ODD SHORT DREAMS – 1984 - 2010
Sarah Hartwell

These are just odd short dreams which made an impression on me through very vivid scenes or strong emotions.

SLEEPING WITH THE DEVIL
Dream – June 2010

How I came to be sleeping with the devil-made-flesh I can’t remember. A bargain? A dare? Chance? No matter how it came about, as long as I didn’t look at him my soul would be safe.

Oh but it was hard. I felt his hands on me, expertly caressing, and his firm flesh pressed against mine. He may have been the devil, but he was skilled and unhurried. Still I did not look – oh maybe a glance through squinted eyes, a glimpse of limb or torso, but never into those soul-stealing eyes.

But finally I looked, caught by surprise by unexpected ecstasy. And I was lost, trapped in thrall. He was indescribably handsome, but his expression lacked emotion – not cruel, not kind. It brought to mind the stories of vampires and how they fascinated their victims. There were no horns, no tail, the devil would pass for human. But there were fangs - I felt those four fangs, upper and lower, pierce the left side of my neck just enough that the pain was also pleasure.

So now I sit in this mansion with its wood-panelled rooms and glass panelled bookcases full of leather-bound volumes of inestimable value. The inhumanly handsome devil sits in his winged armchair in front of me, reading a book as though I were not there. Outside are manicured grounds and the silent servants all look like pale copies of him. My torment is to remember that one night and to long for another, while he remains utterly indifferent to me.

THE BRIGHT AND THE BLEAK
Sarah Hartwell, (March 2010)

Imagine a seaside town in England, past its glory days, but still bright with lights and entertainments. There are the tacky sea-front shops selling inflatable rings and glow-sticks alongside rock and candyfloss. Jingles and noise spills from slightly tatty amusement arcades where the games machines reflect past years' hits, not this year's blockbusters. Trams festooned with coloured bulbs, flashing in patterns, trundle along the wide streets, linking hotels and casinos, pier and promenade. Despite its outdated attractions, tourists throng from midmorning to midnight.

Somewhere here there is a portal, pre-dating the glitz and glamour, even pre-dating the sleepy fish and crabbing village that stood here before the amusements arrived. And we are here to find it. Back a way from the bright, noisy promenade, back where the school and fire station stand and where the Victoria era buildings have been converted into B-and-Bs for benefit claimants, back among the blockish grey concrete "modern hotels" there is a door to elsewhere.

He and I find the building as described, several streets back. It's a 1960s building - a school or college, one of those institutional buildings of corridors and rooms and double doors (some glazed, some solid) to be kept shut to prevent spread of fire. One of those sets of fire doors is the portal. The place is disused of course, apart from a caretaker who carefully avoids one particular corridor. There are rumours of people missing here and it's too unsettling so only urban explorers dare come here and some return changed.

We find the doors in the dustiest corridor (of course, because the caretaker avoids this bit). There are footprints in the grime in both directions. The doors resist at first, but as we push the the right hand door open, the left opens towards us. Action and reaction. As we pass from the bright world, the other "we" pass into our world. They look careworn and pallid, a bleaker reflection of ourselves.

The other side is the twin of ours, but somehow bleaker and lacking hope or spirit. the seaside amusements are dull and tawdry. Paint flakes and broken bulbs haven't been replaced. It's darker than we anticipated as the lights are fewer. It's colder too as a chill breeze comes up off of the sea, but much of the chill is due to a sense of depression. Only one motel is open, though the manager is brusque. he knows we don't belong on the bleak side. The room he gives us is sparsely furnished.

On the seafront, the trams look dingy with their missing bulbs. Litter hasn't been picked up and instead of late night tourists there are bored teens swigging white cider as though to blot out the hopelessness of their surroundings. This place is a dead end where people wash up, not a destination.

We planned to stay one night and explore, but it's been days now. Our barely civil hotel manager has explained why. For everyone who comes through, their analogues must go into the bright. Once there, they want to stay - who wouldn't? We can push those doors as much as we want, but unless the bleak "we" want to come back, we cannot open them. We are they, they are we, just different sides of a mirror. What would we do if we'd escaped into the bright? We'd put as much distance as possible so we couldn't be pulled back through.

FROM PLANET SHEPHERD TO LONDON OF THE RISING SUN
Dream - August 2009
This was a rather enjoyable sci-fi dream. I think the reference to shepherds was because I often travelled to Shepherd's Bush at this time.

I was being launched into space in a small vehicle called Peripatetia. This was an exhilarating experience as it took off from a runway, moved through blue sky and clouds and out into blackness (complete with g-forces). Somehow, I then became a geologist on a starship in the Star Trek universe (briefly passing Checkov, Kirk and McCoy in a corridor). The ship didn't have transporters so we had to land when we visited a planet. The part of the planet visited was grassy and hilly and had outcrops of flint-like stone that turned out to be harder than diamond - normal phasers didn't make any impact on it. We managed to take a broken off lump of this super-flint into Engineering to try some lasers on it. Disappointingly I didn't meet Mr Scott. Oddly, the planet seemed to be inhabited by shepherds.

When I returned to Earth in the Peripatetia, I found myself in a London that was oddly changed. London was an Anglo-Japanese city, part of a merging of the British and Japanese Empires. There was a tram system where single carriage trams did the routes associated with buses. I had a ticket for the 228 tram. The colour-coded tram route map (mounted on a concrete pillar, with North, East, South and West on different sides) was in English and Japanese characters. Most names of places around London were different, but most were familiar e.g. Coventry Gardens though a few were perplexing: Sovereign Vet and again they were in both character sets. There was also a "You are here" type map which indicated a big Japanese temple in what I'd previously known as Hyde Park.

The tram station was a single platform and the red tram cars queued up behind each other before zooming off, switching rails as they left the tram station to head in different directions. Inside were backless upholstered benches rather than seats. I can't recall where I disembarked, but I ended up walking up and down pedestrian subways in search of a restaurant as I seemed to have a valid credit card on me. All the restaurants and cafes served Japanese cuisine - not a Starbucks, Costa, McD or KFC anywhere. Apart from the pedestrian subways, it all seemed much cleaner and more orderly as well.

ALIENS OVER STANSTED AIRPORT
Dream – September 2008
Another weird, but enjoyable, sci-fi dream with a dash of X-Files and Dr Who.

Hovering over Stansted Airport was a huge red alien brain/heart. It looks like a dark red gas-bag in the shape of a mass of bubbles stuck together. White lines criss-cross the rippling surface of the floating monstrosity. It floats in the sky like a Portuguese Manowar jellyfish floats on the suface of the sea. The sky is orange-red, the colour of fire. Fringes of flame can be seen in the atmosphere, another manifestation of the alien brain/heart trying to cross from its dimension into ours.

Cut to the interior of an Airbus A340 in a stacking pattern for Stansted, or at least for when Stansted ought to be. There is no response from Air Traffic Control, no GPS signals, no runway lights, no headlights and tail-lights on the motorways, no streetlights, nothing. Below is dark, woodland empty of human habitation. The alien being has displaced the aeroplane into an adjacent dimension where the earth is uninhabited by humans. There is no Stansted Airport, not even flat fields on which to attempt an emergency landing. The pilot circles in vain, looking for lights below.

For some reason I am called to fight the alien threat. Mulder and Scully are sitting in a car outside Stansted Airport drinking coffee from a Thermos. The Doctor is looking up at the sky, unable to figure out what to do. The alien thing, a protrusion of a mindless, hungry and unimaginably huge pan-dimensional being into our dimension, is floating and rippling like a bag of viscera against a backdrop of flame. If it pushes through into our dimension we will be consumed by flame. I float up to meet it. As I ascend, I grow impossibly huge until my hands can grasp each side of the floating viscera as though it were a beach-ball. Thousands of feet below me is the Essex countryside. Above me is a sheet of flame. The sky is the colour of a livid bruise.

The heart/brain (for it is both combined) pulses against my hands and I can feel it pulsing in my mind. It is a mindless being. It lacks the intellect to wish us ill, it is simply consuming in order to survive. I push at it with my mind, pushing it back into its own dimension. The flames in the sky dim and vanish, sucked out of this dimension. The hungry creature howls in my mind as I send it back to its own dimension.

Cut to the interior of the plane. It has been circling the area where Stansted ought to be. Below it twinkle sulphur yellow streetlights, red tail lights and white head lights, forming swirls and pattern against the dark ground. It is back in the sky over the airport, awaiting instructions for the final approach.

HAMMERSMITH
Dream - 2008

I was in a very small prison cell. I was offered a bigger cell as a reward for good behaviour after one night and said "No need - it's only for a few nights anyway" and decided to catch up on my reading. The prison food was good though - king prawn chow mein. I was then made to tidy up a manager's office: grey metal cupboards full of lever arch files, unsorted paperwork, 10 year old Yellow Pages. spare shirts and ties. There followed a confused meander where I failed to reach Reading in mum's old Morris Oxford (completing the back-to-the-1970s timeslip the M25 hadn't been built) and ended up in a cheap hotel room with some friends.

Thoroughly disoriented, I was sent to visit a company located on the ground floor of a shiny new office block. They produced signs or something and it turned out I was there for an interview, but I didn't know that. The CV they had looked like my CV from the early 1990s and I said the "agency" had made a mistake because I wasn't looking for a new job. I left, but then had to visit office number 16 in the same building. They also thought I was there for an interview and asked me to write software as part of a test. I said I'd quit software years ago and had been in QA and electronics-related stuff for over 10 years. The "agency" had sent me for a software interview.

Having left the office, which turned out to be situated roughtly were the Hammersmith & City Line station is in Hammersmith, I tried to cross the road for the other tube station but found myself part of a school crocodile going to assembly (evidently somewhere else in Hammersmith). The crocodile was interrupted when one class formed a choir and sang a rousing verse about Tolkienesque dwarves (several versions of this song cropped up throughout the dream, all relating to dwarves, gold and questing). At this point I realised I needed a shower and a change of clothes so, by a quirk of dream logic I ended up in a bookshop with Billy where he bought a table-tennis bat ... except instead of rubber-padded-wood it had a metal hoop with a stocking stretched over it!

By the time the alarm went off, all this traipsing around Hammersmith singing about dwarves, going to interviews I knew nothing about and buying mutant table tennis bats meant I was knackered when I woke up! My brain does love to play reading/Reading/bookshop jokes on me though. Maybe it wasn't about reading in jail, but Reading Gaol prompted by reading Will Self's rewrite of an Oscar Wilde story.

A DATE WITH DEATH
Dream - May 2008

Death was running towards me down a London street, the sort of street you see round Covent Garden thronged with pedestrians. He was in the usual black robes and carrying a scythe and in a hurry. Every time he pushed someone out the way with his scythe they fell down dead. In the dream I thought "this is shappng up to be a Kit Kat have-a-break advert or a Pepsi live-life-to-the-max advert".

Death then ran into a small cafe (single fronted; old-style small multiple window panes to the right of the door; door frame and window frames painted yellow and peeling a little; neon "cafe" sign over the door - even in dreams I notice stuff like that) to his left. Several people, mainly men in their 30s or 40s, ran out the door and fell over dead on the pavement. The blue/red flashing neon sign lit up the pile of bodies on the doorstep. I went into the cafe, expecting to see pale-faced death sitting there snapping the fingers of a Kit-Kat or breaking open a Pepsi in a relaxed manner having a break from the hard work of reaping souls. He was sat at a table to my right, with his back to the wall. With his hood pushed back and scythe leaning on the wall next to him, he was more of a fresh-faced 30ish person.

In one of those odd scene jumps, I suddenly found myself in a bedroom underneath death. In a carnal sense. Neither of us with robes and the scythe was nowhere in sight. Luckily the face of this not-so-grim reaper did not resemble anyone known to me (that would have been highly embarrassing in waking life!). During this frolicking with death I was told I'd have death's offspring in what he called a "destructive conception". At this point and before the frolics began in earnest, I woke up. It was 4:28 a.m.

AFTER THE FLOODS
Dream – 2008

For several nights my dreams had a recurring theme of flooding. It began with a dream first that I was in a desert and needed a bottle of water and then that my workplace was knee deep in water. Every night thereafter had a "flood" theme with towns getting flooded to varying extents. This one was the most detailed and persistent of the flood dreams.

I'd gone to feed the ducks on a local river and noticed the river kept rising. I started to walk back up the field to the road and the rising water kept pace with me. Back home I packed provisions into several crates including cat litter and cat food and I got the cat into a travelling basket. In the car, I had to use some country lanes as the main roads were flooded. The waters were rising and my region, which is on a hill, was getting cut off as low-lying areas were submerged.

Somehow I made it through to the other side of the floods and went to warn friends who lived in a rambling old building, previously a watermill, alongside a river (in waking life I don't know anyone living in a mill near a river). Their river hadn't begun to rise so they viewed me and my crates and the cat with amusement. While I was trying to convince them, I looked out and saw the river had risen by several feet. The dream jumped to me getting hold of a large boat and loading all the provisions from the car into it (my main concern always being the cat's safety). The craft was wide-bodied and had a shallow keel and reminded me of a Norfolk wherry or simple sailing barge with a plain square sail. The shallow keel was essential because of all the obstructions under water i.e. rooves, chimney pots, though oddly there was no floating debris. The only things now above water were church steeples that I tied my boat to and the water was still rising to submerge those. I couldn't even see any office buildings or flats above water level.

I realised I was running out of drinking water and needed it to rain. The rivers had risen and inundated the land and joined up with the sea. All of East Anglia was underwater and the water was now brackish. It was worse than the 1953 floods and was a permanent change, not just the result of a storm and high tide; we had been complacent about flood defences holding back the sea, but once the rivers had overflowed there was no saving the land. I knew I needed to sail the boat north to the hillier parts of Britain that were now islands. Even after waking up and going back to sleep, I was back in flooded Eastern England trying to warn people about rising rivers or trying to sail to dry land.

DALEKS, SNAKES AND THE LONDON UNDERGROUND
Dream - 2007

It began with an elderly couple on an anniversary trip falling off a mountain ridge. Or rather the woman fell off and the husband jumped after her rather than be a widower. They were drinking a celebratory glass of white wine on the ridge before falling/jumping. The scene pulled back and instead of actually being on the mountain ridge I was sitting in a minimalist wood-furnished traditional Japanese-style room watching this on TV. The TV show changed to a warning about Daleks.

Next thing, I was in a London Underground Station, except it was obviously a mock-up (big glazed wall tiles, arched passages etc). For some reason I was with a chap called Dave who was from UNIT (Dave looked very much like an ex-colleague who now works on the LU). The uniform was the old style olive drab in heavy fabric, a bit World War II looking rather than patched camo style. I remarked to him that the mock-up was a good replica of passages in a station, but they had no signs saying platform or line details. It was supposed to be Victoria and Northern Lines. For some reason he was suspicious of a locked hatch. and I was plain nosy, so he prised it open and behind all the pipes was something alien, so he shut it again, but not before I had also seen tentacles among the pipework. At that point everyone began running. They were all being evacuated in one direction, but a few of us decided to hide down some passages. I followed Dave because we had seen something alien behind the hatch and we thought the aliens might be in control of the station so it was best not to follow everyone else.

After running through several tunnels, about 20 of us ended up outdoors beside an overground rail line with a parked train on it. It was going to Finsbury Park. For some reason that was exactly where we wanted to go so we pulled open the doors. A woman fell out when the doors opened and she apologised for leaning on the door. We all crowded into the carriages which were totally packed and the train set off. We were relieved at escaping from the nameless alien threat in the nameless tube station. People got off at the next stop and Dave and I managed to get a seat and started talking about escaping to Finsbury Park.

For some reason, the train turned into a bus and the end of the carriage had a driver's cab. A big bald bloke got on with a sack that contained a large blue snake. iI bit the driver. It turned out the snake was an alien and if you got bitten 8 times you would also turn into an alien snake-being. The tentacles behind the hatch in the Underground station had been baby alien blue snakes. There was a giant blue turtle-headed alien snake creature that had taken over part of London. Dave being a UNIT bloke got off the bus to fight the alien foe.

I got off at the next stop with a group of 3 or 4 women as we didn't fancy being stuck on a bus with a driver who was turning into a blue alien reptile. We ran through some narrow streets and found ourselves in a college campus. On the way, I got bitten by a small blue snake, but only once. The others sat down, but I was worried about turning into an alien. The building ahead said "Janitorial Supplies" in gold lettering above the double doors. I went in and for some reason knew that bleach would kill the aliens so i made the other women grab all the bleach from a trolley and put a half-half dilution of bleach into sprayers. I gave the old lady (the cleaner) a cup of tea when she began to flap about us taking her cleaning supplies. We left behind the gallon containers of "Diaper Solution" though I didn't know why a college needed something for soaking nappies in.

I asked one of the women to put some 1:1 bleach solution on the festering bite on my back. After several applications (which stung) it turned into hard skin and fell off. Armed with bleach sprayers we decided to look for Dave because he would be with UNIT and they would save London and we now had a weapon against alien snakes.

First we found a huge alien snake biting a person on one of London's green areas. It had dug itself a big tunnel, which explained why they liked the London Underground tunnels, and only its head stuck out. It was dragging its victim into it. We doused the head with bleach and when it roared, we poured a cup of bleach in its maw and it died, turning into blue sludge. Unfortunately it had already killed the person. We walked onto the High Street and into a pub, asking "Have you seen Dave?". No-one had so we went next-door and asked the same thing. We asked this in every shop until we reached a pub where several of my real-life colleagues were drinking and they said Dave was in the next pub. So we went to tell him about the bleach weapon.

Then it got a bit confused because I suddenly ended up on a bus that was a mobile trinket shop selling turquoise artefacts and made-to-order perfume from crushed flower petals in oil. After queuing for what seemed like ages, I got off and went into the shop it was parked outside. This was a big gift shop of the same turquoise and perfume things. By then I had lost the bleach weapon and also lost my companions. I was certain I wouldn't find anyone from UNIT in a perfume shop. Then the fire alarm started ringing and I thought "Oh no, it all starts again" and got ready to start running from the alien menace, but it was the alarm clock.

Victoria and Northern Lines means either Euston, Kings Cross St Pancras, Warren Street or Stockwell. For some reason this fact bothered me more than the idea of giant blue snake-like aliens. Oddly, I hadn't even watched Doctor Who around the time of this dream.

HOLBORN TO ARCHWAY
Dream - October 2007

I've got as far as Holborn and need to get to an office in Archway which, according to my dream is Northern Line (my subconscious has memorised way too much of the tube map). For some reason I can't get a tube from Holborn so I have to get to Tottenham Court Road by bus, which turns out to be an old Routemaster bus. Oh, and I have to get a few quid from the cash machine and top up the Oyster.

The dream jumps to me walking into the office, except it's an office as it was back in the mid-1980s when I first joined Marconi Radar in Chelmsford. It's upstairs in a rather grim building - no carpet tiles, just lino tiles. It's not open plan either. In the main office are 4 old wooden (teak-veneered chipboard) desks pushed together in the centre. There are 2 side offices off of the main office.There are no computers. My desk has a stack of paperwork on it and a pile of archive boxes next to it and on the chair. The chair is an old-style 4-legged vinyl covered chair, not a swivel. I realise I have moved to this office and my blue swivel chair should be there. I find it at the desk opposite me and it has an archive box on it. I move the box and try to reclaim my chair. I am not senior enough to have a swivel chair. I explain that it's a specially adapted chair because of my back problems. No, only senior people in the office can have a swivel chair. I must use the black vinyl chair.

Then the alarm went off. It was very odd to find myself back in the small cluttered office with un-ergonomic desks and chairs. We don't notice how much everything has changed until we somehow find ourselves back where we started out. In real life, the grim office block of that dream isn't in Archway, but was in Chelmsford and was demolished to make way for a housing development.

THE THIRD WAVE
Dream - May 2007

I was in a tsunami. A strip of city began beyond the wide sloping saltmarsh. . It struck me that it was only a few metres above sea level. The buildings were towers of mirrored or smoked glass, some so new that cranes and scaffolding was clustered around them. As the sucking sea retreated out to the unbelievably clear blue horizon I found myself scrambling up metal ladders on the side of chrome-and-glass tower, aiming to reach a high balcony.

The first wall of water that hit was still high enough to suck at my legs as the force drove it up the side of the building. Then it retreated, taking trucks and cranes with it. The second wave was less forceful, but it didn't need to be - it only needed to be strong enough to complete the damage done by the first. I knew there would be a third wave, less fierce than the first, but far more devastating and I was reminded of the Richard Chamberlain film The Last Wave (which I haven't seen since 1977).

ONCE MORE, WITH SPIRIT
Dream - March 2007

It's a strange kind of life this. During the daytime, I'm loitering about my mortal remains watching people gawking at them. I'm not inside the bandages of course, that would be gross, I just like watching people's reactions. In times past, people sat for hours with pencil and paper and drew the exhibits. These days, it's all over in a flash - a digital picture taken in haste to be consumed at leisure.

Sometimes I just sit in my case and people-watch. They fascinate me - everything from idle curiosity to serious study and even, to my eternal dismay, disgust. The children leave greasy fingerprints on my glass case, which is annoying and rather spoils the view from the sarcophagus. Lately I've taken to sitting on top of the case, swinging my non-corporeal legs and flicking non-corporeal snot at the more irritating children - the ones that walk around with stiff legs and outstretched arms going "Look, I'm a mummy."

Once the visitors have gone, the museum is left to us and the night staff. I'm generally known as Atun, though I had a splendidly long name in dynastic days, befitting a priest and a prince of Egypt. On the next shelf is a lesser wife of a pharoah. She's a bit miffed that they've misidentified her family and is very fond of saying "he was the third, for goodness sake, the third - not the fifth!" and despite being only a couple of dynasties older than me, she far prefers the company over in Ancient Britain. It's a good job her husband is over in Cairo as I rely don't think he'd approve of the company she's been keeping lately - a bog body, for goodness sake!

Ram, whose display is a few rooms away, told me they'd brought in a chariot for the revamped Bronze Age exhibit - nice two-wheeler, beaten metal, leather and wood. That sounded like fun. There are a couple of Celtic ponies around from a ritual burial so we thought we'd hitch them up and race around the central hall. To our disappointment, it was a modern reconstruction so it didn't have a spirit. What we really need is a dead chariot, one from an ancient burial; one with spirit.

Please don't think we're just a couple of late dynastic/early Iron Age boy racers. There's a forlorn tiger wandering around the colonial India exhibit. Poor thing is only a motheaten rug and he's so tatty he's kept in the store room these days in a drawer labelled "Royal Bengal tiger, study skin and skull", so Ram and I thought we could brighten up his night with an old-fashioned chariot hunt. The most excitement he's had of late is ambushing the Roman senator's wife on her way from the Romans in Britain display to the 18th century French fashions.

What about the dinosaurs, I hear you ask, do they come alive at night? Silly, of course not. 65 million years of decay and even their spirits have fossilised. Never mind the disappointment of the chariot, there's a bit of a party in the snack bar. The caterers are chucking out a crate of chocolate brownies gone past their sell-by and we've found an amphora of wine over in Minoan crete with a bit of spirit left in it (not much though - that crowd over in Roman Britain are a right bunch of boozers). Life's too long not to enjoy yourself!

THE DIVORCEE AND THE TRAINEE PRIEST
Dream – 2006

I was a character in a typically Joanne Harris style storyline, having just read all of her books. I have no interest whatsoever in priests.

I was a young divorcee in a picturesque rural village in France. A young priest had joined the local priesthood as some sort of training or helping out capacity. He was tall, dark and drop-dead gorgeous. Having seen the 2 priests and several villagers in the village square, the young and distinctly non-religious divorcee was resisting the urge to seduce the drop-dead gorgeous younger priest and had returned to her farm to get on with growing herbs, fruit and vegetables.

Some time later, the young divorcee was taking healthy fruit and veg to an elderly and somewhat hypochondriac woman in the village. The older priest was sure the woman needed the services of a priest and had sent his younger colleague along. Young divorcee and young priest eye each other up. Priest's resolve to his religious calling wavers and divorcee tries hard to resist him.

Scene changes. There has been some sort of accident - a collapsed wall or something - causing injury to the young priest. The young divorcee must stay with him until more help arrives. His eyes beg her to seduce him. She wants to but doesn't want to corrupt him. The older priest is getting wind of the situation and, unable to preach directly at the non-churchgoing divorcee, tries to turn the villagers against her. At which point I inconveniently wake up, wondering what happened next.

POCKET UNIVERSE
Dream - July 2006

An odd dream about being a scientist returning from an alternate reality. There is no way to put in words the horror and emptiness at the end of the dream.

"It's a pocket universe," my sister told me, "And it's shrinking."

It sure looked like the real world to me, but there was no denying that this parallel reality - a mere bubble of existence - was collapsing. The days had been growing shorter and now passed in a mere 2 hours. Colours were being lost, starting with the longer wavelengths. Physical dimensions were subtly changing.

"We should go back to our own universe," I said, "We've studied enough about pocket universes now. Leave a remote probe here to transmit final data." The probe would be crushed out of existence when the pocket universe collapsed completely.

"I want Frank to come back with us," my sister told me.

"That's not possible! There's no precedent for taking someone from a pocket universe back to prime."

My sister had formed a relationship with Frank during our months here. He hadn't known we came from an alternate until a few days (prime-length days) ago and he didn't know his reality was collapsing. That was one of the oddities about these places; the denizens perception of reality altered. That there were now multiple sunsets and sunrises in a day was normal. Only my sister and I could recall it being different because we were not part of this reality.

"I've done the calculations and we can do it," she told me. "He doesn't understand that things are changing around him, but he wants to return with us."

The air felt thick enough to be counted a liquid when return time came. I felt it and she felt, but Frank had no perception of this compression. Sunset and sunrise had merged into a permanent overcase and the colours had shifted towards the red. Frank had tided his woodworker tools away in compulsive neatness and held my right hand. My sister held my left hand.

I felt the shift in air pressure as we crossed over to the prime reality, leaving the collapsing universe behind. Frank's hand still grasped mine firmly. My left hand was empty; my twin gone and that other world had accelerated into dense oblivion with her still there. Overwhelmed by the horror and emptiness and alone for the first time in my life, I howled in despair.

MR HOPPER
Dream - July 2004

This dream was peculiar because it continued in snatches throughout the night, even after a night-time bathroom visit.

Part 1

Along with 2 friends, Carol and Cass, I had been invited to investigate a large old house, once the property of a certain Mrs Hopper. The house was now only occupied by a late middle-aged male caretaker whose name I didn't find out. The third (top) floor had been turned into a shrine for Mrs Hopper's beloved dogs and small statues lined the walls. The caretaker was reinterring one of Mrs Hopper's dogs, a mummified poodle, into a niche near the top of the stairs. The niche was in a half landing, 3 steps below the level of the top floor. The staircase turned 180 degrees to continue to the next half landing about 8 steps below. The back wall of the half landing was covered in a floor-to-ceiling wrought iron ornamental screen.

To open the niche, the caretaker lifted a floor board on the left hand side of the half-landing. The floor and part of the wall slid away to reveal what looked like a fireplace. He put the bundle, containing Mrs Hopper's mummified poodle into the niche in the floor. At that point, a hologram of a woman in her early twenties sprang into being at the right hand side of the half landing. Carol, Cass and myself sat entranced on the three step from the half-landing to the top floor. Mrs Hopper was shown as young and attractive, though we'd expected any pictures of her to show an eccentric old woman. Mrs Hopper, it turned out, had either died young or chosen to present herself as she had been when younger..

The hologram image spoke about her son, only 2 years old when the hologram was recorded. Evidently Mrs Hopper had some sort of premonition of future problems.

"We're meeting Mr Hopper this afternoon," I said to no-one in particular, "He's now 48". In fact Mr Hopper had commissioned us to check out his late mother's house before he took possession of it after a fiercely contested legal dispute.

At this point, the sophistication of the programme revealed itself as the hologram began talking to us. Either that, or it was programmed to respond to certain words, such as her son's name. However, there was no time to take note of what she was saying - I noticed two metal cylinders at the top centre of the wrought iron grille were turning and tilting towards us. I grabbed Carol and Cass and we leapt against the grille as a laser shot out at the steps where we had been sitting. The programme had evidently taken this into consideration as another metal cylinder revolved and tilted in the wall 8 steps down from us. Mrs Hopper had had the whole house wired, probably to stop her son from getting it.

Part 2

We had found a panel of electronics in a cupboard in the hose. When Cass had tried to log into the system, the user interface had fried. Mrs Hopper was again one step ahead of anyone who tried to move into her house.

Part 3

I woke up in a king sized bed in a large bedroom. Somehow we had disabled part of the house's internal security system. I wasn't certain what had woken me up until I noticed the acrid odour of smouldering fur. A mouse lay fried on the floor near the far wall, some way to my right. I looked up at the wall to my left, above a mirror and fireplace. A red light blinked. Looking back to the other side, I saw a faint white line sweeping across the floor, searching for movement. Only the bed was safe. Mrs Hopper had evidently felt under threat at night. I wondered how she avoided getting fried if she had to get up in the night, then guessed that she wore a remote control or something similar to give her immunity against the house's defences. I now had to work out how to get out of the room without being fried by lasers. My immediate though was to somehow cover the roving red eye. However I didn't have time to put that into practice as I must have fallen asleep again.

Part 4

When I came to, I was sitting in a room smaller than the bedroom. Carol and Cass sat on chairs against the wall opposite and they looked ashen-faced. I took stock of my surroundings and noted that I was sitting on the floor, leaning to my right against the side of a leather armchair. A hand fondled the top of my head like one might stroke a dog and I realised someone was standing to my left.

"I have to thank you for sorting out my mother's booby traps" said a man's voice.

A newspaper was passed in front of my eyes and I noticed something about Egypt and oil and shenanigans involving shares or finances (I was having trouble focusing). Mr Hopper had been involved in the oil trade in that region. The paper was moved away and I felt him sit down on the chair, a hand resting heavily on my head. I glanced around, but my head was twisted firmly back to looking across the room. I had an impression of a tall, well-muscled, broad-chested and cruel character, tanned and completely bald (the man calling himself Mr Hopper in his dealings with the office had been genial and grey-haired with wire-rimmed spectacles). Mrs Hopper had not wanted her cruel-natured son to have the house, though her hologram spoke of her son as only 2 years old (perhaps her husband had been cruel-natured and she'd had a premonition of future troubles). We had been employed by Mr Hopper to secure the house for him. I was certain we would not be leaving the house.

That was where final part of the dream ended. I have no idea where the names or characters came from. I have previously dreamt of an old empty building, usually with large wooden double doors, where the top floor is given over to statues of dogs and sometimes to shelves of large leather-bound books.

MISSING THE TRAIN
Dream – June 2003

All last night I dreamt of missing trains (woke up 4 of 5 times after "missing" a train). Either got to station too late, or Number 70 bus was late (and the 66 didn't go to the station), or delays on London Underground, or I hadn't packed, or I was struggling with unwieldy luggage, or couldn't find right platform etc. When I finally reached station I ended up on platform K1A but my train was at G1A. I caught it, but woke up before I found out where I was going.

Numbers 70, 66, K1A or G1A don't mean anything to me; I can't work out any significance to persistent (and very detailed) dreams about missing trains!

THE GOLDEN MOTOR CAR
Dream - January 2002

I had inexplicably found myself in my home town, but in a different reality. It was a world without trains. Stevenson had not invented his steam locomotive "The Rocket" but had instead invented an internal combustion engine fuelled by volatile spirit. He had invented the motor car. The train had quite simply never been invented. There were no railways, no stations and no long-distance mass transportation of commuters between cities. The longest distance any worker travelled to his office was one hour by bus meaning that many people worked closer to home.

It was very odd walking down familiar streets which were subtly different from the home I knew. The bus station was roughly where I had known it, except it was several times larger and on the other side of the road in the space the rail station was in my world. It was a monument of Victorian building. In my world it was an ugly grey 1960s concrete structure which had defied all attempts to prettify it. Here it was a historical building, a huge hall, constructed of mellow red and yellow bricks which were glazed and arranged in a pattern. Black bricks picked out the huge words "Bus Terminus" and the great care had been taken over the proportions, the windows and other architectural features. It was magnificent.

Where I had known the town's old cramped railway station underneath its viaduct there was just a road. No viaduct arches, no embankment. Where one of the arches stood in my world was a large Victorian-built pub, painted dark green. Here there were no "Railway Tavern" pubs serving thirsty commuters. Gold lettering picked out the name "THE GOLDEN MOTOR CAR".

There would be no Liverpool Street station, no Waterloo or Kings Cross. No London Underground. No network of railways joining city to city. Just roads and motorways, albeit ones built with Victorian engineering skills and pride. IK Brunel - builder of fine motorway bridges? Were there bus-spotters who enthused over the structural beauty of some motorway interchange designed by some Victorian engineer and held together with so many thousand rivets?

Somehow I got to talking with a civil engineer whose job it was to maintain some of those bridges and tunnels. The problem was that the Victorians had never envisaged the volume of traffic and the road system was literally falling to pieces. There was no room to widen the roads and the weight of so much traffic was too much for the Victorian methods.

I began to explain to him the concept of a railway - dozens of carriages all pulled by one diesel locomotive and travelling on its own track, not on the roads. It would take a great deal to persuade anyone to build a network of railways and to sell the idea to the travelling public, but he thought it had some merits.

THE HISTORY HOUSE
Dream - April 2001

I was watching a news report about a house which some local council had to refurbish. It had been owned by an elderly woman and her son and had was practically unchanged from when they first got it - the décor, the furnishings etc were all original. They had been very reclusive and no-one apart from them had ever entered the house. The old woman had died some time back and the elderly son had recently died and they had no relatives so the council had gone into the house to clear out their possessions and do any repairs ready for the next tenants.

The news showed the scene inside a house. Furnishings and fixtures and fittings from the 1930s, like a museum mock-up. But the amazing thing was the writing on the walls - every wall was covered with neat, small writing as though used as a diary. The living room, hallway, the bedrooms - everywhere including the bathroom was covered in neat writing. It covered a period of time from when the woman had first lived there and then later on her son had continued writing. It was a historical record, detailing events which had happened - world wars, government crises etc. The council couldn't paper over the walls or rip off the wall plaster until the whole record had been photographed, it was so unique.

In my dream, I was trying to explain this amazing find to my partner, but he was half asleep. We were in a bedroom which seemed half-familiar to me except it isn't anywhere we've ever lived or stayed. I was walking between the bed and the dressing table/wardrobe and he was still lying in bed. I was explaining about the house with the writing on the walls. I finished off by saying "It's a unique first hand historical account.". My voice started fading as I said "historical" and I had totally lost my voice (like during a throat infection) when I tried to say "account" and could only manage a breathy whisper.

When I joined the firm I was surprised to find how many of the employees were women - a positive step for equality I thought. The firm occupied several upper floors of a tall office building and had its own security force with a security desk in the foyer. One of the other women enlightened me as to a peculiar policy intended to bond the work force more closely - the MD slept with all of his female employees shortly after they joined.

I laughed this off as an office myth. The MD was an attractive man in his thirties, but I couldn’t imagine him forcing himself on his female employees. Nevertheless when he asked, or rather instructed, me to stay late one evening I tried to make some excuse about needing to go home. I left the office at the usual time, but when I reached the security point the guard stopped me.

"I’m afraid you can’t leave right now, you have an appointment with the MD," he said with a straight face, "It would be best to return to your desk."

I went back and sat at my desk until the MD walked in. He sat on the edge of the desk for a few minutes making conversation, before inviting me to the conference room. It was not any of the conference rooms I had ever seen and instead of a conference table and other paraphernalia suited to meetings, it was more like a bedroom. Evidently the women had not been joking. They had not told me of the man’s incredible stamina though! Actually it wasn’t bad, he was skilled and considerate. Whether he liked to ‘re-bond’ all of the staff regularly I don’t know, but I quite enjoyed ‘working late’ over the next several months.

Several months later a new girl joined as a secretary. She was in her early twenties and engaged; in an old-fashioned way she was ‘saving herself’ for the honeymoon night. The rest of us knew that ‘working late’ would probably destroy her, but no-one wanted to intervene in case we lost our own jobs and our own very good salaries. Eventually I plucked up the courage to offer myself as a stand-in, explaining that it would be unfair on the new girl. I found myself ‘working late’ more often than before.

Then one evening as I stood in the ‘conference room’ looking out of the window to the streets below, Phil (the MD) told me that the arrangement could not continue.

"I am beginning to feel that you have a hold over me, something I really can’t allow to continue," he said.

I nodded, expecting our ‘relationship’ to fizzle out and hoping that he would continue to leave the other girl alone. Even so, I felt a little sad about it.

"Here, have a coffee," he said, holding out a cup.

We sat on the edge of the bed, both drinking coffee, not needing to talk. I began to feel light headed.

"Why not lie down for a while?" he suggested, taking the cup from me. My hands were shaking and the cup was rattling on its saucer by this time.

When I lay down, I realized how dizzy I felt. I tried not to pass out. Even with my eyes open, the room was going dark and Phil’s voice seemed to be coming from a long way off as though my ears were full of cotton wool.

"I’m so sorry," he was saying, "but I really can’t let you have any hold over me."

"What have you done?" I tried to say, but I don’t think any noise came out. The crushing weight on my chest made it hard to breathe, let alone speak.

"Don’t fight it, you will just drift away," he said.

By now I could see nothing though I knew my eyes were open. The coffee had been drugged - not simply enough to make me sleep, but enough that I could feel my heart slowing and my breathing become slow and shallow. Fingers brushed my eyes closed, but I stubbornly refused to stop breathing. Stay conscious and concentrate on breathing, just keep breathing, I told myself.

"I’m sorry it has to come to this," he said and I felt my arm, which felt icy cold, being lifted and the sharp prickle of a needle sliding into the vein inside my elbow, "but I really can’t risk becoming too fond of you, I promise you won’t feel a thing."

I heard roaring in my ears, then silence. The blackness became more intense and the weight on my chest vanished as I no longer fought to breathe. And as I slipped beyond reach, I carried with me an incredible anger.

(No idea what this meant, I woke up as I ‘died’, but the feeling of so much anger that I wanted to pull another person down with me persisted for a long while after I woke up. Interesting that my ‘final’ feeling was not betrayal, but anger.)

SCHOOL DREAMS AND STRESS DREAMS

School dreams happen when I'm stressed out. This one occurred following a very stressful day at work after I'd been triple-booked, worked through lunch (didn't get any food) in order to meet commitments that had been landed on me that morning. I couldn't work late because I needed to get groceries on the way home (there being no partner to do the household shopping) and because I have animals that need to be fed. In the dream I was in my least favourite lesson - French with Mrs Fife. This is a common component of nightmares. Mrs Fife favoured the immersion method and made no allowances for those of us not linguistically inclined . I spent my first 3 years of French lessons without a clue of what she was going on about. She insisted we asked questions in French and she only answered in French. I lacked the ability to ask something and if I could ask, I couldn't understand the answer! I spent hours on homework I didn't understand and ended up with "4/10, see me, lack of effort, shoddy, careless, lazy." After she left I enjoyed French - her replacement explained things in English where necessary and my grades went up to 8/10, 9/10 (showing the importance of using teaching methods applicable to the type of pupil).

In one such dream, when I found the correct school room, I had been put in the wrong class and couldn't keep up and the teacher was berating me for lack of effort, ignoring the fact I just didn't understand her lessons. The scene suddenly changes and I am supposed to be boarding a plane. A small orange passenger jet takes off while I'm waiting to board. The plane is still climbing when there's a loud boom. We can't see any explosion because of cloud cover, but the burnt wreckage lands in the sea and is washed up on the beach. I vividly remember the reports saying there were 22 people in the main cabin and 5 people in the other cabin. I refuse to board my plane after that. The scene changes again. I am driving through autumnal beech woodland and end up in a country pub with red and gold carpet. Sadly I wake up before ordering a nice pint of beer!

The rest of the night had included dreams about being at boarding school (it was set at my old grammar school which isn't a boarding school) and needing to move to a different dorm. For some reason my boarding school belongings included such improbable objects as a Dyson vacuum cleaner and a Flymo and while my classmates were loading their stuff onto the bus, I'd somehow forgotten to pack and was loading my stuff (3 boxes of books, the Dyson and the Flymo) into my car.

Then I was on a coach (bus, not horse drawn) driven by Harry Potter in, according to other passengers, an adaptation of an Enid Blyton book whose name none of us could remember. Suddenly the motorway detoured across a muddy field and we were beset by highwaymen who flung tractor tyres at us ....

Stress-related or illness related dreams can be absolute crackers. This is from one particular night in 2007 when I went to bed feeling unwell and bunged up and this got incorporated into the nightmares.

A lichen had taken root in my skull and I was snorting out solid yellow lumps of lichen instead of snot. The doctor said I needed painful injections into my skull to kill off the lichen. A grey mare was trying to throttle me by biting my throat and when that failed she stood on my chest to stop me breathing.

A VISIT TO THE UNIVERSITY OF LIFE
Dream - 1994

Though not invited, we managed to sneak into the palace (an ornate edifice of red and yellow brick with soaring spires, reminiscent of Cambridge University's architecture) and walked down the long main corridor. To either side of us were doors, most of which were open as though inviting passers-by to enter. The open doorway on our right somehow led onto a beach where Zeus, in the form of a bull, was frolicking in the surf while goddesses watched, laughing, from the sands.

A little further along the corridor, to the left, Aristotle, in classical garb, was discussing the nature of happiness with a group of men and women in contemporary dress; each question they asked he deflected with a deeper question of his own, likewise each point they thought to score he queried. At length the students (for I felt that they were students) left, mulling over the questions.

In the room next to Aristotle's was a girl aged six or seven. She was painting on a canvas - magnificent swirling designs of enormous complexity which she had plucked from her imagination, but which I recognised as part of the Mandelbrot set, a chaos fractal. One of the colours on her palette was empty and she began to cry, because without it she could not complete her picture.

What was this building where the rooms inside were bigger than the building without? Where classical gods played and where Aristotle met people of my own time and outmatched them with his thinking? Where a young child painted images from a science she could neither imagine nor comprehend?

This dream had an intense feeling of being deep and meaningful, especially the child prodigy. Don't know why Aristotle should crop up and manage to confound modern people, but incredible sensation of there being a meaning I was not able to comprehend - presumably the reason I wasn't actually entitled to enter the building and had to sneak in. For some reason, some of the perfectly ordinary doors in the hallway opened into other worlds while others opened into ordinary rooms.

PRINCE NIKOLAI
Dream - 1999

It was either the 1890s or early 1900s and I was in a grand house - not a palace, but a royal lodge. Prince (or Tsar?) Nikolai was there and my visit coincided with his murder. In those days, the intense fire which destroyed the place would cover up the fact that he'd been shot.

(A very odd, short but intense dream which left me with the sensation of being witness to a murder which had been covered up and which history considered an accidental death. I got the feeling that if the murder had been uncovered, history might have been different.)

THE TOWN
Recurring Dreams Throughout 1998/99

Continued visits to an English town. It is very picturesque, timber frame buildings in places on the main street. There is a pub - old with wood beams - which serves very good food - especially the dessert menu. To the right of this pub/restaurant, separated by several other shops is a coffee house called the Cap and Feather. The proprietor seems to know me and we chat. Also in town on a side street is a wonderful art supplies shop. There are 2 streets running parallel to each other and the timber frame shops are back-to-back in a central row between the streets. I remember thinking they were a fire risk.

Also in the town is a newer section at the end of the pretty streets - there is some sort of tower supported on four brick pillars. I can't remember what the tower is since it was raining and I was sheltering in the covered area between the supporting pillars. In front of me is a major road with C&A store on the other side. Behind me is a small shopping precinct with a downstairs restaurant.

(I have visited this town in my dreams several times and I still visit it, the streets are always the same as though it's a place I've been to in real life. In 2022 I discovered through photos that the Cap and Feather was The Feathers Hotel in Ludlow, a place I had visited as a child on a family holiday. The people there seem to know me, and it's like meeting old friends.)

THE GENERAL STORE
Dream - 1996

Having travelled for a number of miles along country roads with no firm idea of where we were going, we decided to stop for directions at a village. We stopped outside a run down red brick building with creeping plants clinging to its rounded front. It looked deserted.

"I’ll go round the back and see if there’s anything round there," I offered, hoping to find newer or occupied shops or homes which were obscured from view by the large, empty building.

When I got round the back I noticed a door into the old building. Looks were obviously deceptive - the front door to this building was evidently on the side away from the country road and facing the village instead. While the other side was weed covered and apparently deserted, this side had polished windows and an open door inviting me in.

A bell tinkled as I moved the door a little. Inside, the shop was an old style general store (common in country villages where time apparently stood still) with a clean swept plank floor and wooden counters. The till was an old manual appliance. A ‘Christmas’ stocking for loose change for charity was hung on one counter, close to the till, it contained old coins. Some open hessian and paper sacks in front of the counter held seed potatoes. Other goods were stacked on shelves so that the shopkeeper had to fetch them for the customer. I found it very quaint and charming that this old style of service had been preserved.

The shopkeepers were an elderly couple, who smiled warmly at me.

"We don’t get many visitors to the village," one of them said. For a short while we discussed the weather and other inconsequential matters; all very reassuring and civil.

A door on the rundown side of the building opened and my partner peered in. A shaft of sunlight lit up motes of dust disturbed by the draft.

"Nothing out here," he said, "but I found a doorway under the creepers."

I began to say that I had found the entrance on the far side when I turned round to talk to one of the shopkeepers, remembering my original intention of asking directions. The place was empty. Some old pieces of hessian drifted across a floor thick with dust. The wooden counters were bare - no till, no charity collection. The shelves were bare and dusty - no tins or boxes of goods. Forty years had passed in the opening of a door, swept away by sunlight.

I felt an incredible sense of loss, a desire to recapture the moment when I had walked into to the general store and talked to people from long gone. There was a sense of wanting to recapture the moment, of emptiness and desolation, incredible, indescribable sadness.

I walked round the building several times, but the door which had invited me in now swung loose on its hinges. The polished windows were thick with years of grime. The interior remained stubbornly empty. I could not get back to that friendly shop which I had entered a few moments earlier and which had been erased from reality with the opening of a door.

I was left with an incredible sense of loss and loneliness and wanting to turn back time to recapture something (or some feeling) I couldn't even name!

THE HUNTER
Copyright 1995, S Hartwell
(9 November 1995 - a strange storylike dream of a shape-changing individual pursued by a tireless hunter; this is very much "as it happened" and no effort to make it into a story. The dream was absolute paranoia and terrifying, especially the way it ended.)

I knew he had been following me. At one point I had even taken the shape of a bird and flown to the Far Isles, but within days the man with dark curled hair and the look of a raptor in his face had appeared again. I sensed that he was a predator and I the prey, but I could not work out why I was being hunted and stalked or what he wanted. For now he hung back, ready to make his move when I had finally exhausted all of my options. Tired, I took bird-shape again and flew back to the mainland.

"I don't understand it," I said to a friend, "He's been following at a distance for ages now, but he never seems ready to make his move. I can't tell what he wants so I don't know what to do about it. All I can do is keep running away!"

"If I was you, I'd keep running," my friend said. "Word is that he's a genetically engineered marksman and he's just waiting for a suitable chance to finish you off."

"Finish me? He could have done that dozens of times. No matter what I do he always catches up with me."

"He wants you alone - no-one to see him shoot you. And he savours your fear. A marksman enjoys the thrill of the stalk with the prey never knowing when he will choose to end it."

"But why? What have I ever done that someone wants to set a stalker onto me?"

"I don't know. But it's all he can be. He's designed to never give up the hunt. He'll enjoy the challenge of the chase until you're exhausted. You can't escape from a marksman. He probably knows your planned movements as well, he might be waiting for you when you go to the stables on Sunday night."

Oh God, the stables! It was a regular Sunday night job and I would be alone. Why did someone want me dead? Was it because I was a metamorph - there were now dozens of metamorphs around so why me? This stalker would never quit, whatever I did he would get me. Sunday night he would be waiting. Maybe if I asked for someone else to do the night watch ...

"You could get someone else to do your shift," my friend said, "but that would mean going over to arrange it with Sue and he could be lying in wait in case you do just that."

Destiny - I couldn't escape it. Would he do it before or after I had done my shift? Would it be quick or would I end up begging, grovelling before the genetically engineered assassin shot me? I felt queasy with fear and an excess of adrenalin. I wanted to be brave, but I was being methodically hunted by someone whose sole purpose in life was to extinguish me.

That afternoon I went over to see Sue; I had to risk it. Maybe I could hang on for a few more days. A life spent running is little more than an existence, but the urge to survive a little longer was strong. Sue invited me inside for a cup of tea. I accepted. I need something to keep me sane.

"I'd like you to meet a friend of mine. This is Marc." she said.

A man with dark curly hair and a predator's face walked out of the kitchen into the room.

"Hello," he said, smiling and levelling a handgun at my chest as I tried to back away.

No time for begging or pleading, no grovelling, no time even for dignified bravery, only silent, helpless terror. For all the chase was long and hopeless, the execution would at least be quick.

NECRA AND THE POLITICS OF THE DEAD
Copyright 1995, S Hartwell
(This was a rather scary dream narrative which I've written down pretty much just as it happened. I've no idea which city Necra is supposed to represent in the waking world.)

The streets of Necra were thronged despite the banners proclaiming Unicorn Day. The banners were strung from building to building like Christmas greeting banners, but proclaiming that each member of the Dead could convert up to 10 new recruits on Unicorn Day. The tall red buildings in the town centre hinted at Victorian brick terraces, their ground floor rooms converted to shops and offices where the upstairs rooms used to be. Like so many things in Necra, the houses had been converted.

People seemed oblivious to Unicorn Day as they moved around, some aimlessly and inviting attention, others purposefully and cautiously as they moved from shop to shop, or home after necessary errands. It was dangerous for the living to venture out onto the streets during this day when the dead ruled. Not even Living Rights activists left their homes on this day.

Personally, I could not distinguish between the Living and the Dead. This sort of ignorance is highly dangerous in Necra, where a dagger in the ribs could enlist a member of the Living into the ranks of Necra's Dead Faction. The Dead were jealous of their living fellows despite needing them. Despite the Dead's ultimate reliance on the Living, extreme factions wanted to rid Necra of the Living altogether and Unicorn Day, with its hidden spiral-blade daggers, was the High Council's concession to the growing ranks and stronger demands of the powerful Dead Faction.

Since I could not distinguish who among the crowd was Dead and who was Living, I was relieved to get out of the crowd and into the Hotel Aera where I would be safe from the daggers of Unicorn Day. The Dead could only convert people on the streets, a concession the Dead made to the Living Rights lobby.

Once Necra had been Vivia, city of the living, and then some meddlesome fool had found a way to reanimate a body, but that body relied on some sort of emanations of a Living person in order to survive. Soon people were reviving recently deceased friends and family. They fed, benignly enough, on the energy given off by their Living friends. But the Dead were like a cancer. They did not age and in time their numbers grew as they brought back the people who had brought them back. Soon whole families were Dead. The Dead demanded rights, then equality and recognition as an ethnic minority. Soon the Living were the ethnic minority in Necra. To be Dead was to be 'perfect'.

The Dead continued in their suspended state as they had in life. They 'lived' at home, worked with Living colleagues and envied the Living on whom they depended for 'life'.

Beyond the iodized glass of the Aera's lobby, a scuffle broke out. A member of the Living fell. A new recruit of the Dead rose. Living tourists and visitors stayed safe inside the Aera's foyer while less foolhardy Necran's hid at home. The foolhardy, resident and visitor alike, took their chances outside and had nothing to lose but mortality and possibly everything to gain. Tourists flocked to Necra, intrigued by the politics of the Dead. The High Council had Dead Councillors. The Dead demanded proportional representation to swing the power balance in their favour.

Purist Dead wanted the Living eliminated. They gave no thought to how they would survive without life energy. Once Dead had lived at home with their friends, but more and more the Dead kept the Living as pets, as captives or livestock, to drink their energy. The Living dissipated this energy endlessly without missing it and it could support two or three Dead, but as more and more joined the Dead, the Living's numbers fell and it was becoming a status symbol to own one. The Living lived shorter, frailer lives as the demands on their energy grew.

Living visitors were safe inside the Aera Hotel. Only when you shook hands with the staff did you realise that they were Dead. Providing a safe place for Unicorn Day tourists allowed them to use our energy. Could they all survive when all of Necra was Dead and tourists were scared away? Would the Dead Necrans "die" without the Living, and would Necra itself be reclaimed by the Living and become Vivia again? Or would the Dead expand away from Necra to Paris, London, Moscow, New York until all Earth was Dead?

The Living could not rise up - in a fight, each Living death was a Dead recruit. The Dead simply got up again unless flamed, dismembered (and even then the bits writhed awfully) or crushed to pulp. Few Living could stomach that sort of carnage.

Around Hotel Aera, people thronged in a carnival of death and rebirth. Those outside dared the daggers of the Dead; some were pressed up against the windows of the Aera though they might as well have been a mile away from safety. Selfishly, each member of the Dead sought his or her ten recruits to the cause. Some of the Living sought escape, others sought conversion.

On a street corner not far from the scrum outside the Aera, one of the Dead poured petrol over herself and ended her non-existence.

MONOTONY
Dream – sometime 1990s

A world with a race of workers, each conditioned to do repetitive tasks. After they had learnt their task and it became habitual, the hippocampus (part of the brain involved in making memories) of each had been destroyed so they never got bored. They always performed their monotonous tasks as if each time is the first time. They live each moment as if it is their only waking moment, frozen in a single lifelong minute of time like a fly in amber.

SERENITY
Dream - 1988

I was sitting in my car, broken down on the hard shoulder of a busy motorway, trying to rev the engine into some semblance of normality. It coughed twice, turned over with a groan of complaint and began to run raggedly. A short distance ahead was an exit slip road with a motorway bridge across the carriageways. Easing the car into first gear I crept forwards hoping to build up enough speed to move into the slow lane, either to get to the nearest emergency phone or to get the wretched vehicle off of the motorway at the next exit. I coaxed it a few yards forwards, ready to slip into second, then (hopefully) third and accelerate hard into a gap. Looking over my shoulder I saw a huge "Yorkie" style truck screeching as it careered onto the hard shoulder. The metal radiator grille loomed larger in my rear-view mirror as it bore down on my small vehicle and I could see the driver’s face, pale with shock before the metal grille filled the entire rear-view mirror. Before I could build up speed the truck impacted. I heard no bang, no tearing of metal, no torturous sounds of my car as it vanished beneath the monstrous truck. One moment the radiator grille filled my entire field of vision, then the world winked out of existence as though I had closed my eyes. No sound, no pain - nothing - as though everything had winked out of being.

.... a long timeless blankness during which I was conscious of nothing but my wondering mind .....

.... aware of being nothing but pure consciousness, no biofeedback from my body, I was pure essence of consciousness, pure disembodied thought, floating free in ‘blackness’ ....

.... utter peace, tranquility, serenity, calmness, as I floated without form or flesh ...

.... gradually I became aware of other essences of thought in the void, perceived as though they were stars twinkling in a universe and I was another pinpoint of light-thought-being ....

Intact, dazed and impossibly thrown clear, I wandered down the verge towards another stranded motorist standing at the emergency phone. I called out but he seemed not to hear me above the roar and grumble of traffic. I tapped his shoulder - no reaction. In frustration, I turned to look at my vehicle, yards behind me and saw in the tangled mess of metal shrouded in smoke, an arm draped limply from a crevice in the wreck and I realised why no-one had noticed my ‘miraculous’ escape.

(There is no real way of describing the ‘awareness of being aware’, ‘pure disembodied consciousness’ or floating in a void which I could not perceiving through any conventional senses; nor of the other ‘consciousnesses’ which I likened to stars. However, I have no fear of death anymore; the process of dying is another matter entirely though!)

442, THE YEAR OF THE WHITE BOAR
Dream – December 1988

(A very odd, short but intense dream where the date seemed significant.)

It is said that a white boar can be seen to run from a spot on the hillside to the hillcrest and there to vanish. On the spot from which it rises, in 442 AD, it was felled by a hunting party and each member of that party died in mysterious circumstances, to be buried communally in a barrow at the hillcrest. Now by moonlight on the chalk downs, the boar rises from the place it fell to mock those who hunted the faerie beast. And, it is said, in the barrow, the mortal remains of a royal hunting party rises in celebration of a hunting victory never celebrated in life.

ONLY TWO DAYS
S Hartwell, 1984

(Most of my nightmares are surreal, but this was a real nightmare which used my real life and real people as the backdrop. I was grateful to wake up after this experience.)

"You have only two days to live," the doctors told me.

They said it clinically, as though stating some universally known truth such as "the sun is hot."

"The feeling of nausea you describe is the sensation of internal haemorrhaging," cold, clinical facts repeated like an automaton, "We suggest you enjoy yourself - the end, when it comes, will be quick and without warning. Until then, you can live normally …"

Normally? How can I live normally for two days knowing that the blood vessels in my brain were a timebomb and that no-one could defuse it?

"…. Eat as you like, drink - to excess even, smoke - it won't make any difference at this stage. Experiment with drugs if you wish, they can't do any additional damage at this stage."

I remembered all the times I'd played "what would you do if you had only five minutes to live?" (applied to "if the nuclear bomb warning went off"). Most people intended to die of sexual exhaustion first though they would have to find a partner and the downside for women was that most women would be vapourised before having an orgasm (please Mr President, can you give us twenty minutes warning so I have time to climax first?).

But humans are creatures of habit. I decided to live out my two days as though nothing had changed. My emotions seemed deadened, as though part of me had been cauterised or cut away. I felt empty and as hollow as though someone had torn my guts from me. I also felt the multitudinous pinpoint haemorrhages leaking their life-giving redness into my bowel and lungs, felt the small ruptures enlarge and join up into long rents in my blood vessels. I felt sick.

Gary was the first person I met back at college and he offered me his lecture notes to copy up.

"It isn't worth it," I told him cheerfully, "I won't be sitting my finals."

"You're leaving?"

"I'm dying," I said - cold fact - "I have two days at the most."

My words seemed not to hit him. He laughed in an embarrassed, apologetic way. I began to laugh with him, laughing at my own impending death as if it was all make believe or a sick joke. As I did so, I could feel the inner alveolar surfaces of my lungs rupturing, leaking blood and fluid into my lungs. I coughed as I was robbed of breathing surface. Blood flecked my painted lips and tasted metallic in my mouth. My throat felt ragged.

"Oh my God, you mean it," he breathed (my God, let me breathe, I was thinking) and he looked stunned.

I could only nod as inside me I could feel my vena cava leak its blackish airless blood into my body cavities, bathing my organs in escaped fluid.

Words rushed through my mind, at the most … at the most … at the most. They filled my head like a train rushing headlong, like a swelling tide, like the tide of meningeal fluid leaking through the membranes and finding a channel behind my nose and down my throat. Their steady flow, bitter in my mouth, choked me; bursting haemorrhages filled me; images tumbled through my starved, depleted brain, crowding out the real world into muffled greyness.

My words came stickily from my mouth, dripping blood as I tried to form coherent words.

Breathless words from suffocating, asphyxiating, drowning lungs.

Famous last words ….

"…. At the most."

…. And with a dying, gurgling, choking voice, I died, drowning in my own body fluids.

(I was very grateful to wake up - gasping for breath - from this dream.)

DALE FLIERS
S Hartwell, 1979

Dale Fliers were born - and died - in a dream back in about 1979. The dream was a premonition of what would become of football (i.e. soccer, English Football) if TV really took over and the sport became on entertainment side-show. The dream (or nightmare) was particularly vivid and was set in the year 2089, ten years after football had been made illegal because of the mindless violence it seemed to inspire in its followers. In the dream I knew the date.

I remember standing in a grimy back-street which was hardly reached by the daylight. I was leaning against a dingy wall from which peeled old posters. To my left was a glassless window; the white paint peeling from the rotting wood frame. Opposite me, across this forgotten back-street littered with rotting paper, dirty cans and bright slivers of glass, was a tall, grimy, whitewashed wall.

I looked up at the towering, castle-like wall before me. Whitewash hung from it on flakes of plaster. Dust and cobwebs had accumulated over ten years. Vandals had defaced the grimy whiteness with pen and spray-paint. At a height of about five feet from the ground, someone had sprayed what I understood to be a protest in large, black capital letters:

Let me recall a recurring nightmare I have had in recent years. It is the Saturday before Christmas and after watching "Match Of The Day" I fall asleep in my armchair and dream about football's future. The dream foretells a Cup Final on Christmas Day between the two best supported clubs of that time - call them Manchester United and Liverpool.

DRAGONQUEEN'S LAIR

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