Just like a dream

 I had such a lovely dream last night I hope you won't mind if I share it here.  Because it featured Robert Smith*!

Before you ask – no, it wasn’t that kind of dream.  But it was incredibly feelgood, and there is nothing quite like waking up after having a particularly pleasant dream, instead of either just a nonsense one, or worse - an unsettling or frightening one.  The emotions we feel in our more vivid reveries often seem to linger on the following day, just like an actual experience would and again, much like in real life, there’s great pleasure to be had in actively revisiting the good ones in our minds to keep those feelings alive.

So, in the dream, Robert Smith was a lovely old pal from my college days.  And I was back at some art school, within a big campus area, walking about in the sunshine waiting to meet up with some mates and go to a gig, when this (young) Robert appeared out of the blue.  He just put his arm around my shoulder as he fell into step with me and a warm, easy, lovely conversation ensued throughout the rest of this sweet unconscious flight of fancy as we wandered around together on a soft Summery day.  There was music as well – meeting up with the DJ who was going to do the set before the gig and who played us a few previews of his record choices, all of which were completely imagined and yet I heard them vividly, as real songs.  I wish I could recall the tunes, they were good; I remember lots of fuzzy guitars and a lively bass.  Do you ever dream up music in your sleep too?  If only we could record it!

“I’m definitely going to treat myself to Three Imaginary Boys”, I announced as I remembered the dream this morning (and then giggled at the ambiguity of what I'd just said…)     But it was just that I had bought and loved TIB soon after it was released many years ago and, somehow, like many other albums I’d owned in my teens, it had been replaced by something else I’d subsequently decided I’d listen to more.   Now I have a hanker to own it again and to keep it forever this time.  I find myself doing this more and more with the music I loved so much in my formative years but later let go.  As has often been said I’m sure, it goes much deeper than just the music - it’s about the feel of the time, the associations, youthful memories, identity, growing up… so much more, all of this wrapped up in 12” of vinyl and some idiosyncratic cover art.   

Anyway, thanks Robert, for inadvertently turning up in my head last night and being one imaginary boy in that dream.  It really was lovely to see you!

The Cure: 10.15 Saturday Night

 *I know why he featured – we’d been watching a repeat of ToTP in the evening on which he was playing keyboards with Siouxsie & the Banshees for ‘Swimming Horses’ (excellent to see again).  Plus just a few days beforehand Martin had posted the perennially charming Love Cats on his excellent blog…

Behind the wall of sleep

If I ever win something on the Lottery (unlikely, I don’t do it), or come into some inheritance (unlikely, no-one still around with anything to leave), or you're a generous philanthropist reading this now (lovely to meet you!) – there's something, not too out-of-this-world, I'd just like to do.

It's fairly modest: a kind of art project - travelling around Europe photographing windows.  Not any old windows, though; I know what I’m looking for - ones that, soon as I notice them, have a strange, déjà-vu effect, as if I’ve been on the inside of them, looking out.  I’ll be out of harm’s way, in the open air, but I’ll know that, on the other side of their small, dirty panes, up high and out of reach (always up high), all manner of unspoken danger and supernatural wickedness lurks.  I'll know because I’ve been behind these windows many times, in dreams.

The recurring theme (probably a common one?) is that I’m wandering through a building – often an old house with paneled walls and narrow staircases, like you see in creepy 1940s films, but sometimes they're industrial or 1970s office blocks – and I go higher and higher.  Everything's fine until I step into the very top room or space with that window, and then I feel ‘the malevolent presence’.   Sometimes I'm trapped, peering out at a normal world I can't get to.  I never see the source of my fear, just sense something very sinister in the room.  I'm sure a psychoanalyst would have an explanation.  I might not want to hear it, mind.

Anyway, maybe I'd overcome these disturbing dreams by capturing the physical image of the windows themselves? It would be great just to have enough freedom and funds to go travelling with a cool high-tech camera (once I've learned how to use it)  and then I could click away to my heart's content (in between eating linguine in Tuscany and visiting the Louvre in Paris. Perks of the job).  Let me know if you fancy doing the driving.

I s'pose that's what dreams are for, the daydreams anyway... that's where things start, tho' in this case it started with nightmares.

I'm unlikely to have time/money to fully indulge in something pointless like this, though. Who does?  It's a shame, isn't it -  all the things we might do if only we could just suspend normal life for long enough and take off with no other concerns.  Not major life changes or ambitions, just 'projects' - things that really are possible, but need a bit more than you have.

Meanwhile then, I took a short stroll locally (before I sprained my ankle!) and found a few high windows, the best I could do with limited time, anyway.  Here are just three crappy, furtive pics to try and show what I mean.  (I had to tell the owner of one that I was photographing a bird on his roof as I didn’t want to let him in on the unspeakable paranormal malevolence in his attic.)

Are they a bit creepy, or is it just me?  I mean, just imagine yourself, trapped behind them, where no-one can hear you scream....

Don't be misled by the pretty gable around that spooky top window 

Even the alarm won't protect from the evil presence in that attic room

The tiny ancient window up there on the left
offers no escape from the terrifying ghosts within

What we get up to when we're not there

(before the new hairstyle)

Rylan Clark has grown his hair long and dyed it a rather fetching shade of aubergine. Or is it burgundy? I don't know but it's very shiny and sleek; it looks like nylon. Or doll's hair. Or perhaps doll's hair IS nylon. Anyway, I only know this because I met him the other day when I went to some launch event thingy at a local university. He was kind enough to escort me from Reception across the grounds to the main hall and I was struck by how genial he was and wonderfully easy to talk to. It was like we'd known each other for years. We were getting along so swimmingly that he put his arm around me as we walked and I can still recall the soft feel of the loose-knit cream jumper he was wearing. His arms were so long that his left one looped right around then up under my armpit and at one point he... well... I suppose, had it been anyone else, like a straight man doing it without my permission, I might have used the term, “touched me up” or maybe “copped a feel”. And it would've been a very different scenario. But somehow, it just wasn't like that. It was a kind of comforting and chummy “cupping” instead. Dare I say, enjoyable?

Nothing particularly memorable happened at the venue after that but I arrived home in the afternoon and noticed from the kitchen window that Mr SDS was outside, hanging up the washing. For some reason, he wasn't using the normal line; instead he'd erected one of those rotary airers. I didn't think we had room for one at the bottom of the garden but I was obviously mistaken. I walked down to greet him and was somewhat confounded to see that, having pegged out all the pillowcases, he was now hanging up the suet cakes for the birds. There must have been about twenty of these at least, all suspended from the cords on the airer itself, so that they actually hung right against the clean laundry.  Only it was, of course, now no longer clean - instead every item was encrusted with hundreds of little spatters of white fat. One half of me was delighted that he should be putting out the bird food (that's usually my domain) – and so much of it too! - but the other half was appalled at his choice of where to place it.   Very unlike him. “What are you doing?!” I called out, my surprise matched only by my annoyance. I never got to hear his reply. I opened my eyes slowly and the light filtered in, accompanied by sounds too, the sounds of the morning... a distant song thrush, tyres on the road, the whirring of the central heating pump as it stirred into life. I lay there and reminisced. Rylan Clark copping a feel!

I know nobody ever really wants to hear or read about someone else's weird dreams (unless they're in them, so Rylan may be interested) but in the absence of anything meaningful or riveting to say here at the moment, I'm afraid that's what you have.

She goes in and out and in and out...

Last night I had this dream in which I was playing, of all the most unlikely things, an accordion.  I'd forgotten about it completely until I was flitting around the interwebs this morning and quite by chance I came across an article about, of all the most unlikely things, accordions.  "Ooh, what a weird coincidence!  I've just broken my dream!" I gasped, and went on to explain to Mr SDS how spookily odd it seemed that I should both dream about and read about, in the space of just a few hours, and of all the most unlikely things, accordions.

 "No, it was the Johnnie Allen song" he replied.

Ah... my memory is so short sometimes.  Last night, before I'd gone to bed, we'd been going through some music archives not heard in a long time, and it included Johnnie Allen's cover of Chuck Berry's 'Promised Land'.  It's a great song, isn't it?  And it has a very notable accordion break in it.   Of course...

Still, it was weird to be playing the accordion in a dream.

An accordion

A typewriter

The Dentists

I must have been grinding my teeth or something but last night I had a dental dream.  For some reason I can't work out, the actor Eddie Marsan was the one doing the drilling.  Not a  benign, smiley Eddie Marsan but a very sinister, cold (and still smiley - which is even more sinister) one.  If you saw him play the sociopath hitman 'Sunshine' in the comedy drama 'Grass' by Andrew Collins and Simon Day a few years back - that was who he was.  A fucking hitman dentist!

"Open wide"

He shoved metal implements down my throat which nearly choked me and I also remember that he took advantage of my submissive position on the horizontal chair for an inappropriate grope of my wobbly bits.  I expect you're glad I used the word 'inappropriate' there...

Then he buggered off as it was 5.30pm apparently, and told me that his assistant would carry on.  I looked across the room to see who that lucky person might be and it was the bloke from up the road who fixed our gutters last year.  "Is he a qualified dentist, then?" I asked, somewhat appalled - although it probably came out as, "Ith e a ollyied ehhitht theh?" to which the reply from sinister, cold, smiley Sunshine was, "No but dentists don't need to be qualified these days, anyone can do it".  And then, thank god, I woke up. Dribbling.

But the dream suddenly reminded me of the band The Dentists, whom I once saw live back in the '80s and who, incidentally, had a song called 'I Had An Excellent Dream'...

Bruce & I

“I had one of those dreams last night,” I said to Mr SDS this morning. Yes, one of those dreams - you know the kind I mean. “It was with, oh, Bruce whatsisname,” I explained. We then went through a number of Bruces with whom I'm very glad I didn't do unspeakable things in my slumber:

“Bruce Dickinson?”

Ugh no, not him with that histrionic voice!  That would have made me run to the hills.

“Bruce Forsyth?”

Cue countless catchphrases leading to innuendo overload:
Nice to see you, to see you...
Give us a twirl!
You get nothing for a pair!
Higher... Lower...

"Bruce Lee?  Bruce Springsteen?  Bruce Willis?"

But no, it was none of the above, thankfully. It was, you know, the one who made 'Withnail & I'... Bruce Robinson. I've no idea why he turned up in my dream but I don't mind admitting that I'm glad he did - far better than Ricky Gervais, whom I've had twice, for some bizarre reason.  But Bruce Robinson - such a talented, witty, edgy and really rather gorgeous man, I'm sure you'd agree. Apart from being a fan of his first film - who isn't?! -  I also enjoyed his cameo role in 'Still Crazy' about the fictional band Strange Fruit, and his biography 'Smoking in Bed' (thanks, A!).  I warmed to him even more when I read that he checks his kindling for spiders before lighting a fire so as not to inadvertently incinerate the little creatures, and that he's written some books for children which are illustrated by his artist wife. And last night he... well, I won't say... but it was all very strange and fruity and crazy indeed, as well as being in a public place in broad daylight (blush).  It was as if I'd "gone on holiday by mistake".

Barenaked lady

Why on earth - oh god, why on earth! - did I decide to go to work that day in a huge, busy office... with no clothes on?

It had seemed a normal enough idea at the time, to just not bother to wear anything.  Next thing you know, I’m there at my desk, surrounded by hundreds of co-workers of both sexes, all of whom are fully and respectably dressed.  And there’s me: completely, utterly nude.  Not a stitch on.  There’s nothing I can do about it, because I can’t get home, so I’m stuck here all day like this and I’m really starting to think it’s a bad idea.   Nobody’s called the police, or a psychiatrist, or my next-of-kin…. so it’s obviously not that weird in the scheme of things, but still I feel ashamed and uncomfortable and just wish I hadn’t decided to do it.  Wish I could turn the clock back.  People are looking at me rather disapprovingly and the awful sinking feeling in my stomach is increasing with every passing minute.

I am so relieved when I wake up – although, just for a second, as I blink in the light of the new morning,  I start to wonder if I have actually done it.  The sense of regret and of shame and of being the only one who has, for some unknown reason, decided to go totally starkers amongst all her clothed colleagues, certainly feels real enough - even if (thankfully) only fleetingly.

 It had to be, didn't it?  Those early (naughty!) Ants...