual ingurgitation of orange anti-psychotic pills themselves. It was quite frankly one of the worst dreams I have ever had, and may serve to put me off any further O. D. attempts. The substance in its melted pile was all chemical death, all inorganic, and one starts to remember that before the chemical adventure of medication taking, one was deeply against Western medication. But they say the science works and it’s best to plug in; and even my dad who was an original hippy was in favour of my taking medication, so abject was my illness. So it is that I write to you whomsoever you are after having been under the chemical cosh for about two decades. The big question is one of whether or not the medication blocks off the creative spark in blocking off the psychosis. I think it does but also makes living more manageable. The empty medicine packets build up so fast and there’s nothing to show for your time as they do apart from endlessly recursive files that themselves seem to be comprised of empty medication packets, queues for meds, repeat prescriptions between the lines, even the case where literature becomes nothing but a machine for remembering to take your medication. Still, the science works and it is best to plug in. In science we trust. “O little bitter pill which art in Heaven, give us this day our daily ecstasy comedown.” So the poem went in 2002; and the dying of the dream of being a poet is another thing that gets me down. But who really makes it these days? No-one really does. So amidst the illness there is the disintegration of my poetry to consider. If it were a few years ago, I never would’ve started a sentence with “and” or “but” but I have given up caring now. It might be that the best one I did is still the seven year old book that stored the idea of the net in writing in the attic to give it a chance to grow all the way round the world. But by now I am just chasing voices… what did they say? The best one I did was “the dot one.” Well, that could mean giving the government “the dot page,” but could also mean the binaural earphone recordings in The Flood. That’s where I said I would “plug my senses in the mains,” on the binaural earphone album, and no essay came of that moment, just a trail of hallucinations on the way to becoming mentally ill. They said at the time I should follow up with just myself and an acoustic guitar. I have a book of songs that documents all this. Now my dreamwork is in the system, and I am straying from the topic, to march down memory lane and demand a refund from Old Man Time. I do miss being young but remember what Michael Hofmann said of those that die young, that they die of boredom, for life transmogrifies into something more rich and strange with maturity, and thanatos, the awareness of one’s own mortality in life, becomes a Sixth Sense the older you get and the more the perceptual kingdom of the individual enters overdrive.

07/ 01/ 2026

I dreamt of Paul. We had been apart but were reunited and sharing ideas again. We were catching up on the time spent separated. I don’t remember any more of it than that glimpse, that feeling. It was good to see the old friend again. But then again I remember there was a book – the dream-book! Sometimes spots, pretty patterns, concentric circles, whatever, it had the special aura you’d expect the dream-book to have. I held it in my hands and travelled into its pages.

08/ 01/ 2026

It started with the game. Induction. Buffering membership. “The game began with Galileo,” someone said. Chess board on the floor. My penis grew very dilated and large and was hanging out. At some point the boys in the band got back from a Mission to outer space and had news for us. They were in a van and they also seemed to want to bring us news of the game which they found out about on their mission but we were the ones at the centre of the game. They were then induced into the game too. My brother Robert was master of ceremonies. He was doing the induction along with some women. While thawing, I asked one of them if she had read The Lords And The New Creatures in French and she had. But when the band were sitting down a small, flying horse came towards Steve. “Let’s face it,” said Dr. Bob. “The Flood and Tea With The Behemoth were both great bands.” That’s my band and Mark’s. I think Mark’s band were said to be “already in with the click.” This was like something out of a Greek afternoon made famous by sunshine and wine. Like the Weimar Republic. I wish it had gone on but I woke, and I have to tell myself it was real and the game is still going. It was a game of cultural treasure. Of iconography. Of human chess. Of anything you wanted really. They were letting us in on the secrets of life because we had proved ourselves worthy. The game was about coming to maturity, relaxing about sex, and graduating from football. The human chessboard was in a cloister. I remember more now. When we were first being induced we were thawing and asked to watch a movie, watch a movie while we waited, genitals dangling, until some beautiful women started asking us questions.

So it is that I have become convinced there is a book in the undersea of dreams… and whether or not its language corresponds to actual language I do not know… but have been trying to smuggle language out of the unconscious for a long time. Michael Hofmann says language smuggled out of the unconscious is a leather boxing glove protruding from the telly on a mechanical, metal arm!

09/ 01/ 2026

I am at an impasse because my dream was sooooooooooo big I could not fit it into words. The gist of it, I think, was that I was responsible for September 11th and was to be punished be it by the State or the people or both. They were dreaming up all sorts of methods that I don’t remember and which didn’t seem physical but emotional, like being trapped in a mirror or something like that. When I woke I went back to bed afterwards and had a whole separate dream about the Future State. Simon Pomery was in this dream. He had a self-driving car. He could set the car on cruise and focus on poetry in the back instead of driving. My song ‘Air Raid Shelter’ appeared in the dream.

11/ 01/ 26

I dreamed that my old band the Flood had become a collective in my absence. Steve introduced me to the new players of whom there were several dozen in a room where part of the collective was all about what drugs they took, and where they only took organic drugs.

12/ 01/ 2026

I dreamt of my old band becoming a collective yet again and this time we were trying to track down my music that they had recorded in my absence. There were several busy places where we met and exchanged CD’s.

16/ 01/ 2026

I dreamed something about our old school poetry magazine Poetry Now. It was a theme throughout the dream. There was a ceremony where it was celebrated. At the end of the dream there was a wise saying to be derived from the experience of setting up a poetry magazine but I didn’t smuggle it out of the unconscious. The idea was that I will never do better than that school magazine in the rest of my life. There was chocolate hidden in the ivy hedge at one point, here at Cumpstones. That was after the ceremony where the magazine was celebrated. My memory of this dream was only very vague upon waking. The poetry in it got away as per usual.

17/ 01/ 2026

I dreamed of my dad’s Irish friend Patrick. He’d been living on the Isle of Man and came over to Cumbria to see us boys now that dad had died. He brought some skunk and some hash for us. I expressed a wish to live on the Isle of Man. Next thing you know us three boys had gone over there. I think Patrick lived in a caravan. We departed from him and went looking for a hotel in a city with posh buildings.

19/ 01/ 2026

I dreamed of Luke Boulton and then I went to Amsterdam with Mary, Mary and James I think. When I woke I was thinking of that song by Tricky “follow where Mary goes, says if I change my stride, then I’ll fly.” It’s really sad that I’m not likely to see Luke Boulton, who was a mate from Uni, again – and as for Mary I think she’s died, at least I heard so about a year ago. So that’s sad too. When I had come to wakefulness I was furious about how badly my books had gone, what a disaster it had all been. My not knowing what I was put through, what I did when I was younger, what was left up to me. I am still angry about it and it’s about 4 AM.

21/ 01/ 2026

I dreamed I had a baby with Syra

(a woman from University I love).

We sat on the top level of a bus.

Dr. Bob also had a baby, a son,

but mine was a daughter. James

was there and my mother too.

We were learning things off our kids.

When I woke I wished I really had one:

a little baby girl with Syra Sowe.

If to wake is to die then the dream was killed.

Just for a moment I was happy as a dad,

but then it wasn’t real when I woke,

only a clarification of something I wanted.

24/ 01/ 2026

My mum was there, it was a house, a wooden farmhouse, possibly the house from Wizard of Oz. Certainly there was a hurricane on the horizon headed straight for us – and we got ourselves tightly packed together in the house and someone started playing a gig, a really good song going “travel in unconsciousness” to the melody of ‘The Fear’ by Pulp, and also to a song I wrote in Oedipus Wrecks which is also very similar to Pulp’s ‘The Fear’. And my mum and I got close and waited for the hurricane. And everyone else there was a stranger. And the song “travel in unconsciousness” echoed round the farm and I kept quiet about having written one with the same melody and for some reason my mouth filled with tobacco which I tried to spit out. That was how I woke, spitting out tobacco in my dream and singing the song that goes “travel in unconsciousness.” It made me miss my London friends and think how badly my self-publishing and vanity-press publishing carer has gone. I went through visual radio and didn’t write something akin to Huxley’s Doors of Perception, Heaven and Hell about visual radio kicking in, which I should’ve done.

26/ 01/ 2026

I dreamt about Flora. We were going out. It’s enough to make you go weak at the knees. What else can I say? At some moment I was doing press ups and jogs to impress her, to get fit. The crux of the dream, the main import, I do not remember though. I just remember a feeling of love in the dream that is rare in my waking life. It was a feeling of love and trust, of how my life should’ve gone but didn’t, for instead I am hurt, a misfit, a weirdo. All that dalliance I never knew, all that domestic bliss – it was obtainable only in dreams. For once I was boyfriend material, but then I woke and the illusion was shattered, I returned to my cursed, Wickerman existence, my laptop, my Vape pen.

31/ 01/ 2026

I was gobbled by a monster at the end. It just leaped out. I was looking at pictures of songs. One was the stones, one was the Doors, and in my dream I turned my neck, as if to say to someone “it’s the Doors” and all of a sudden when I turned my neck, perhaps for real in body in the bed, a monster of brown leaped out of the imagery in the dream and gobbled me with a gobbling sound. So it was a nightmare that was sprung upon me in a sudden jolt. It was going fine but turned out to wake me in an instant of horror, with the monster.

01/ 02/ 2026

Everyone was waiting at the table for me to bring them tea, coffee and drugs. The drugs were in paper form, written or printed, at first. It was the big boss who was bringing them from behind the counter. Then came some pills. It was the culmination of a holiday in a dream town. Alicia Beckett was there and so was my dad, and so was Will Fenn, the lawyer, all of them waiting round the table, for these papers to be released, for the papers were drugs. This was but the tail end of a long night’s dreaming that I couldn’t possibly hope to remember.

03/ 02/ 2026

I dreamed of Rachel, beautiful Rachel; that I went to see her at the end of our youth on a magic bus that had a dance floor and a bar and sold drugs and had a bank machine. I didn’t have enough money but pretended. I wasn’t well endowed enough but we had sex. I loved her, and the dream became very druggy, a druggy Romance as our youth was ending, and I dragged her into the drugs, if only for a night, and became fucked up myself. People started to blame me for the drug taking, including Luke Boulton, an old mate from University, whom I met in the pub when I was chasing Rachel. I chased her for a long time. On board the magic bus were all her work mates and I felt very small because I didn’t work, had mental illness and was therefore not viable, not proper boyfriend material. I spent my last money on drugs and therefore couldn’t pay for her on the date. It was supposed to be a special occasion, and it was, but it was also fucked up.

I remember we used to send each other letters, postcards and mix tapes. She sent me a postcard from Ireland and also one from India in her gap year. I let it slide a bit then there was a time I was chasing her. I asked her to marry me and she said yes but I was deep in a first psychotic episode at University and needed to be sectioned so the marriage never happened, and now it’s too late no doubt. Now I am 43. She has children. Is a professional. But in the dream we made love and while it lasted it was good.

05/ 02/ 2026

I dreamt at first of clickibar (as in cricket.) Some of us from Habs (a school I attended) had gone along to an event where every school sends its best cricketers. I tagged along really at this sort of open day. You could see the standard of player was quite high, some of the bowlers exhibiting their skills being very fast, some of the batsmen near professional. Our school team seemed to be a bit behind. I had a bowl and a bat and I think I did quite well. Later in the dream I was in a room of distress. I had two baccy pouches and two blocks of hash that went one in each. And there was a cleaner who came in asking for sex except she had children with her and when she had forced sex on us both, I would then be blamed. So it was a hotel room of distress.

09/ 02/ 2026

I dreamed of poetry again, of the words “there is poetry in evolution too,” of golden chains inside dry stone walls, of the branches of trees cut off by dad with his chainsaw. It could be that I can no longer ejaculate on these meds and because of the State and am but a stump dumbfounded. I had tried to wank but it was hard and nothing came out. It’s been like this for a long time now. My punishment for being the victim of a curse.

11/ 02/ 2026

I dreamed I had written a really good book of philosophy then James came along and wrote an even better one. Then there was a scene where you could listen to music from a business card, or even eat food from it. I showed it to my friend Tom Woodhall and also showed off that I could hover in the air for minutes as if I had wings. Then there was Glastonbury. I was the witness from The Lords And The New Creatures and somehow everyone knew. I got back and it was Christmas at the foot of the fell. Dad was watching telly and his little mobile rang and I answered it. Dad’s mate Colin was on the other end, and said “hi Giles” because I sound like my dad on the phone. I told him it was John not Giles and I had been to Glastonbury and it was beautiful because the Universal Mind was there. When I woke I was asking myself if Colin was still alive and remembered that he had sadly passed as had my dad and Graham too. I thought of the line from the Pulp song about how (after the festival) there will always be a corner of your soul that you’ve left in a far-flung field. I woke to the same old terrible life-situation, threatening voices, being under a curse and realised I was innocent. I wished for a more forgiving and kind world.