The Vampire's Kiss - A Sonnet - Black Rose Society 2024 Creative Contest Entry - Alex Greene

 

The Vampire's Kiss - A Sonnet

By Alex Greene
writing as “Baccata”

The tender touch of lips burns like a light

And like a rising mist, this deep'ning kiss

Blots out all thought save sensual delight.

I've tasted love - but no love burned like this.

I feel your breath escape - a shivered hiss

Mixed with my breath. Your body shudders. Tight

As Titan's grip your arms embrace me - This

Is our time. We share our love this night.

Long have we waited for this fated night.

A rendezvous: a tryst we dared not miss.

Anticipation, lust, desire and fright

Add passion's fevered fervour to our bliss.

Then in the morning, I shall steal away;

Though soon I shall return, at end of day.

Den & Lauren, The TV Soap Opera

 

This was my biggest dream to date. I'd been brought over to Channel 5 Studios to begin production of the latest soap opera to his Britain's TV screens.

This was my big break. Den & Lauren was about to break into the soap opera market.

This was not a show for daytime TV - not, at least, 100% of it. Some of the episodes were going to be shown long after the 21:00 TV watershed, because of the open and honest nudity, sexual activity, and hypnosis scenes.

I was so looking forwards to seeing whom they'd cast as the protagonists Den Thompson and Lauren Tanaka.

Iron Man and Wind Turbine

 

So, then, this dream happened.

I was watching Iron Man charging up with a long charge cable from the top of a wind turbine, like the one in the pic above.

Iron Man finishes, unplugs, the cable, puts in it his pocket, starts to take off.

SMACK

Turbine blade.

So I'm watching as he sort of shakes it off, shakes his fist, and gears up to make a second attampt.

SMACK

Turbine blade.

So he starts thinking, and he decides to put some distance between himself and this vexatious wind turbine, so he backs up, and backs up, and backs up, and backs up, and backs up, and backs up ...

Takes a good look at the turbine over there ..

Winds up for a good leap ...

SMACK

SECOND turbine.

I woke up laughing my head off, and the only thing in this dream was Iron Man getting a concussion.

Garden of Enchantment

 

You have visited beautiful gardens before, but this garden is special.

This garden is here to restore the spirits to the disenchanted.

Welcome to The Garden of Enchantment.

From the moment you approach its all-encompassing hedge, you feel it working on you already. Your first sense affected is scent, as the Garden offers you scents from every flower you ever loved.

The sun shines on your body as you open the gate, a little iron thing which opens with a squeak to allow you entry. There is a footpath beyond, cool stone cobbles undulating across the lawn, past the central fountain with its rushing, babbling waters glittering in the daylight.

And then you walk past the fountain, and on into the garden proper, following a desire path through the grass.

This is a journey of pleasure, past banks of fragrant flowers flooding the air with their sweet scent, to clouds of pollinating bees and butterflies, clustering around overhanging wisteria.

Beyond that is a large ornamental pond, the cool waters taking away the heat of the day.

And soon, your desire path through the undergrowth takes you to the labyrinth at the heart of the garden.

This labyrinth is unicursal. The path only goes in one direction, closer and closer to the centre with each turn. As your feet step onto the winding path, your thoughts slow down, your mind growing still and silent as all urgency leaves you.

There is only the sun on your body, and the feel of the soil on the path beneath your feet, and each turn which takes away yet more of your thoughts and emotions as you carefully, methodically, calmly, just follow the path, and your planning stops as your whole life becomes just following the path, just seeing the path dead ahead, no further than the next bend.

Because, as the labyrinth takes you closer to the centre, all the paths are getting shorter, and your ability to think gets shorter and shorter, too, and it's so easy to let go and drop now, but you've got to see things through, at the centre.

Because the centre is so close, now, and when you get there, all you need to do is go blank, and let go, and let all your thoughts stop, and even as you realise this, you see the centre of the labyrinth just up ahead, and when you reach it, all your thinking stops, and your mind stops, and it all goes blank and empty, and so so peaceful, and you'll just want to go here next.

Boat, Boots, Spider

I had a wonderful dream this morning, before it was interrupted by a spider landing on my face.

There is a recurring dream I have, where I am setting sail across a misty sea to reach a distant island port. Beyond that port is a much longer ocean journey, which requires a ship. This first leg of the voyage, from the mainland to the island, required a smaller vessel. A boat.

I was below decks, holdall packed, everything secured. The place where I was standing was a starboard seating area, all rows of seats pointing forward. The boat was reversing into its berth, between high stone walls, all covered in lush green algae. Other than myself, there was nobody in that compartment.

The draft of the boat was unusually low. The sea was visible from the viewport beside me, only about a metre below the bottom of the port. The waters were dark, and I could see dozens of jellyfish drifting in the serene waters. Some had been stranded, and clung to the jetty walls.

I looked forwards, and saw a wave approaching. The boat bucked, but stayed at station keeping, just rocking up and down. It was then that I realised that, while I was clothed, I'd forgotten to put my boots on - I was barefoot.

I was about to reach into my holdall to see if I'd packed my boots on the top of my luggage when Anansi began to take a tour of my face. And that was the end of my dream.

Basket

 

I was on the bus, going towards the veterinary clinic. It was a crowded bus, and I was carrying an empty pet carrier.

Yes, empty.

Yet somehow, I convinced everyone on the bus that I had an invisible cat inside. 'Oh, he's adorable, but you won't believe how hard it is for a vet to see him.'

I threw my voice, making a loud screech, and terrified some overly-curious dog. That served to convince the rest of the bus.

So I got off the bus at the stop beside the clinic, watched it disappear into the distance, then waited fifteen minutes for the next one, so I could do the same thing with a whole new audience. This time, the cat in the basket was still under anaesthesia, due to having just been spayed.

Field

 

This dream is about my Dad. And a field.

Dad and I were both in town. Regular streets, though I didn't recognise the landmarks. I looked away for a moment, and Dad wandered off up some alley underneath a red brick arch beside some building. Naturally, I took off after him.

I came through the arch, and found myself in a large field, part of which had been fenced off with big grid fences like the one above. And there was Dad, stuck in the middle of them, unable to find his way out.

I climbed over fences and reached him, and found the road out. So I told Dad to follow me, and I brought him back towards the arch and to the street.

Trouble is, there was some sort of business unit next door, just beyond the boundary fence. Clearly, somebody saw us, so as we came down through the alley back onto the street, we were met by security.

For some reason, the leader was convinced that I was Paul Burrell, Princess Di's former butler. I didn't disillusion him, and he let us go. Then we were back on the street, and this time I made sure Dad wouldn't wander off again.

I swear, he could get lost in a field.

Locked in

I'd been invited to attend a gala wedding. A beloved friend was getting hitched. A blonde. It seems that, in my dreams, I have a type.

I turned up in my best bib and tucker, and somebody guided me into a side room with the promise of snacks.

The snacks were a lie. They shut the door behind me and locked me in.

So I meditated alone in the room for two hours, while the wedding itself took place just outside the room. Another person, a real friend, unlocked the door, and let me out. They'd had to move some furniture out of the way - someone had tried to bar the door with a sofa as well as locking it. I was released just in time to see my old friend, dressed in white, leaving the room, newlywed husband in tow.

Some of my so-called friends turned up, claiming to have arranged for my imprisonment in the side room. One of them said that it was to prevent me using hypnosis to make the bride and groom walk around naked or something like that.

They sounded so smug, until I asked them why the fuck they'd invited me in the first place.

They told me they hadn't - it had been my friend the bride who'd invited me, and they'd bit their lip rather than object, so they'd hatched this scheme to bundle me out of the way and lie to my friend, telling her I'd declined my RSVP and not bothered to show at the last minute.

A pity that the true friend, the one who'd moved the sofa away and let me out, had put their whole conversation on his phone, and that the live call had gone through to the bride's phone. She'd got it all, loud and clear.

I woke up before anything else could happen. But if she'd found out, I can't imagine the following few minutes would have been very pleasant for the schemers.

Speed Signs

 

So, here in Wales, some of our roads have been given a new speed limit, down 10 mph from 30. 20 mph is the new default speed limit on Welsh roads, and it's pissing off tory-voting gammons left and right.

This is not about the politics of the real world. This post is about my dream this morning.

I was wandering down a road which looks like this one above. Where I saw a 20 mph sign, I replaced it with a new one, indicating a speed limit of 9 miles per hour.

I'd been doing this to all the local 20 mph signs across Wales, it would seem. But that's not all.

It turned out that I was also replacing speed limit signs for the 30, 40, 50 mph and higher zones with new speed limit signs - 90 mph.

And making sure that these roads ended in sections of roads where the speed limit went down from 90 to to 9 mph.

Earth

 

I had a really weird dream this morning.

I had been transformed into some sort of earth being, capable of phasing through stone, earth, rock. I could meld my body with the stone columns of a church, and hide myself underground.

A lot of people were scared shitless of me. There was a meeting inside a church and one of them saw the rippling effect of my movement through the stones. Freaked out everyone.

Some people tried to hold meetings in a plane, because it meant that I was not able to phase inside the plane's body. I dpread the rumour that my body could not pass through solid steel, and people everywhere began buying up steel plates to line their basements, attics and so on.

I bought shares in the steel companies. I was raking in the dough.

Plus, I lied through my teeth. I could phase through metal just as happily as stone, and metal is an excellent conductor of sound. But let them have their sense of security.

The dream took a weird turn. One woman, an investigative journalist, got caught up in the investigation. She was chasing me, and she ran into some sort of Mob, and they buried her alive. So I just pulled her out of the box and got her to safety above ground.

The alarm woke me up before the rest of the dream could unfold.

Alien Princess

 

All I could remember was standing on some alien world, gorgeous sunset, weird sky, and this alien on my left just finished accusing me of all sorts. Really angry at me. And he looks past me and says "Sister, don't you want to tell someone about what went on between the two of you?"

And on my right, this alien princess replies "Nothing I'd ever admit to in court."

Damn. My dream self is having better sex than I am, and I wasn't even invited to watch.

Gates

 
Not much I can remember about this dream, but what I do remember felt incredibly arousing.

I dreamed that I was standing in some public venue which was putting on a few big screen displays, showcasing some forthcoming TV show. The big draw was actor Gates McFadden (above). There was a crowd of other people, all in silhouette, nothing outstanding to identify any of them, they might as well have been shop mannequins.

And then there was Gates, who was leaning against one of the displays.

She was smoking something. Looked like a cigarette in a holder.

As I watched, she was standing in front of me, with silhouettes flanking her. She took a drag and blew out a cloud of smoke.

That was an intensely hot dream. Gates doesn't smoke.

Dog

So this morning, this is what my mind came up with.

It was the last day of Scooby Doo. The place was open to the public, but it was a disappointing experience. All of the sets had been struck, and I could see them piled up and jumbled in a darkened room through a door which one of the workers had left open.

The walls were all bare, apart from holes in the walls where hooks had been, to hold up the scenery. There were patches of blutac and white tack, and bits of tape. The carpet was threadbare, and sticky.

I went to the commissary, and they were giving away the food. This was the last day, and they were going to throw all the uneaten food in the dumpster before going home. The server behind the counter was very nice, but I could see her pain, so even though she told me to put my money away, I sneaked a couple of hundreds into her hand "for her troubles" as she handed me the tray.

Then there was the dog.

I sat down to eat, and this huge brown head was suddenly resting on my lap. I looked down, and it was Scooby Doo the Eighth, last of the dynasty of the Scoobies Doo of Hollywood. I looked into its huge eyes, and the server was smiling sadly.

'He always cadges food off visitors,' she said. 'I put a little extra on your tray so you could feed him. I saw him looking at you.'

She then told me that this Scooby was now homeless. It was getting a little confused, wondering where the hoomans it had been hanging around with all these years had gone. Their scent was still in the air, though it was fading. And his handler had been killed in a car accident a few days ago. With nobody calling around to see if there was someone who could adopt this aging mutt, it was probably going to end its days in an empty, darkened studio.

Nobody to ask "Scooby Doo, Where Are You?"

So I massaged his forehead, and behind its ears, and its thick, muscular neck. I then fed it, and I could feel its drool on my fingers.

At that point, I woke up. I think I adopted a dog in my dream.

And I have been drooled upon by Scooby Doo.

More Hotel Dreams

 

I knew I wasn't done with my hotel dream.

I dreamed I was back in the hotel from my last dream. I owned the place, and I'd organised a fan-run SF / fantasy convention on the premises. I was on my way in to the hotel, when I caught sight of someone dressed like the character in the above picture. She was in front of the entrance, barefoot like the character above, smoking.

I advised her to stub it out and come inside, since the rain was coming in hard, right on my heels. Sure enough, that's what happened. The ferocity of the storm shocked the person.

In my dream, I talked to the woman. I asked her if she were cosplaying, or modelling. She was cosplaying the character, Suzy Nine Millimetre, a cadavatar from the 2000 AD  2023 strip Azimuth.

In my dream, I let her explain everything about her character, and the city of Azimuth, and what her character's role was in the comic. I just listened, nodding, as if I'd never heard of 2000 AD, let alone been reading it since 1977. Lots of "Go on" and "*gasp* Is that so? Do tell."

All the while, I gently led her towards the express elevator to my penthouse floors, the top two floors of said hotel, as seen in my last dream. The alarm went off as I was sitting down with her to enjoy tea at one of the small occasional tables in the suite, with a magnificent view of rolling moors outside.

Pity. I would have loved to have seen where the dream led. I wondered what the décor of the bedroom looked like.

Hotel Suite

In my latest dream, I had been given a hotel to run. The top two floors were mine to play with and live in. The suite occupied the top two floors of the hotel, and both floors were open plan, with wide panoramic windows along three sides, and rooms along the fourth side with corridors leading towards the interior, presumably for invited guests.

At the north end was a wide staircase connecting the upper and lower penthouse floors. The lower penthouse level was of a similar design to the upper floor, where I was. More panoramic windows, more rooms along the west side, more corridors.

There was a visitor. A child, no older than about ten. Apparently, she had wandered onto one of the penthouse elevators. She was fleeing from her uncle, who was a somewhat predatory party entertainer. Check suit and trousers, clown shoes, bow tie.

The dream ended with me telling the child to go into the panic room - I had the combination - and the creep warning me that he was somehow connected. Then I pushed him down the stairs.

The Seventh Suitor

This dream felt like something from the mind of F Scott Fitzgerald.

Her name was Lydia. She was petite, elfin, ethereal, blonde, with a smile men would kill for. We would bump into one another in formal galas, all tuxedoes and ball gowns. Lydia had a pack of six identical suitors in black tie hanging around her, all of them offering lighters to light her cigarette, but she would always detach herself from her cloud of pilot fish and swim across the ballroom to see me.

Tonight, she was wearing something gossamer, by the looks of it. That was all she had on, other than her usual white dress gloves, some jewels, and a smile. Draped her arm over my shoulder. Said "Let's go to the balcony."

So we went. It was cool out. Like me, she didn't notice. She said "I've been trying to catch your heart for some time. Come, join me."

I put my arm about her waist and said "Lydia, you know I'd love to do that. But I am not going to be your seventh suitor. You want me? Here I am ... your only suitor."

The alarm does go off at precisely the wrong moment.

Gravedigger

I was in my room, and I heard this weird crackling sound like a frying pan fire. It was coming from above, and when I looked up I saw one of these. It was two feet long. I managed to put it into a stacker - the kind of plastic box you put your clothes into. I brought it into the kitchen, but the beetle just made that weird crackling sound again, and ruptured the stacker in its bid to break free. It flew over to the fridge, and clung to the fridge door a moment. I opened the door out, and the beetle did not hesitate - it opened its wings and just flew through the door and out to freedom, making that crackling noise as it flew.

What Goes Around

I was a professional witness to a powerful Yakuza family based on Hawaii. For reasons absolutely unfathomable to me, an organised crime family needed me to be the witness to observe and confirm that the forms of Family justice had been properly observed, and punishment conducted in the proper manner.

I was accompanying the Oyabun's daughter, a young adult and already truly a member of her family. She was a machine, and I was entrusted to take care of her - not that she needed much caretaking, since she was a well-tempered killing machine, capable of handling any threat.

I witnessed as she cut off a man's little finger, with signet ring (not depicted, but worth more than double the price of the one illustrated above). She pulled off the ring, and disposed of it by catapulting it into the Pacific off the edge of a grassy, forested cliff. The finger was wrapped in a box and origami paper to be delivered to the Oyabun.

The Oyabun himself disposed of the boss of the nine-fingered man. For her crime of exposing the Family to the scrutiny of the authorities, the Oyabun took it upon himself to dispense justice in person, while sitting beside the boss.

She hardly felt the tanto slip between her ribs. The Oyabun might have been cutting fish to make sashimi, and there was hardly any blood on the blade when he handed it to me, wrapped in white silk, a single red spot spreading symbolically outward from the centre where the blade sat.

Lastly, her job done, the daughter remembered that she had a duty to perform, as well. We bowed deeply, mournfully, and then she calmly walked into a busy street and got run over by a bus.

It was a harrowing dream ... but it ended with superb irony, almost as if I were watching an episode of the Lenkov Hawaii Five-O reboot being played out as if on a screen. Steve and Danno had been taking some well-earned leave, and had gone out to sea to sink a few tins, shoot the breeze, and of course to catch some fish.

Steve landed a huge one; and it cut to later that evening, to where Steve was cutting up the fish to serve at a celebratory luau. He gutted the fish ... and the signet ring fell out onto his chopping board.

That concluded one of the oddest dreams I ever experienced.

Set Voice To Stun

I was at a SF convention, and the fans were out in force. I was an estabished author of science fiction books, and I'd started up some sort of book series about psychic agents in the far future.

The series was a tribute to the late James H Schmitz' Hub series, featuring an all-female cast of powerful agents, most notably Telzey Amberdon, a PSI 18 telepath: a true prodigy. My series was a homage to that, and it was set in my own shared universe.

So I was going up some stairs just off the main hall. Apparently, there were either more dealer rooms on the upper storey, or quarters for the guests. The stairs were brightly-lit, painted a creamy yellow, and there were crowds of students on the stairs.

I was on my way out when this drunken yahoo, looked like some sort of actor, came along and stood on the island halfway up the steps where they turn around, and began some sort of tirade at me about how science fiction was silly, made-up, kids' shit unfit for a proper consideration by the media, and how preposterous my ideas were.

I stood there a moment, as the moron actor went back to their stall. Then I just quietly went down the stairs. The young people on the stairs parted like the Red Sea to let me pass. They could see that I was pissed off mightily.

I found the halfwit's stall, and stood there, surrounded by his fans, and turned my voice volume to maximum.This is what I said ...

'Of all the asinine suggestions I have ever heard, the spurious claim that science fiction is an unworthy storytelling medium is the most absurd, the most specious, and the most lacking both in factual truth and necessary imagination.

'If it hadn't been for the incredible minds of authors such as Arthur C Clarke and Isaac Asimov, Mary Shelley and Ursula K LeGuin in imagining speculative futures, the world would be a far, far poorer place. People of all ages and genders got into solid, practical STEM careers on the back of science fiction.

'So many advances in engineering, space drives, robotics, artificial intelligence, medicine, biology, mathematics and technology only came about because some kid picked up a cheap pulp magazine, or read a book, or watched a show like Star Trek or Babylon 5, and dreamed of making their tech real - and then other kids saw their present day, and dared to dream of an even more wonderful future, and damn me again if more kids picked up those books or watched those shows, and wanted to make a future work for them, where there is BIPOC and ace and LGBT representation, and a Black woman can work on a Starship and not be a maid.

'Science fiction is the roadmap. STEM graduates are the travellers on the road, forging new roads, and don't you ever disparage a future of enfolding tech wonders that gave you your fucking job, you stultified wretch!'

I then turned to look at the absolutely silent hall. Every single face was turned to look at me as if I were wearing an octopus for a wig or something, but that's a dream for another day.

All I said at that point was to say 'Thank you for coming to my TED Talk,' followed by miming dropping a mic and walking out to thunderous applause.

I woke up at that point. I had to check to make sure I hadn't actually said any of that rant out loud in my sleep.

Moral Decision

I was tutoring a young girl in the ocarina. Her mother owned an occult store. We were all good friends, and she trusted me with the tutoring, mostly because I was (a) educational for the kid, (b) very good at tutoring.

I was in the store, buying a small crystal ball in a beautiful wooden case covered in a patterned fabric. The owner demanded £39.45, which I paid without hesitation because, you know, if you've got to dream, what's the point of dreaming of being broke?

I made my way home, and stopped halfway to drop in on the daughter. She offered to polish the crystal ball, and I waited.

And waited.

And waited.

It turned out that the kid was sitting on the thing, with no intention of handing it back to me, polished or unpolished. She then told me that she was going to phone her Mum and ask her if someone had stolen the crystal ball from her store.

So I picked up my own phone and called the mother instead. She rang the girl back and got her to let go of the item, at long last, so I could go home.

To my amazement, the girl turned up the following morning, on the stoop of my home - which basically looked like the railway station in town, only decommissioned and with the rails removed, and the land all around basically returning to grassland.

The girl turned up with her ocarina in hand, expecting me to tutor her.

I was faced with a moral choice, to forgive or to condemn. I forgave and told her to sit on the platform next to me, to begin the lesson.

When the mother called on me later, she asked me why I'd continued to give her daughter a lesson. I replied "One, I had a choice: if I'd cancelled all the lessons going forward, I'd have planted a bad memory in the daughter, one she would be looking back on and regretting the rest of her days. She might have done something rash on her way home, like throwing away her ocarina or even smashing it; and the kid showed a lot of promise, and I would not want to kill that creative spirit in her at the very time she was best poised to learn to be creative.

"Two, I didn't want to ruin her life like that. Not my place to be petty and vindictive.

"Three, the only person ever authorised to punish a child is the child's parent. Not my business to make the girl face the consequences of her mistake.

"Four ... I wanted to tell the girl a profound truth: all kids make mistakes. Most kids grow up in time and become adults, like me, like her mother ... but we never learn to not make mistakes, and in fact we make new mistakes, and bad things happen to both kids and adults even if we do not make mistakes, like rain or unexpected bills. The only difference being, we can all learn to love the rain, but only the adults worry about the bills, so that their kids never have to until they are adults, with kids of their own, and it'll be their turn to worry about the bills."

And on that note, the alarm sounded. I never got the mother's or the kid's reaction. But I hope I did well enough by them.

Ivy-Strewn Walls

I've had this dream before. It has never ended well.

In this dream, I'm part of a group hired to explore a mansion which has long been abandoned for unknown and mysterious reasons. Team A is exploring the interior; Team B, the exterior beyond the ivy-strewn walls, and my team, Team C, is exploring the grounds within the 40-foot walls.

My team has just completed our survey, with no answers, when one of the team says one of the most terrifying lines you will ever hear in any of my dreams.

'Hold on there. That's odd.'

General rule of thumb for my dreams. If I find it odd, it's generally going to be terrifying to everybody else.

The odd thing is a vertical crack in the western wall in the SW corner. It wasn't there before. By the time we get there, the crack has already opened out, and it turns out to be double gates, concealed by the ivy, opening inwards towards us.

Just beyond this set of gates is a broad set of forty stairs, leading up towards another wall way above us, and a set of huge double doors, apparently sealed shut. Probably with age.

Team A's leader, the overall leader of the mission, is busy within the interior. He instructs us over the walkie talkies to go up the stairs and see about trying to at least measure the doors, if not open them. I can't convey the scale of these doors enough - they are massive: you could fit two semi trucks through them, side by side, witn enough space for a third semi truck between them.

My team is almost at the top when Team B arrives at the foot of the stairs. Team B's leader looks up at us, and says this.

'I think you ought to come down from there. Don't go near that door. See, the thing is, we've gone all the way around the area outside these walls, and I can tell you that from the outside, there's no gates; no stairs, and certainly no big double doors.

'Just exterior walls, covered in ivy.'

At this point, there's a loud, deep clunk from the door. It's being opened from the other side ...

Laird of Hardnosed Ambition

I was attending a convention in another town. It was north of where I live - that was all I knew. It might have been Scotland. There were no landmarks to confirm, save that some of the walls looked like mediaeval fortifications.

I'd been in this place before - a dream I'd had a few months back. At that time, I was in the back of a taxi, trying to get to a castle - but the driver insisted on taking a long, circuitous route through crisscrossing streets laid out in an American square grid pattern like city blocks.

In this dream, I was at the castle, and I met a woman called Lorna. She had short, dark hair, an oval face, and she was just an inch or two shy of six feet. She said that she'd come to the convention to meet the guests, and she rattled off some former stars of Game of Thrones and one or two of the extras who'd turned up in Star Trek: Picard as XBs. The actors Isa Briones, Michelle Hurd, and Santiago Cabrera were named, which somehow made sense - if they had been there, chances are I'd have forked out the heavy pile of dosh to have booked this con.

I got the general impression that this fan-run media convention had cost me a pretty penny, and that for my money there were all sorts of guest perks available such as nice hotel gifts laid out for visitors - I'd snatched up all of their 1Tb thumb-sized flash drives and microSD cards, but I'd discreetly turned up my nose at the cigars and champagne.

It was the last day of the con, and delegates were given a short break of two hours between panel discussions to go out and visit the town. The guest celebrities had been whisked away on a short tour of the historic town, so there was little to do but to go out in the autumn sunshine.

Lorna came up to me and asked if I could join her. There was a part of the town she had always wanted to go to. It looked like a row of bungalows to me. I lost Lorna somewhere, and sat on a low wall opposite one of the bungalows to wait for her. A delegate of the hotel approached one of the flats, looked at me and said "I'm not sharing," and went in - there were two scantily-clad female models, sex workers whom I'd seen earlier at the convention, doing some sort of commercial cosplay as video game characters for a forthcoming console game.

Wondering where Lorna was, I rounded the corner and saw that just past these bungalow flats was a much posher part of town. And in the middle distance, I saw Lorna and a female friend chatting with some chap who was riding in a limo. He looked rich af, and Lorna looked around before she and her friend got in.

She never saw me, but there was no mistaking the look of hardnosed ambition. This was what she'd come to town for. The convention had been an excuse.

I tried to make my way back to the convention, but the shortcut involved scaling a low castle wall, and it didn't look like a part of the castle which was open to the public, so I walked the long way back. Besides, shortcuts in my dreams aren't - if I take them, I literally spend the rest of the dream wandering around and never get to my destination.

The dream skipped ahead. It was already the end of the convention, and guests were being given parting gifts. Apparently, I was checking out already, the bill having been settled - and they'd offered comp laundry, so my clothes for the con were fresh in their sack, washed and pressed and sealed up in those vacuum laundry bags for no extra cost.

The hotel lobby looked just lavish, decked out in a kind of medieval style, with the reception desk set between the entrance doors, facing into the lobby, meaning you'd have had to pass by the reception desk coming in or going out. I saw coats of arms on the front of the desk, but I couldn't tell if they were real heraldic coats of arms, or if they'd come from Game of Thrones or Harnworld.

I ended up taking two of those cigar cases home after all, as gifts to the few friends of mine who still smoke, but my bags were positively groaning with 1Tb flash drives and microSD cards worth hundreds of pounds. So I guess my time at the convention had been profitable for me, too.

And that was it.

I never wondered what happened to Lorna or her friend. A person with that kind of ambition and ulterior motives really has no place in my life.

Pic is unrelated, sort of.

Circus In My Head

In my dream last night, the staff of an entire three-ring circus wandered through my head.

I was in my home from a much older time. The Ringmistress arrived first, a handsome figure. She climbed up the stairs and waited at the top, then gestured for the rest of the performers to climb up the stairs.

The door to my room was opaque on the outside, but I could somehow see outside as if it were gauze. I saw the athletes, clowns, some jugglers, the sword swallower with her long swords, a fire eater and then a long parade of apparently topless women, wearing only shoes and sequinned shorts, holding their arms over their breasts. Then there were more clowns.

Everyone was heading further up the corridor, to where it made a right hand turn to head towards Mum and Dad's bedroom at the far end. I was wondering how that room could stand up structurally with so many people on it when the first of the circus' grey horses went by, with a juggler on him juggling clubs.

Then the circus' fortune teller somehow found her way into the room, and she was rifling through my occult books, critiquing me on my accumulated knowledge. I woke up at that point.

Rick Astley

I was a time traveller, ten thousand years into the future. Some enthusiastic historians led me into their Museum of Old Terra in order to attempt to verify the nature and function of various artefacts.

Their religion section listed various songs which they believed to be hymns in praise to various gods from my time, and one artefact was The Holy Disk - the last Rick Astley vinyl in existence. The historians had discovered that there was a pattern to the grooves, which they had resolved into music and, of course, the Great Hymn which demonstrated the unconditional loyalty of their god, Riqastli, to His followers:-

Never gonna give you up
Never gonna let you down ...

Then the historians took me around the corner to where they had the only known work of art depicting Riqastli ...

Apparently this was the only image they had of the man who was reputedly The Holiest Man To Have Ever Walked The Earth. So when they asked me if this was indeed their Riqastli, I had to say "That is indeed the image of The Holiest Man To Have Ever Walked The Earth."

One global holy war averted, I went back to my time machine. Society creates its gods in its own image. But their holiest gods never give you up, never let you down, never run around and desert you ...

Turbolifts

I was in charge of maintaining a fleet of lift cars capable of taking passengers to any part of some kind of shopping mall. These weren't like elevators, with only a lifetime of vertical movement within a single shaft - these were more like Star Trek's turbolifts, and they moved around within the mall, essentially travelling like monorail cars along a ceiling track from which the cars were suspended.

My job was to maintain the fleet. The problem was, the cars had been hacked. The contractor had done a cheapass job, and the control panels could be accessed by microUSB ports covered with tiny rubber caps, and even via Bluetooth. Nobody told anyone that the panels had Bluetooth, and that all of them were on all the time.

Some schoolkid had hacked the entire fleet, and half of the cars were sending members of the public to random locations, particularly if the passengers in the cars were kids whom the hacker didn't like.

The fleet comprised forty cars. 27 of them were in service, ten were undergoing maintenance, and three had vanished. It turns out that the kid had discovered three ghost stations on the turbolift network, opening onto underground areas of the mall which had never been opened but which had been reserved for times of national emergency. The hacker had sent three of his worst enemies on a neverending trip cycling between these dark, half-forgotten stations, traumatised.

I got up at 5am. As far as I can tell, those poor kids are still down there.

Flying Dream

Flight dreams don't come that often, but they're always joyful.

This one felt personal. Imagine returning to your childhood home, and finding that you're a couple of decades early because you're looking at the home as it once was, before the surrounding council houses and residences. Back when it was just a lonely old house atop a sloping garden, all fields.

What made it a flight dream was my cloak. I wore a cloak made of a black material which could stretch either side of me on a thought, becoming wings which generated lift. I was walking down the bottom road, a broad but rutted old highway. Calling upon the cloak, I began to fly up along the old field towards the house, flying no more than about five or so metres above the grass until I reached the house.

When I landed, the owner came out to meet me. His wife watched from a first storey window, petrified - she had seen me flying towards the house.

I explained that I will grow up in the old place - just that, for some reason unknown to me, I hadn't even been born yet. I was a traveller through time, and I had no idea how I'd come to be in this period, so early in the house's history.

I didn't tell him that he would be gone from the place by the 1970s, and that we would be the very next owners. I didn't need to tell him his future. I think his missus may have guessed.

The one thing I did do was to show to the owner that I could fly. I extended the cloak, took off, rose to around ten metres, followed the curvature and slope of the field, then took up a thermal and rose to a few hundred metres until I caught the local jet stream, then I just sped off towards the east a few minutes.

I told him that it would take about half an hour for me to get back, once I disengaged from the jet stream. I was right. and by the time I got back, a storm cloud was closing in from the east, lightning flashing overhead. I landed back on the grounds of the old place, and the owner asked me why I'd chosen to land early. I informed him that the air was about to get blustery - as I spoke, the wind picked up, proving me right.

The dream ended just as the old man invited me in to spend the night. I have no idea what he'd have thought of me, or my 21st century sensibilities. Or my weird occult creed. Or the things I had seen, in the years to come.

Oliver Haddo

Aleister Crowley had the honour of leing parodied, albeit negatively, by three well-known contemporary authors: W Somerset Maugham, to whom he was Oliver Haddo in "The Magician;" Dennis Wheatley, who portrayed him as Mocata in "The Devil Rides Out;" and M R James, who cast Crowley as the karcist Karswell in "Casting The Runes."

In every case, Crowley was savagely demonised as a lecherous, hateful, spiteful, petty charlatan and a sexually-deviant monster.

Bear in mind that Crowley was open about his bisexuality, at a time when it was considered illegal, may you burn in hell Queen Victoria, but that was enough in those pre-Wolfenden days to give authors licence to paint him as a literal and metaphorical anthropomorphised Satan on Earth.

And that was how I felt in this morning's dream.

The venue was a hotel carvery, like the one on the ground floor of the Manchester Hilton, which I had the pleasure of visiting in '16.

In my dream, which was set at a convention, I was picking my breakfast from the carvery's breakfast buffet, and I noticed things like the women staring at me, then looking away with a cocked snoot if I glanced in their direction; a young man coming up to the young woman right in front of me in the queue, whispering and pointing at me, causing the woman to turn around, gasp, and abandon her tray; and a father loudly ordering his kids to stand behind him.

In the end, I ate alone, feeling like Oliver Haddo and Aleister and Boris Balkan from The Ninth Gate, feeling people staring at me as if I were smoking a cigar indoors or wearing a gimp suit or something. They all felt like people who had, perhaps deliberately, misinterpreted everything I stood for in life and turned it around, so I looked like the manifestation of all of their petty evils and prejudices.

But could I tell them that they were wrong, and they could all go fuck themselves? I guess I'll never know, because the alarm went off right at the worst part of the dream.

Shelter from The Storm

The proper name for this level crossing is the Croesnewydd North Fork level crossing. The signal box is the white building on the left. Presumably, the cottage on the opposite side of the rail would have belonged to an old fashioned signalman, back in the day.

This town and the rails have a long history. However, history is not what I dream of, when I come across this place in my dreams.

This railway crossing feels like a natural border. Everything beyond the crossing is outside of town, Terra Incognita.

This morning, I woke up within the dream and realised that I had been using an abandoned shack as shelter against a storm during the night. It was still raining, and the thunder was angry and loud.

I also realised that the first trains of the day were about to come along, so I had to get out of the shack quickly, before I was spotted.

Don't freak - it turns out that there had been a real storm last night.

However, I woke up for real back in my own bed.

First Class

There's this thing where my friend and I, both X-Men fans, occasionally swap fanfics. My favourite is when I'm tasked with writing a fanfic where I meet Emma Frost.

This morning's fun dream sent me into the final scene of X-Men: First Class.

Moi: I know we've had our differences.

Emma Frost: Where's your telepath friend?

Moi: Gone. Left a bit of a gap in my life, if I'm to be honest. I was rather hoping you would fill it. [glances at my team in the cell entrance] Join us.

Emma Frost: Alex, I believe.

Moi: I prefer ... Spiral.

Home and Obey

For some reason, I was invited back by the Home & Away staff to come back to the show, reprising my rogue Welsh hypnotist character. There have been some cast changes since the last time I had this dream, and a lot of them had never been tranced before, but I got the entire cast tranced just like last time.

The rest of the show had had Willow, one of the newcomers, having joined the year after my hypnotic shenanigans, looks up at the house on the hill which I'd bought in 2016 in cash, and John and Marilyn's attempts to deflect her, before they revealed that I'd given them the keys and told them to look after the place till I got back, with a regular payment sent to them to take care of maintenance and for their service.

All this had already just been shot before it was my turn to drop in, coming out of a bus with my cases beside me, camera panning up my nice suit to focus on my eyes as I whisper 'I'm baaaack ...'

Next time on Home & Away: I wander into my house, catch Willow there, and trance her (as in, the actual actress who plays her) without even breaking a sweat. The last words before the credits roll come from me looking at the woman with her eyes closed, deeply entranced, and saying 'Now what am I going to do with you?'

Party Monster

I was with one of my lovers at a party. I knew that my lover was into poly relationships, and I was happy to give her that space she needed. This was by arrangement, and I was happy that she was finding so much love in her life.

However, this party made me feel uncomfortable as hell, because while everybody in the party was somebody she knew, none of them knew who I was - and I didn't know anybody else either.

There were pairings, couplings, and one tall blonde approached me, shook her head, and made a beeline for a coupling which became a threesome. That blonde looked like a supermodel.

I looked at the person who'd invited me to the party. She was preoccupied. So I made sure she was all right, and headed on out. On the way out, the tall blonde referred to me as "that monster" in passing to one of her partners.

The following morning, I was sitting at one of the outside tables in a cafe, having coffee and a croissant, and my lover came and sat with me. She came to apologise for her blonde friend's outrageous behaviour at the party. She'd picked the friends specifically for the event, hoping that the blonde would appeal enough to me to keep me at the party while she enjoyed the company of the two old lovers she hadn't seen in years.

Obviously, she hadn't picked her friends carefully enough.

The blonde came along, at that point, and sat down beside us at the table, but I can't tell you what would have happened next because the alarm went off.

Arena

It was past midnight, and I was either chasing someone or being chased - the details were vague on that score.

I was running in a tree-filled park east of where my folks live. In the real world, there is a small park where this park is, but this one bore no resemblance to the real world one.

There were stone steps leading down, and they came to an abrupt halt at a circular pit, carved into the ground. The pit was a couple of hundred feet across and some forty feet deep, with a leaf-lined floor. In the real world, this would not exist, and there'd be a long lake here instead.

Surrounding this pit were many old trees. Apparently, this natural arena had an audience - younger people, kids, young adults, wearing mostly rags. Apparently they lived in the area, staying out of the way of the cops.

I stood on the flat floor of this pit, and the locals dropped rope ladders down and clambered down to join me. Their leader, a pretty young woman, warned me that the cops were on their way already, and that if I was to evade them and live another night, I had to climb up one of the rope ladders and get into the trees.

It seemed that the cops on the ground were incapable of looking up, apparently. And the tree cover apparently masked our IR signatures, the noises we made, and even our scents from the dogs.

Halfway up, I could hear people approaching in a hurry, beating at the undergrowth. I could see the waving columns of light from handheld flashlights.

And the alarm went off.

Recruitment Drive

It has been a while since I had a dream to write about here, but this one was fun.

So there's this cafe in the bus station. It's a nice place. I was sitting at one of the tables, and two young women were sitting beside me.

I managed to catch their attention. They seemed interested in me. I didn't talk about me at all. Maybe that was it.

Just out of curiosity, I told them I knew of a little trick. They'd seen fidget spinners before, but they weren't prepared for a fidget spinner hypnosis induction, with the spinner acting as a spiral.

So I set it spinning while the women watched. I let them know that as the blades of the spinner slowed, their minds would also slow; and when the blades stopped, so too would their minds, and they'd drop into trance.

And that was exactly what they both did, gazing at my fidget spinner.

So I instructed them that I would bring them out of trance shortly, only they'd feel a bit of a pull to go back into a trance, like a weight drawing their minds down, and also I told them to forget that they'd seen the spinner in my hand, and it would be as if I was showing them my spinner for the first time.

When they came back, I could see that they were slightly less alert than they had been before. They seemed surprised when I brought out my magic fidget spinner, and sank straight back into trance without hesitation, deeper than the first time.

This time, when I brought them out, the pull to go back into trance was even stronger. their eyelids were half open. This time, they reacted as if they hadn't seen a fidget spinner before in their lives. Trancing them was so easy; you could have just snapped your fingers and they'd have gone down.

So I fractionated them a fourth time; and this time, they responded to the world as if they were on morphine. This time, when I put them into a trance, I knew that they would not be coming out of it until I was done giving them instructions.

Which I did.

I made sure to give them an anchoring trigger, to drag them right back into a deep trance with a single word; and a couple of other triggers to enjoy. Then I brought them up out of trance, with no memory or awareness of having been in a trance, and they came back into the room as if only a few seconds had passed.

One of them got up. She was apparently off home. I activated one of the triggers. Instead of going home, she headed over to the store next door, and came back with a lighter and a packet of cigarettes. This apparently shocked her friend, since the woman didn't smoke. Neither did she, but when I activated her calibrating trigger she, too, went into the store to come out with something she'd never normally buy.

I told them they could smoke them outside, and they got up to come with me. Both of them had kind of forgotten that they had intended to go home.

The alarm went off, just as they were climbing into the back of a taxi with me.

Salvation

I found myself waiting for someone in a public place. Apparently, I was waiting for the Italian Cultural Attache.

The Attache turns up, immaculately dressed, and I greeted him, apparently dressed in my ordinary street clothes. The Attache behaved as if nothing was out of the ordinary.

The Attache had come to me out of courtesy. I'd been asking about gaining access to historical documents about Florence in Italy, and he'd been smoothing the bureaucratic process and unruffling a few feathers.

And then he asked me "You said you had brought along a plus one."

I looked around, and there she was. Jodie Whittaker, the actress. Naked, apart from heels and a matching handbag. She stood alongside me and lit up a cigarette.

Sometimes, my dreams are my only salvation from terminal boredom.

Bookshop

I was on my way home from some event taking place in another town, dragging a heavy suitcase behind me. I had more than an hour to go before my train home.

The front of the railway station was a huge, imposing building in a classical style, at the end of a large and busy courtyard. I noticed some stores near the entrance, including a second-hand bookshop, so I wandered in and took a look around.

It turned out to be a treasure trove. Under the counter was a single Loompanics issue of the Principia Discordia. Across the room, languishing in a clearance bin at 20p each, multiple copies of Zohra Greenhalgh's books Contrarywise and Trickster's Touch; copies of Peter J Carroll's Liber Null & Psychonaut; and a single copy of Joanne Harris' book The Gospel of Loki.

On the shelf awaiting clearance, under heavy discount, a complete Encyclopedia Harnica and every Harnlore, lovingly maintained and kept in magazine binders. Several copies of Harnworld articles were also present, including a few not in my collection.

I woke up before the dream ended, but I had the impression that I would have boarded the train home with my suitcase stuffed with books, and the bookseller would have wondered what to do with a small pile of clothes that somebody had dumped on the pavement outside his store.

The Big Job

So the dream I had was just full of celebrity actors. Carel Struycken, Ed Wasser (who'd played "Mister Morden" in Babylon 5), Adrianne Palicki, Adrienne Barbeau, Angela Lansbury, Mark Ralston, Deep Roy, and the late Ron Glass, all running around in my dream like one hilarious episode of Murder, She Wrote.

There was an Oceans Eleven - style con job to liberate a very large deposit of cash which included some of Jessica Fletcher's savings, hence Angela turning up here and there. Adrienne (Barbeau) was a "reporter," "Anita Smith"; Ed Wasser was "Dr Morris," handing out the sedative injections as a "fever" swept a bank courtesy of a drug being slipped into the food and drinks by Carel Struycken's character "Temperance."

My dream never made it clear why the staff and security were eating and drinking in a bank. Shush. My unconscious was on a roll here.

Ron Glass was typecast as "Father Carmody," actually "Jim "The Gecko" Harrison" because of his sticky fingers (he was a pickpocket, not a second-storey man). Adrianne (Palicki) was both Wasser's assistant "Nurse Rowley" and "Anita Smith's" unnamed camera person, and she was apparently a former quick-change artiste, and if that gave you an image of Adrianne Palicki naked, feel free to indulge.

It all turned out to be a beautifully-orchestrated scheme to murder someone. Deep Roy, who'd appeared in the dream here and there, was an author whose stories had been cruelly rejected by an editor, "Larry Butler" (Ralston), who then went and plagiarised Deep Roy's character's book. "Butler" knew that Deep Roy's character was not very tall, but did not suspect that Struycken's character "Temperance" was, in fact, the author's brother, and who'd fed "Butler" drinks from a glass which had been smeared with a trace of peanut butter, knowing that "Butler" had a lethal peanut allergy.

I got as far as Jessica Fletcher nabbing Deep Roy's character, but not apparently in time to save any of the other characters, whose murders he'd arranged after they'd stolen the money: apparently, he'd sprayed the notes with a contact poison, which killed all the swindlers once they came into contact with the now-lethal money.

And I guess I learned something here today. "There is no profit in revenge," or maybe "J Michael Straczynski, please get out of my fucking head."


Image of Jessica Fletcher from Murder, She Wrote (Angela Lansbury)
from Pinterest

Snack

So I dreamed that I was on the top floor of some sort of public area - it could have been a mall, or a museum. There was a big stairwell that curved around in a spiral, at least six or seven storeys going down.

Mum and Dad were with me, and they'd given me a snack: Mediterranean style fried red peppers and sun dried tomatoes, chopped fine and sandwiched between two Jacob's Cream Crackers. I'd taken a bite, and I heard this screech.

I looked across, and it was apparently Theresa May, screaming at me for eating something - the first thing I'd eaten in eighteen hours. Apparently, I was letting her down by breaking a fast which she'd been organising for me and several others, to lose weight, which frankly was news to me.

So as I watched, Theresa May rushed down the stairs, still screaming, and she was honestly having a nervous breakdown, going by the sounds of her, all because I dared to be eating some actual food.

I can't tell you what my snack tasted like, because the alarm went off. But I imagine it would have tasted scrumptious.


Not cricket.

Room 2156

Convention time, and I had been given the access fob to the room at the hotel which was the venue for the convention. I'd come down to check out the hotel, and then decided to come back to the room to put my stuff away, since I'd just dumped it all inside the room.

I always get the elevator at the back. There are two, in the middle of a long corridor, basically the hotel's east and west wings. I was in the east wing.

A woman entered the elevator car in front of me. I got in, and checked my fob. It was not on the twelfth floor; it was room 2156. 21st floor.

I got out of the elevator, and the corridor was dimly-lit and almost silent. I could hear voices coming from the rooms. 2156 was a long way away, down along the corridor to the right, around the corner and the next, and more or less heading back in a westerly direction towards the end of the corridor. 2156 was right at the end, near the steps.

This part of the hotel was silent - it didn't sound as if there was anybody there at all. 2156 was on my right. I came in, and my stuff was right where I'd left in in the room. It looked a bit bare, but then I realised that this was just the vestibule - that there was a corridor off to the left. I went down the corridor, carrying my stuff. There was a big panoramic window on my left, and I could see the other wing of the hotel, curving around like a blocky C, embracing the hotel complex far below.

The short corridor opened out into a larger room, with a big panoramic window looking out at the city, a patio, and the bed area behind a curved wall. Beside the bed was a coffee table, and on that table were all sorts of fun toys: some of those military flashlights with a million lumen output that they advertise in all the spam, and sixteen tiny thumbnail - sized flash drives. I checked the capacity listed on their sides.

Four terabyte capacity. Each.

Not only that - the flashlight had a cap which, when unscrewed, revealed a USB plug and a flash drive with a 16 Tb capacity. "I'll 'ave that," I found myself saying.

So behind this partitioning curved wall was the dresser and some drawers, presumably for socks and underwear. I opened the drawers, looking for somewhere to put my fundaments, and discovered boxes stuffed with more of these tiny flash drives, 4 Tb and 8 Tb capacity. Dozens of them per box. Stacks of boxes. So I just found space for them all in my holdall and packed the lot of them into that.

Then I vowed to go shopping in town during the convention and buy myself another holdall for the spare flashlights, mobile phone battery packs, chargers, and even a couple of fleshlights in the bottom drawer - with a full range of attachments.

The alarm went off before I could do more than absentmindedly wonder whether this room was normally reserved for A-list celebs and their entourages or something. This was one dream where I really wish that I had the superpower of being able to bring material objects into the waking world from my dreams.

Alien War

What do you do when you are caught on a bus when it turns into the latest battlefield between two covertly invading alien species, who have independently chosen the Earth as theirs?

Not much, apparently. Wake up in a cold sweat, in my case.

I was on a bus. It was the end of a chase. I was looking around, and every passenger was looking at me with cold, empty, unemotional, alien eyes. The Body Snatchers had run me to ground at last.

One of the aliens had boarded the bus, which was parked on the side of the road. I knew her. She handed me two sleeping pills, and told me to take them. In front of me, two of the passengers had brought forward a pod.

'Just take these two pills, and all your worries will be over,' she said to me.

I looked at the pills in my hand. 'I'd like that,' I replied, 'but there's a problem. I'm not sure if you're aware, but the Earth is already under attack by a terrifying alien species, and it isn't you. It too is a species which duplicates its host - but this species does so directly, by assimilating the tissues of the body, down to the cellular level, starting with the living blood.'

By now, some of the myrmidons on the bus had spotted what I had already seen. Some of them were pointing. One of them was howling like Donald Sutherland at the end of the 1978 Body Snatchers movie.

I didn't want to turn to look at the unfolding body horror behind me. I caught a glimpse of a face, its skin drawn beyond breaking point, splitting open to reveal red musculature beneath, and an alien sibilant hiss drowning out the myrmidons' howls.

'I think the tissues of some of your pods have been colonised by this other species,' I said, as the Thing climbed out of the driver's seat. 'You've been denying them valuable assets, stifling their colonisation efforts. And they don't like that.'

I looked down, feeling my arm lengthen. 'It looks as if you've just bought yourself a war.'

At that moment, I woke up. And of course, my first instinct was to check my arm. To my disappointment, it was its normal length, and ended in its usual hand and fingers. I'd been looking forward to getting a functional tentacle.

And yes, I was on the side of the Things. When faced with a choice, go with the least human option. Less cruelty.

Go Bag

My go bag containing everything I need for when I'm staying away from home. It's a large blue zipped holdall, it weighs a ton, but it's a burden I am always happy to bear.

I live in that go bag while I'm travelling. Everything stays in that go bag, because you never know when I might have to pull the ripcord and leave in a few minutes - or even a few seconds.

So I found myself in very familiar surroundings. I was squatting in the Remote Town Landlord's place again. It is this sort of a bungalow, a sprawling building in its own grounds, surrounded by neighbours' houses in a residential part of Remote Town. I woke up, looked out of the window at a neighbour's house, and I realised that I was naked. It was a bright, sunny morning, but it was early, so nobody was awake next door yet.

And then I heard a powered gate opening, and I realised that the landlord was coming back. All my clothes were laid out, and I put them on sharpish and got out before his car could come around the corner. I knew the alarm code and where he hid his house key; it had been ages since I'd been here, but he'd not changed his pattern at all.

One thing had changed. He was on his own now. No sign of the wife and kid from the last time I'd squatted in his place.

I have no idea when I will be coming back here, or whether I'll be expecting to see the landlord glaring at me, or the locks changed, or even the police. My dreams here are weird, sometimes.

State of Emergency

So I was in town, specifically in an area of town called Hill Street. At the top of Hill Street is a bank on the corner, some stores on the opposite side, and what used to be the old Boots chemist till they moved out to somewhere out of town. There is also an alley between buildings.

Not in my dream.

In this dream, the bank was there, but where there's a greasy spoon cafe there was an entrance to some sort of subterranean baths. I went down a flight of spiral stone steps that looked to date back to Roman times, and saw three burly men in swimming trunks, discussing business as they trod the glowing blue waters.

Where the alley was, instead there was a covered mall and rows of small shops on either side. The alley had the same dogleg shape, but it was darker, and the glass panels overhead were grimy from years of neglect.

Just past the alley, unexpectedly there was a bright shop, with its entrance doors wide open and people milling about in the street outside. I spoke with the manager, a nice-looking chap in a dark suit. Looked a bit young to be a manager, but there you go. He sounded inexperienced, too, but he was learning.

I heard the sound of people pounding on metal. I looked back, and I saw that the mall shutters had closed. The manager listened to the pounding and said "Get out onto the street before the outer doors close."

Outside, the crowds were gathering, confused. I wandered down to the Island Green shopping estate, through more crowds. It was cold. Rain was starting to fall.

Then I got a text, and opened my mobile phone. The text read "Please stand by. At 13:30, check your phones for an urgent message."

It was 13:29. As I watched, the time changed to 13:30 and a new text came in. It read "Telephone and internet services are now suspended due to a national state of emergency. Please stand by." The crowd began to react with shock, fear and outrage, but I got a call.

It was a clipped military voice calling me by name. I answered. It asked to confirm my location and asked me to move to an open space.

There was a helicopter overhead. And soldiers drove up in a large truck bearing military colours and markings, and asked me to get into the chopper when it landed. I saw a Colonel inside the darkened interior of the chopper, and a lot of women soldiers manning consoles on either side.

And that was it.

The Machines

Never had such an insane dream before. It felt like being inside a full movie.

I was part of a human enclave, one of the last left on Earth in some post-apocalyptic science fiction story. Very Twelve Monkeys / Terminator in its feel. I got the impression that the movie had begun some time ago, and I’d only just tuned in.

There were people out there manning ridiculously large guns against these oncoming SIs, but you might as well try and stop the tide. The dream began with me staring down the barrels of one of those advanced guns. The gun was complex, reconfigurable, beautiful to watch, the barrels changing around like spirals, the ammo chains like a thick umbilicus stretching all the way back to the enclave proper.

Apparently, I could channel spirits and even machine spirits. I could channel spirits at will, and I had but to concentrate on any slip of paper bearing the name of a person to channel their thoughts.

I felt myself getting possessed by a machine spirit, and apparently a friendly one; but the link was severed unexpectedly and I woke up lying on the floor.

Another time, I was channelling the ghost of the inventor of the machines, called SIs, which were coming for humans - the reason why we were living in these enclaves, because they'd already wiped most of the rest of humanity out. All the major cities were gone.

The next human spirit I was channelling told me that her enclave was being run over by two Sis, one babbling about purity, another one about heritage. Then the voice fell silent.

In every case, I felt myself channelling those voices, like someone in a trance.

I never saw the SIs, but I just woke up wondering where the hell I was and found myself hearing that little voice I’d heard before, one of the machine voices, saying “Where else? You’re at the start.”



Picture from Forbes

Consciousness

I can't remember much about what I dreamed this morning - I was among a crowd of people, it was dark, it was icy cold, and people were drawing big blankets through a ditch filled with water and throwing them onto a pile, presumably to freeze into some sort of structure of iced-up blankets. There might have been a shelter beneath that pile, something that had been dug into the almightily cold ground.

Like a blanket igloo, fashioned like a papier mache sculpture only with blankets of ice instead of newspaper strips soaked in glue.

But one line stuck out from that dream - something somebody said to me, paraphrasing Bulwer-Lytton.

E.G. Bulwer-Lytton once said "Art and Science have their meeting point in Method."

But this person's line to me was this.

"Experience and Perception have their meeting point in Consciousness."

"Experience" refers to one's engrams, one's collection of rules - one's natural organic knowledge base of physical and emotional responses and reactions. "Perception" refers to the stimuli of one's senses, which trigger specific patterns of engrams to activate their coded behaviours. The two coming together produce a set of behaviours which the mind interprets as Consciousness.