A Disintegration Loop

I was hoping to add a minimum of one entry per month, but I am currently a little snowed under with work and my PhD, so have decided to make this post-26th birthday dream the last one for the year, with Twenty following at some stage in the first week of 2010. This particular recollection was ridiculously bright, and happened in an easily recognizable Luton, making a pleasing (though disconcerting) change from the usual city based ramblings of my brain. For other reasons, the dream is recreated on my main blog (tisar.wordpress), elaborated on, taken on detours etc. 'In Luton, well...initially some nondescript countryside outside Luton, where a small community has sprung up around an impressive tree, with a face carved in to it. There are buildings of various kinds, a factory, a threshers (in the tradional sense of that word), a milliners and a pub called 'The ____ Horse'. I go there with friends, as a sort of pub crawl. Start in the country and move to the town is the ide...

This was probably the first dream I can remember having since moving back to York. It obviously harks back to specific childhood memories, blended with the usual cast of people from when I was younger (except the comedian). Misc sexual references to trains I would assume is related to Hitchcock, but perhaps Zizek is the best judge of that. Lots of symbols to wrap teeth around. 'Wandering through Putteridge Bury. An indistinct beginning, following that much traveled road to the farmhouse and dried up pond. A man spins a sports car on some gravel alongside a barn conversion I am unfamiliar with (I realised when I work up that I did know the barn...odd that whilst asleep my brain wouldn't recognise it). I walk along the track to where the old white house should be, next to the greenhouse my Dad used to own. Instead, just scrub land and some kids jumping on a knackered trampoline. I meander towards what I assume is Great Hayes; there is a long row of portaloos by the roadside. I fi...

A distinctly wintery feel with this one. Unusually centred around somewhere other than the city which was both a pleasant surprise and ultimately disturbing. I have found my sleeping patterns have altered noticeably since leaving a job that required a 5am start, and as a result the nocturnal ramblings I have have been allowed some space to mutate more. 'Somewhere in Russia, in a collection of fields and mounds surrounded by barbed wire fences. I assume it is a gulag. Myself and Zoe are investigating a disappearance. At one end the field passes through a rusted gate to a crumbling road. We meet a man on the road who runs a kebab shop from his garage. I ask him some questions as his English is good (I seem to have checked first) but he is reluctant to answer them. He does reveal that the fenced area is not a former gulag but is actually an old zoo. After purchasing a 'chicken burger' we return, only to be chased by a bear through some woodland to the north of the zoo. We for...

Long pause between posts owing to house moving and a lack of internet connection for over six weeks. Most frustrating. The intervening period has however furnished me with some new and skewed meanderings inside the subconscious underworld. The first, as you can guess from the reference to a certain daily newspaper, is from a while ago. The second (a double post to make up for the absence) came from a book I found whilst packing that contains notes on a defunct record label, conversations not appropriate for verbal discussion and occasional nocturnal recollections. 15. A warehouse, not dissimilar to Asda, where everything comes in multicoloured stacked boxes. Most boxes hold copies of The Times. I tell someone that they're not selling because they're not as cool as the new Berliner format Guardian (depressing how sad I am even in dreams). Later, am on an island, a little like the one in Lost. At one point I even ask when Walt is coming back. There are a crack team of commandos a...

Longish entry, again City based, obviously inspired by reading Millennium People. Happened about a fortnight ago, since when I have been largely unable to remember nocturnal occurrences, aside from one where I spent a long time drinking whisky like it was water. Hopefully this trend will evaporate once my time at the supermarket is terminated next week... I am a police informant/spy, and have infiltrated a terrorist organization based in a waterfront property in some old Victorian-style docks. The waterway is located where West Hampstead Thameslink station is in reality, the train line being a river area. After walking along the planks to the hideout I am greeted by a man with a short beard and small eyes. He tells me to watch the hideout. He'll be back soon, in maybe half an hour. On hearing this and watching him depart, the anti terrorist unit, who I am apparently a part of, mobilise to bug the property. This involves Channel 4's financial correspondent Faizal Islam, dressed...

Shortly before going to Edinburgh with a large group of friends, this is obviously picking up on the underlying concerns of something going wrong (which never happened)...written around 4am; this seems to be a fairly common time for waking for me, presumably influenced by sleep cycles. This one impressed me because I managed to spell nonchalantly correctly despite being almost asleep. I also subsequently visited a bookshop with much anarchist literature. 'On holiday with friends. We appear to be staying in a rocky crevice, in pairs, on a volcano...possibly Vesuvius. My partner is a man called Dan who is tall and thin, with long wiry hair. He is almost entirely grey and resembles no-one I know. During the night, which is not unusually warm, I go out walking along a narrow road. I see shadows of people climbing to the peak of the volcano. I can also see lava spewing out. I rush back to the holiday accommodation to tell the others of the impending danger. My hair briefly catches fire ...

This happened during a night of largely restless sleep. The mornings growing lighter, the birds louder, people go to work earlier, all encroaching on my ability to stay in the realm of subconscious meanderings. Still, I recall waking from this confused as to where I was, and then angry at needing to be at work 'I have lost my job, working in a non specified warehouse. Outside are terraced gardens, the feel of an afternoon spent in rural Italy. A bald man is explaining to me why things have to change, and that when he says 'fired' he means 'being transferred to a distant war'. The warehouse is some sort of command ship. A fat man talks about how the enemy is a self replicating virus that mimics human form. As he explains, the whole place goes in to some kind of lock down, with lights flashing and soldiers running. He suggests I get a gun. All that is left are some out-of-date dusted over technologies, which actually prove to work better than the regular equipment. I ...

This one is semi recent, and reminded me of several places I had been to, alongside the three places I have lived in. Again, the subconscious city is ever present, looming, resourceful in its way via rearranging, regenerating; it is never static. I think this is why I find it so unsettling. This was written at 2.30am, which appears to be a peak time for waking and notation 'I am walking around a hollowed out area, with high brick buildings encircling a sort of square with a tree and a police box, which sits in the centre like the TARDIS. A man, tall and angular, with a candle stands outside it. He is waiting to walk me somewhere. I ask him to wait a while longer, as I have noticed a familiar building. It is my old home, from York I think. I look through the window in to what seems to be the front room. All the rooms, cupboards and fixtures are the same, though contained within one room, like the other rooms are collapsed down in to it. I go inside, as the door is not locked. Inside...

A surprisingly recent entry is in order, and this came fresh from the cortex last night/this morning. 'In an old tall building on the outskirts of the City . Outside, numerous fires rage, rubble is strewn across collapsed streets. I am with a group of friends, and part of some kind of elite squad trying to hold the building from marauding hordes of unknown evil. With me are real life compadres, but also several people from stage and screen whom I should recognise but do not (waking based research indicates these people to be actors Peter Mullan and Michala Banas). I have a weapon, but am told not to use it under any circumstances. This seems strange considering our role as a military unit. We are told to a) contain the threat, voice comes via an unseen radio, and b) make our way to the base of the building and meet up with a security force, which seems to be led by my real life work mate Nick, who has one purple eye. Action shifts relentlessly, I am often confused as to where peopl...

This one had the city as a backdrop, though the longer it went on the more obvious it was to me that I was a long way from home. It reminds me of Cities of the Red Night by William S Burroughs, and also the popular lunchtime soap opera Neighbours. I posted it once before on a now defunct journal elsewhere. 'Old building, on a prairie or any other large expanse of flat open land. The sun here is always setting, the sky a permanent red, fading into yellow where it reaches the floor. The building has no doors or windows, outside is windswept; there always seems to be a chance of rain despite what the sky suggests. I am living next door to an accountancy firm out here in nowhere. A man from the television delivers swivel chairs through a gap in the wall where my door should be. He tells me it needs fixing, I tell him I don’t need any help. He looks around the outside of the house for weeds growing up the brickwork. The accountancy firm is responsible for the chairs in my home, there ar...

This one, I think, has something to do with a computer game, and seeing someone I know/knew in the street, after assuming he was still living in Utah (which he had done). In addition, and totally non related, yesterday evening some men engaged in a bottle fight outside my house. I was in that weird transitional phase of sleep, where the night's reality blended with odd hallucinations. I woke in the morning asking Zoe why we hadn't reacted to the combination of fighting men and church bells ringing to alert people of the coming apocalypse. She informed me the latter didn't happen. The men weren't fighting each other for 'survival' as I had imagined. 'On a train, a GNER one before they went all National Express ( quite why I was bothered by this at 4am when I wrote it I will never remember ), with a man swathed in a headscarf. For the whole of this dream my eyes fail to properly work, and I rub and blink repeatedly hoping they will become fixed. The train goes...

Having worked in a supermarket for longer than I would have wanted, very few of my nocturnal wanderings take place in this space, which is definitely a good thing. These are the three I have written down in the past few years since starting work (and am now only part time thankfully). All of these seem to involve twilight, or an odd relationship with light, which I think is largely down to me working stupid hours. Supermarket, shelves all higher than I expect. Some sort of scam is going on. To me 'Everything here is perfect'. How are they fiddling this? ( I enjoy my lack of detail on what the scam is ). A man, possibly the floor manager from TFI Friday whose name was/is Will, flies about on a hover fan type machine, inspecting things. My mum works there for an unexplained reason, and I tell her this 'Will' character is watching me. She tells me to look busy even though there is really nothing to do. Outside it seems like twilight or a late summers afternoon. Chris is th...

This one was set in what I think was a war torn Albanian type place. Again, it had the feel of the conglomerate city that my dreams exist in, but is obviously detached from any semblance of an actual recognisable town owing to the subject, and it being a disjointed and worrying dream...well...no more worrying than they always are. The main feeling I had with this one was that it was part of some larger whole that I have forgotten (similar in tone to the burgerking fairy car crash and flower meadow attack pattern delta dreams that are currently unpublished, and are likely to remain so), as for the majority of the experience I felt seriously fatigued; a profound weariness set into my supposedly youthful bones. The tiger reminded me of a manticore. 'In a compound, behind some kind of electric fence that has huge childlike green and red buttons for controls. Burch (Mete _ Bator) is the leader of our little gang, wearing odd peaked cap and khakis, and sends us out on missions to find fo...

A long entry, set as I remember it in the usual mangled town (as an aside, Jovum is its name it has been decided, I saw it on a sign. It also turns out to be an obvious misspelling of something else) my brain settles in to...and also the paper place. This features an old friend, whom I no longer speak to for simple reasons; he is a cock. I also thought I remembered this as two separate events but apparently not. The specifics of the cut out town reminds me of Salvador Plascencia's People of Paper, so I elected not to use it in any of The Last Night Tree. As way of an update on 'that', it currently stands at 26000 words, and the initial sections set in Jovum and the United Kingdom, of which all are introductions and plot setting, are just about complete. Characters are in place and characterised. A synopsis of the book will come in a few weeks. This entry was written at 3.46 am 'Wandering around a bizarre cut out town. Some features are familiar to me. Matthew Hyde is ab...

This was a classic example of my being in three states; 1) asleep and imagining this scenario 2) half waking and assuming it is happening in real life and 3) writing it down 'I am woken by the sound of something smashing outside the window in the room where I sleep. I don't pull back the curtain, as I know it is some sort of fire bomb, possibly constructed from a tennis ball and matchheads, like that found in a certain cookbook. In the morning, I am outside in the road, collecting bits of paper and detritus the bomb seems to have left in its wake. A Japanese girl is helping me clear the street. We appear to be cohabiting; I am unsure if there is a sexual relationship. She is wearing shorts and a tshirt, in a very 80's style, and explains to an elderly gentleman who happens to be passing what has happened. He mumbles something in Japanese that I cannot understand. I look at the details on his wrinkled face and wonder why I am living somewhere where I understand no-one. We li...

Essentially I am using this as an area for storing a collection of nocturnal happenings in my brain. Sometimes, and it waxes and wanes over the year, I awake and write down what I've been thinking about whilst asleep. It's a bit more ethereal than simple chronicling, as I tend to be mostly asleep when it happens, and writing comes automatically to my fingers. Most of it is ache. However, patterns will emerge. These notes develop, eventually (and after a long process of twiddling, mastication and reconstruction), in to what is currently called The Last Night Tree. I will sometimes add brief notes/explanations to where certain items/instances have come from and why they are included. (?) indicates sections and ideas that I cannot presently recall, but apparently could at the time of writing. The only grammatical changes made to each entry are adding capital letters to the beginning of sentence which I am for some reason incapable of doing at random o'clock. I should point out...