Night of 25th June 2010

It's like a Japanese TV gala event. The stars are all wearing garish, kitsch kimonos and glitzy dinner suits. We approach the event from outside, I notice three girls walking ahead of us. None of them are sexy; they look bandy and malnourished. As with Japanese TV now, most of the stars are comedians. I sense the girls in front were a trio.

It's still early and we weren't fashionably late. The gala is barely populated, and the desperate few who have already arrived wait about looking for something to cling to onto, to assuage the shame of being there before anyone else. As we walk in, I'm relieved to see a safe pair of hands, someone I can latch onto who has better than the rest (here) cool credentials. He appears to me as a handsome Japanese man, but at the same time as Simon Day, and I infer that he, too, is one member of a trio—"Neptunes," an off-kilter mainstream Japanese comedy act (once off-kilter, now thoroughly mainstream).

He's wearing a pink kimono set-up, very like New Year's dress, but pink rather than conservative black and grey. Though I know him, and he (appears to) knows me, I sense we are passing acquaintances, who only knew each other by name. Perhaps this is the first time we've actually met. Simon is waxing lyrical about some daifuku (Japanese sweets) that he's wolfing down in the waiting area. He says they are the best because they are old-school daifuku, traditional, not like the over-sweetened shit people love nowadays. The daifuku are also pink. He's very proud of the daifuku, and continues that they are the real thing, and he got them from Sainsbury's.

Simon is with his wife, who is not very attractive. There is another comedian with his wife, who is much more attractive, though colder, and I suspect some unspoken bond between the other wife and Simon. It's only a suspicion.

Though no drink has been obvious, Simon is getting drunk. The show is still a way from starting and we make our way about the place, looking for Simon's comedic partners. We're outside, away from the gala building, but not far, and I see what looks like a concrete tower block and a regular, if dingy, looking street. Simon heads off toward it, seeming to think that his friends, or someone he knows is there. I stay put, but am aware of Simon's progress by overhearing his loud words, and catching the occasional glimpse of him between parked cars, etc.

Simon hasn't found his partners, but has found someone he knows—and is very happy about it. He's happier because at last he's come across someone he actually knows rather than just passing acquaintances (me) or other showbiz cronies that have to be pandered to. He is very drunk so this relief/happiness is barely concealed—I hear him bellowing how great it is to see you, and God all those fucking people, etc. He's getting ever more animated and excited and that's when it happens.

Simon fell off the tower block.

The person he was with screams/shouts and at this instant I know something is seriously wrong (I didn't see the fall). Simon hits the ground. The person in the tower block jumps down after him; but their jump is controlled, they land on their feet. I rush toward the crash site.

Simon is still far away, but there are two people over him. He's staring past them into space—the sense is, he's on his way out. The closer I get, the more his two friends retreat. I'm quite shocked by this; it's like they want to palm him off on someone and wash their hands.

I get over Simon, there is a blanket over him, he's losing consciousness. The back of his head is smashed. I don't see the wound, but the back of his head is soggy, and blood is pooling under it. The others have fled. I'm not going to leave him.

I hold Simon's hand and put the thought of his wife and friends firmly in my head—almost as though just thinking of them would be the same as shouting for them, or calling the emergency services.

It seems to have worked. Simon's wife approaches from the darkness of the street with a few people in tow. She is less than distraught, takes an analytic look from distance and leaves Simon. I stay there, holding his hand, trying to keep him conscious, though he is no longer. Next the other wife skips in, she is distraught. Yes, Simon must have been having an affair with her—my suspicions were correct, the truth of them is revealed. But she too, only comes within a few steps of the smashed up Simon. She runs away. I can't believe no-one is stepping in to help me keep Simon going; just to comfort him in his last moments. But no, nothing.

I sense Simon has gone. His body is heavy and limp; his eyes closed; his chest lifeless. I roll him over slightly, a result of trying to rouse him. I see the wound: the back of his head is completely gone; a mess of pink tissue and yellow brain pokes out the wide open crevice in the back of his skull. Bits of head scattered about like chunks of watermelon dot the vicinity.

I wake.

Night of 13th June 2010

It begins with skateboarding. In the village where I grew up, at the curved stretch of pavement between the baker's and the florist bordered on both sides by water - the dam on one side, running water down below on the other - I see myself taking runs, from the florist toward the baker, at a stone bench (in real life there were two wooden benches at this spot that I really used to skate when I was a kid; the stone block is a real stone block that I skated as an adult in Tokyo). I'm not that good initially, I gave up skating over 4 years ago, I'm rusty; someone asks me why I've picked it up again. I say, faux heroically, sometimes you don't want to skate, then sometimes you watch an old H-street video...

At this point the image switches and I watch Phil Anselmo, the lead singer of Pantera, as a professional skater in an old 90s style skate video—in the footage, he is skating the exact same spot in the village. He is doing manuals on the stone bench and kick flipping out. As Phil was in his prime, he is physically powerful, wiry, and his skating reflects this—it's snappy, full-blooded, dynamic. But limited (these tricks are now normal).

I glance at the bench, it's still the same grey granite color and has the same uneven sides with a glassy marbled top (the top was great for skating); but there are three lines, columns, rows of bench now—one attached to the next, each higher than the previous, arranged like steps (though in some views it seems one step is barely any higher than the previous). The bench has stretched too, it's no longer the length of the Tokyo bench (enough room for two or three), it stretches almost the length of the florist's to the baker's.

I'm going back to set up for a run at the bench. I'm past the florist's, and my ex-colleague Matsuo (from waking life) is with me. He was an architecture graduate (but never practiced and wasn't particularly savvy) and I begin to complain about the architectural style of the bench to him. I complain about its tacky modern minimalism - like corporate building design - its ugly on economic purpose; and look about for a comparison. I see the store (what used to be Somerfield in the village) and it has huge windows like the palace at Versailles (not a feature of the real store). The windows aren't genuine works of art like the palace at Versailles, but modern imitations/interpretations—something the first modernists in the 20s or 30s might have done. Looking again they look like imitations of the imitations—I see the detail in the semi-circular tops of the window are just painted on the glass instead of being real lead or metal work. But still, at least an effort at some pretense of art has been made and I point it out to nodding Matsuo; Look at that, you see the difference, it's Neo-, Neo-?, Neo-Deco. Matsuo seems to understand what I'm driving at.

I'm making another run at the bench, but this time it isn't clear that it's me—I see the image in third person, and don't feel as connected as before. Me/the skater is exceptionally good, very very good—I/they can do anything. I carve a bench long back-smith, backside flip out, then begin doing a series of PJ Lad style flat tricks. Ollies are popping very high, and right at the end, by the baker's, I nollie a cone.

I'm thinking about how to email some wine. I see the wine in a cylindrical container and know this is the sample from the bottle; I want to send this. But can't quite figure out how to email it (the physical wine). I try an email and the wine is attached as a series of jpegs, perhaps 6, but I'm convinced something is not right. It troubles me.

It's the sequel to Twin Peaks, Anthony Hopkins stars as the special agent (perhaps Dale Cooper). This sequel is certainly a DTV thing, and the whole idea of a sequel and being DTV leaves me skeptical of the quality and sure it'll be a joke. But it's earnestly good in the way some DTV and sympathetic sequels or spin-offs can be.

I can't be sure of the order of events, but the following took place in the show:

1) Laura Palmer last moments sequence in animation. It was perhaps more like a bargain basement rotoscoping effect, but I saw this whole section as though it were a computer animation. Laura was slightly different - but recognizably Laura - her look seemed tuned for the Japanese audience—she looked like women do in Anime.

It must be the moments leading to her death, she is coming on to someone (falsely, it's just her job as a prostitute) and I see her framed, bust up, in a purple dress talking in a smokey voice. The words are lost on me in waking, but I'm sure she was taunting. Then she was bragging—that she'd had sex 15 times in one session, from one man (whether this was the killer, I can't recall).

She is then having sex, she's on the bottom, and I see the killer for the first time, from Laura's perspective below. Again, it's like an Anime shot, very stylized; the killer is a blond male with a strong jaw line and distant, mad blue eyes. His hair is short. He grins madly and cuts Laura on the left cheek. It may have just been with his sharp finger nail.

2) Dale Cooper in the car park. Dale meets up with the civil servant he knew from the first Twin Peaks (no such character in original real series). The civil servant is dirty and Dale knew it, perhaps Dale had found him out and sent him down in the conclusion to the first Twin Peaks. So now, Dale can trust him in a way—he knows what he is, and that he's been marked by it. The civil servant may in fact be the mayor.

He is pleading with Dale to get in his car and go with him somewhere: trust me, trust me, etc. Though Dale is untrusting, he eventually relents and agrees to drive to where the mayor wants him to go. They walk to Dale's car, get in, and at this moment two henchmen types get in Dale's car. The mayor steals out. It must have been revenge!

The mayor walks over to his large executive sedan, an american car, and gets in the driver's side. He starts the engine and slowly drives out of the car park.

3) Dale in his colleague's bedroom. Dale (Hopkins) is with his old Police buddy continuing the search. His old friend thinks it's a pointless, or damaging/dangerous, case and is trying to convince Dale there's nothing in it. But Dale is driven by something his buddy can't understand. Dale continues trying to crack the case.

He is carefully cutting some flowers and leaves from green ground. The flowers and leaves are tiny, and Dale is being very careful using specialist sowing clippers. The clippings are evidence and this is the reason Dale is taking them.

Suddenly, the meadow from which Dale was extracting little flowers and leaves is his buddy's bedroom duvet. His aged buddy and his buddy's wife are in bed, and Dale is on it, in their bedroom. Dale is still clipping the four leaved clover away from its stem very carefully, while the couple look on from the head of the bed. I'm impressed at the four leaved clover. The wife is initially cross that Dale is here doing work; but Dale charms her as he always has in his wounded single male way. She falls for it, as she always has, in her caring passive lover/mother way.

I see the wife's old grey face, her eyebrows in particular—they are very thin and have been trimmed/manicured. It's slightly alarming, but not sinister or scary. The woman's features, too, are thin—bird like or almost ratty, but dignified. Perhaps a little witch-like.

4) Dale in his apartment. My denim folder from my old work is half stuck through Dale's letterbox (from the inside), there's something above it, maybe an A4 yellow legal pad, also clamped in the jaws of the letterbox. Not clamped in the letterbox, but rested on the platform the denim folder and legal pad make, is a small object—perhaps a black case, like a ring case or cigarette case.

Dale's friend is with him in his apartment. He's again remonstrating with Dale. Dale hasn't noticed the black case, he walks past it several times. His buddy, however, does. He takes it, trying to pass it to Dale.

The wine is still playing on my mind. I see a sequence of 90s music and images. The last of which is three Sony televisions on a chrome stand with black plastic bits on it in the middle of a red desert. The tvs are arranged in vertical, spiraling order—like a DNA helix. The main chrome support is a straight bar, vertical but angled. Off it, short storks come out which hold a tv - the stork into the side of the tv - and the tvs are not directly above one another but staggered about the main bar. I see the arrangement, as though it were a shot in a 90s tv ad, from below: the lowest (nearest) tv is huge and the furthest tiny—there must be some kind of fish-eye or special perspective lens on the camera. It's very dramatic and self-important (c.f., it's an ad) at any rate.

I wake.

Night of 12th June 2010

It's an old world setting, the age of sail. There are two girls, perhaps I'm one of them, once aristocratic but now sold into some sort of slavery or servitude because they were found to be charades. They were found out with a false gift of iced buns: giving them to the man, he realized that it was a slight mistake of ceremony—real aristocrats give something similar, but not iced buns, and this faux par tripped his suspicion. He commandeers the women. In the final image, I'm plunged into the open ocean.

We three (men) are on a trip or quest, the setting is again historic—medieval. One of us is Viggo Mortensen, as Hidalgo. We're walking a dirt path through a wood or copse, the trees are not thick around us, rather there are slim trunked trees and grassy floors either side of us. It may be spring or autumn, the trees are not thickly leaved, but not barren either—many branches are thin and twig like.

Viggo has fallen. I see his felled body through a U-shaped break in the twigs: he is not on the dirt track, but on the wooded side, the setting is autumnal now—the twigs and woods is yellow and red. I step through the U-shaped break in the twigs/hedge/saplings. I have a sense of deja vu, Viggo has fallen like this before, however something is different this time—there is a cylindrical lump missing from Viggo's lower body as we check it: perhaps from the side of his rump or upper leg. This missing piece was important and without it we don't now what to do. The quest cannot continue.

I go back to Viggo's body and remove his sword and dagger. The dagger is very long, more the length of a gladius than a dagger; unlike a gladius though, the blade is curved—Eastern. The sword is also curved, almost a comic scimitar. On the sword's blade are three lines or lines of text—I do not know this text, but it is magical and holds the key to the quest. The other man declares that this, the text or what it intones, is a computer. I sense the power of the sword and text.

I wake.

Night of 4th June 2010

It starts very high in the sky. I'm tracking some fighter pilots—it seems a rookie is in training, he has a modern fighter, and his mission is to hunt two other bogies, flown by his experienced instructors. The bogies are MIGs: a black one and a white one. I see the black one bank away and I'm tracking the white one.

It's descending but the design is not a MIG; it looks quite space-age, in a 70s way—the way a Lotus Esprit looks space age in a 70s way. The MIG is doing barrel rolls as it descends, however the rolls of the plane are quite unique: sometimes the body rolls in its entirety (the pilot rolls with the body), an orthodox sight; other times only the wings and forward body roll—the pilot, the cockpit, does not roll. The wings and forward chassis rolling while the cockpit does not seems like a nut spinning round a bolt. The MIG bombs down through the air.

It passes a huge balloon - some kind of altitude marker - and the pilot has to eject. He is still the experienced, senior, instructor, and I sense he is exactly Tom Skerritt (the "Top Gun" instructor from the synonymous film). He's parachuted out and is falling down to the ocean. Skerritt plunges into the water and sinks deep down.

My perspective is now first person. As the waters darken and deepen, I see two divers waiting for me with outstretched arms. They take hold of me and fix some breathing equipment over my mouth—not diving equipment, but the medical muzzles hospitals use when administering gaseous anaesthetic. I'm pulled into the undersea base.

We're in what is my house though it's unknown to me, I guess it must be the new house that Nana and I are currently searching for in waking life. It's a smallish, few bedroomed family house. My parents are visiting.

All the pets are wreaking havoc. I think a small kitten has first caused some chaos, and I'm embarrassed as it leaves a bad impression. Soon a chimpanzee like monkey has appeared from upstairs. I didn't know we had a monkey, but as it appears I know its name and it is familiar to me. It begins to get out of control, and my parents have to step in and care for it—what should be my job as it's my pet. My parents are very understanding and don't criticize me for not being able to handle having a chimpanzee, even though I was the one who took it on. I'm conscious of that and try to take-over. I'm not very successful, the monkey writhes about and is generally very restless. It escapes, and we're all calling its name.

I, or my parents, begin to think that domesticating a wild chimpanzee was silly, and it'd be best to loose the chimpanzee from the house and our care. My father takes control, and with my mother they take the chimpanzee away—presumably to loose it, perhaps to dump it.

I wake.

Night of 3rd June 2010

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are in fierce armed conflict in the garden of the house I grew up in. I watch from my bedroom window (not my original bedroom, but my sister's old room that I moved to).

It's nearing the decisive moment of the battle, Jobs has gotten the upper hand—his advantage seems technical rather than numerical; and it's still obvious that Gates has more weapons and firepower. I'm switched from an "opera seat" style view (out of my window) to a floating perspective, again in the air, on the road outside—I'm looking at the hedges and driveway entrance.

Jobs is in there somewhere, and Gates knows it. This is Gates's chance to eliminate Jobs and sink Jobs's victory. Helicopter gun ships hover to my left and unleash a ripping salvo of missiles at the hedge where Jobs is trying to steal to/from. Finally, one of the gunships launches the killer weapon, the biggest killing instrument, the "nuclear option" though I don't think it's a nuclear weapon. A long torpedo like missile is fired and slips through the air very slowly and very very menacingly. It cruises toward the hedge. Jobs darts out. The missile strikes in slow motion like an image of a car in a crash test. Blue waves of plasma sphere out of the hedge—whether Steve Jobs was killed or not seems irrelevant now, everything is ruined. I wake.

Night of 31st May 2010

We're all together in the house I grew up in. There are many rooms (as there really were) and each is populated by people from my real life. Events are a little jumbled to me, now in waking, but the following took place:

1) Our neighbours from Pakistan are in the loft bedroom. I see Moina, the Mum who I'm close with, attending to her son Ehsan and Samina (his wife) who are stood in front of a mirror. Moina is behind fiddling with one of them, maybe their hair or so on. I act casual and hostlike and go to give Moina a social kiss, no pretense of ceremony, etc., just kiss her on the cheek in a savvy way (of course very pretentious). As I get close Moina is too high, she must be standing on a chair, etc., and the kiss is muddled—Moina also does not fully reciprocate the "oh, Hi!" pretension of my greeting kiss.

2) In a lower bedroom, perhaps my first bedroom in the house, are Pedro and Dani—my Spanish friends from university. They are playing video games, Tekken, as we all used to when I was a student and very into the game. I used to be extremely good at this game in waking life, in the top 5 of the country, and the Spanish were always impressed. They continued to play after university, trying to emulate me (I like to think); but I quickly dropped video games after graduation—I think playing these games is very childish now.

The Spanish are in bed, and the room is scattered, like a sleepover looks the next day. I look at the screen and they have selected a secret character unknown to me. It is some kind of comicy character (most the characters in Tekken were based on macho stereotypes; secret characters were mostly the same, with one exception: "Gon," a miniature dinosaur). The character has a first and last name, uniquely, but it is lost on me in waking. I'm surprised that the Spanish have reached the level of knowing something about Tekken that I don't. They invite me to play; I say no, though I know I can still beat them easily if I wish.

3) I get out of bed and feel intense pain in my legs. I see an image of them: the backs of my legs are hideously sunburnt—the skin is a pink/red, with a strong purple undertone. I appeal to Nana for help (she was a Nurse in real life). The problem has now morphed: the backs of my legs are covered in meadows of disgusting black-heads. The acne is big and pronounced: each spot looks like a mini-volcano, with a black nib that looks like a bee-sting sunk in the flesh.

It's horrid and I want to get rid of it at any cost. I hurriedly appeal to Nana again, and she begins to pop the acne. Porridge-like ooze pops out of the spots, and I furiously join Nana in squeezing them.

4) I walk into the Australian arcade (game-centre). As I used to, I stroll in and hunt for the Tekken machine—and as long ago, I'm confident whoever is on it will be unready for someone with my skills. I stay near the door, but can't see a machine, in fact I can't see many players either—this arcade is not much fun. There is, what looks like, a Tekken machine with red buttons and a red joystick, with a white body; but the machine is turned against another so that people can't sit in front of the controls and play a game—a redundant or broken machine perhaps. I can't see another Tekken machine, or Tekken player anywhere.

But I choose to get some change and play something. I find the change machine, and someone is walking away from it as I approach. I put my coin in and wait. The coin exit doesn't look like a coin-exit should, it looks like the dispenser of a coffee machine: a plastic grill, wet, a bit dirty. My change doesn't come out; a large spider comes out. It is not the kind of spider with hair-thin legs and a chunky body, it has both chunky legs and body—like a tarantula, etc. But it is not hairy. It's a sandy yellow color and looks very generic—like a mass-produced genetically engineered spider.

I can't pick the spider up. I bat it out of the coin collect / coin exit, and it hits the floor. It moves, perhaps attempting to escape, and I try to kill it with some kind of liquid, maybe water. The killing liquid works, the spider's legs curl in, its motionless in the puddle of liquid. I go to pick it up, perhaps I even pick it up.

The arcade closes, the few players who were there file out. I follow them. The lights go out as I leave on to the night Australian street.

I wake