A Disintegration Loop

  In an underground complex, all crumbling concrete and rusted stairs. There are zombies here, their mouths red with blood and flesh. I pilot a small buggy, knocking many of them over, until I end up being stopped by the sheer number of moving bodies before me. As I climb out, they vanish. A man in   strange suit motions toward a staircase as an elephant man-type zombie stumbles toward me. I am to fight him: this is entertainment for an unseen audience. I choose to hide behind a strange wall. The zombie turns into a gun turret which I  eventually destroy.

  The city has been invaded by some sort of 14th century Shogunesque army. They've taken over the giant bathhouse/restaurant, akin to the one from the film Spirited Away. We attempt to retake it by crossing a bridge, carefully balancing on taught wires [I've been playing a lot of Ghost of Tsushima], but archers lean from upstairs windows: they fire down at us, and I see bodies plunge into the river below. I try and alternative tactic for entry, taking an alleyway behind the building, but before I am able to help I become entranced by the unusual intersecting pipework that criss-crosses the space . Staring dumbly at the patterns, I hear the battle continue in the distance.

'Michael from season 4 of The Wire is trying to kill me. We drive through an abandoned city, weaving between wrecked cars, firing guns at each other. None of my shots make contact. In a scene reminiscent of the end of Heat, I follow Michael and his accomplice through something which resembles the Holocaust memorial. I shoot at Michael, and as he falls I continue to riddle his body with bullets. Despite there being a lot of blood it becomes apparent relatively early on that this is not Michael but a cardboard cut-out. I have a flashback to a similar incident where my partner was killed and inexplicably replaced my Matt Berry, dressed in a 70s-style outfit. He had a seizure and rolled around in the mud. Back at the memorial and I am pleading for my life and crying.'

'In an underground complex, all crumbling concrete and rusted stairs. There are zombies here, mouths red with blood and flesh. I pilot a small buggy, knocking many of them over, until I end up being stopped by the sheer number. I climb out but they vanish. A man in strange suit motions toward a stair case as an elephant-man-type zombie stumbles toward me. I am to fight him. I hide behind a strange wall. The zombie turns in to a gun turret which I eventually destroy.'

Adam has become a vampire, at least I assume it’s Adam. We’re outside Asda at twilight, and I become aware of the threat as an object I take to be my brother moves at speed through dense foliage. Against better judgement I give chase, and watch as the vampire-like creature bounds across the road and jumps a garden fence. I follow. I am aware that I am able to leap in a similar fashion, and in the back garden of a normal suburban home I consider my position. The garden has a stone bird table, and through the blinds I can see an elderly couple watching television. I’m approached by a cat, which I instantly recognize as being the vampire. It senses my recognition and scatters in to a thousand black shapes, which form a sort of evil waterfall in reverse, spewing backwards over the fence and on to the adjoining cul-de-sac. I again give chase, but find myself standing in an empty street with no sign of the menace. All the lights in the houses are on, but no-one seems to be home. Again...

'The undercroft of a castle or cathedral. A female friend – blonde, round face, but unrecognizable on waking – is telling me about an amazing man, a prophet no less, who is going to lead her/us to some unspecified promised land. I am obviously sceptical. The undercroft is arranged with a series of desks, as in a Victorian class room (all tightly packed, high, scarred wood). Everyone is wearing a white gown. The class begins, and the students and my friend are subjected to a baffling array of visuals and noises projected across the entirety of the room. Somewhere in the darkness a man is laughing. I move slowly through the flashing lights to the source of the laughter to find Chris Morris, his hair long and curly, is in fact doing all of this as an elaborate joke. I try to explain this to everyone by I am drowned out by the ‘art work’; I run out of the undercroft, aware now that the practical joke was obviously at my expense.'

In some sort of wasteland, possibly Malton from urbandead but in reality. The buildings and general lay out of the space appears to be a grid system, dark green, crisscrossing and bisecting the land; it resembles a giant board game. The sky is muted orange, and I have a feeling there is something lurking in the increasing shadows that dusk has introduced. Someone who I am with shows me around their flat. From the window I see abandoned car parks, and in the distance lakes and mountains, though this view is partially obscured by smoke rising from refineries that seem to encircle the town. The light is falling away. No-one is on the street when I am taken to the next house. The view from the window is the other house. Each subsequent place I am shown around offers a view of the preceding property. I am caught in a loop of property viewing, with some unknown menace responsible for the trap I find myself in.

I missed a few months somehow (I blame late-stage PhD write up), so here are two to catch up. One is from relatively recently and the other is from some point midway through the last decade. 'On a large complex train, arranged like an Ikea store. There is, as always, nowhere to sit, but I had to catch this train. There was no other option. I move from carriage to carriage, vaguely aware of someone guiding my hand through the morass of dark green first class seats I am forbidden to sit in, and elongated Moroccan-style benches replete with sprawl-ing idiots. I eventually come across the red carriage, a sort of standard class area, but covered in beds with red duvets. There are people under the sheets but I am unable to see them. They wriggle around and make noise. By the exit, which I walk through, there is one bed with a corpse in it. What I assume is the final carriage contains a food shop like Ikea; it is only when looking out of the window that I realise I am actually in the...

In a complicated lake view complex, I am trapped in a lift. After somehow escaping, I am eating some terrible lemon cake, and go out on a log raft. I am convinced the raft will sink, but the pilot seems more concerned about me drinking alcohol on board. Later I visit a rundown zoo, similar to the knackered fun house in the original Max Payne game. Lin and Zo are there, and another man. We enjoy the zoo, but as we attempt to leave we are accused of theft. I escape, but everyone else is trapped inside. I attempt to remonstrate with the owners to no avail. The fences are too high for me to get in, and I have a vague memory of trying something similar in the past. Zo eventually escapes but is covered in cuts. Following some confusion in the car, someone gives me a hand job. Later still, I wander around the HF building. It is full to bursting with strangers watching the Belgian Grand Prix. There is also an art gallery attached. Inside I am charged six quid for a slice of oddly liquid cak...

'An open day is being held at the University. I am talking with Paul outside my office, which is now in a palatial roof terrace type area. A bearded man akin to Harold Shipman approaches and says that he loves what we’ve done with the place. I think this an odd comment, but Paul dismisses it and wanders off with the man. More and more people arrive through a lift I never noticed before, and as I attempt to fight my way through the crowd to leave, Chris appears, and starts attacking me. He jumps up and over me several times, raining punches down on me as he descends. I am powerless to respond. The crowd simply stand and stare. Each of them is holding a red balloon.' This one actually happened last night, during a relatively sleepless period brought about by the consumption of alcohol.

'Some sort of alien spacecraft is attacking a terrace of houses. It is small enough that I am able to shut it inside the back door of someone’s house. The spacecraft goes about converting the human race in to Combine-style robots despite my clever defensive strategy. Later, hiding in some waterfront properties in a disused docklands-style area, the few remaining humans attempt to form a resistance; instead of helping out, I am hunting an elderly Rik Mayall through flood drains whilst the man is extinguished from existence by robots I sort-of helped create.'

I am an unsuccessful dectective - so unsuccessful I cannot even spell my own job correctly - with a disabled son. I am attempting to find the killer of a woman in Cambridge, murdered by Lion's Yard, her body found grasping a ladle. Somehow I know the outfit worn by the killer is blue/green/grey and I am compelled to look for evidence in the shampoo aisle of a local supermarket. By chance, over the road, I spot the killer queuing to get in to a Pizza Express. I give chase with my partner, who now exists. The killer leads us to a rooftop which seems to be similar to Hadid's re-imagined transport museum in Glasgow, where my disabled son is intent on killing himself owing to my neglect. We attempt to reach him, but before we can he rolls off the roof. I assume he is dead, but when I am eventually persuaded to look over the edge, in an exchange reminiscent of Brad Pitt at the conclusion of the film Se7en, the chair is empty. What sort of elaborate prank is this? When my partner t...

This happened, according to notes, the same week that Margaret Thatcher died. It came to mind as a result of watching Southcliffe. 'With Adam and others. The world is apparently populated by sadistic murderers. We are walking along a country road, trying to escape some unknown terror. We pass a derelict farm house. Up ahead a car spots us and begins slowly reversing down the road. We hide in the bushes. A man emerges from the car, and chases children across a field. Later, I wander about trying to work out – apparently by reading the landscape – how to get away from everything that is happening. The man returns. He has had enough of killing and wants to explain his politics via a power-point presentation. There is no level ground to set up the projector screen.'

Bjork is staying at my house, except we are in the Simpson’s house. She is staying with me for complicated reasons involving her tour bus breaking down and me saying I have a ticket to her concert, which I do not. She is living out of bags, and is very untidy. She is also smaller than I imagined. One night, she cannot sleep, and comes in to my room to talk. I do not recall what we discuss, but at the end she lies down on the bed and starts singing. The song makes me cry. I stare out the window at clouds rolling by to try and hide this fact from her. Later we are outside the house, which apparently sits on stilts above a tangled semi-dark swamp, populated by the detritus of previous – none gone – civilisations. I tell her I don’t really have tickets to her concert. She knows this, and offers me £20.

'I have moved in to a posh Boston suburb (home of jogging in a costume and the occasional terrorist outrage). I awake one morning to find people's cars wrapped in twine. I go to the 'farmers market' shopping area - which has three fishmongers but no news vendor - and ask questions but no-one knows anything. The following day I awake to find the area besieged by a plague of falling light-bulbs. This time I see them materialize in the sky. Some how I link the twine and the lightbulb incident together and reason it must be a conspiracy of supernatural origin. At the same faux-quaint shopping zone I think about telling the people of the seemingly terrible origins of the events but instead I watch a fishmonger create a diorama from crabs in his shop window. A man in a nearby cafe tells me 'you're not right for the area.'

'For some reason, I have been appointed the bishop of Durham. I am walking around the cathedral, looking in boxes, terrified about my inaugural address to, first, my congregation, and then the wider world. There are numerous tributes and actions I have to perform and I know none of them. I point this out to an adviser and he tells me not to worry, that I can be guided through the steps necessary. I am led through the crowd. I hear people discussing how young I look, how my appointment (an atheist in a religious institution like the church) is crazy. I think to myself ‘I am going to prove them wrong’. As I mount the stage to give my speech, I realise it is unwritten.'

'We decide to travel to the terminal beach on a jet-ski. There are six in our party, and the jet-ski is basically underwater, but it takes us out to sea anyway. The sea is azure blue, and I can see fish beneath me. Other boats pass, as do tanned people balancing on wires. At the beach a house is carved in to the cliff. It's interior matches Burlington Avenue and - inexplicably - there is a window in the kitchen. When I try and look through it someone jumps in front of my line of sight, explaining that these is nothing of interest inside the rocks. I return to the front door to find the beach being quickly submerged by the tide. I call to people but no-one is about. The sky is pink with paper and fire.'

In the past few weeks I was getting a little worried that my lack of memorable midnight recollections would end this chart of nocturnal wanderings, but in the last week or so, I have remembered around 3 dreams a night; in the process of doing so, I have started using my phone to note things down rather than a pad and pen, and then email myself so I actually remember I have the material. Remembering is half the battle. This dream I thought pertinent as I have just finished marking student essays for Spring Term (and presumably this is what inspired it) 'I am circling some sort of warehouse, possibly owned and run by Argos. Inside, a number of my students have killed a man by beating him to death. They now fall about laughing whilst bouncing off inflatable children’s toys. I try to remain stoic in the face of horror, concerned that I may be next. I talk to them a while, and on finding out that ____ is their ring leader, I try to escape. Every path leads back to the warehouse. Insi...

This happened a long while back. Recently though, my dreams have increasingly involved corridors. I find this depressing. 'In some sort of version of Skyrim, except reality. I walk around a tree top world, similar to Kashyykk in Star Wars but also the film Avatar. A strange looking woman with a spear attacks me, and I fend her off and run for safety. Later I am showing an unseen person around the world. Everywhere we go is familiar in some way, though I am unable to explain how I would be so knowledgeable about a world I have barely explored. We run in to the same woman, and before she can attack, I kiss her. Later, we fuck. The unseen person is nowhere to be found.'

'Somewhere on the underground line, with Mark Hamill. We are investigating a disappearance. We find a purple glove at the top of one of the industrial extractor fans. Hamill turns the fan off, and lowers me down through the slats. At the bottom, in amongst a heap of dust and dirt, I find a human hand. We both know it is murder. I am unable to climb back up, so Hamill cuts me loose so that I can find a service exit in the tunnels underneath. As I drop down, I am confronted by another colleague. He tells me that the murderer is in the tunnels. We split up and wander what seems like endless corridors. All is brown/grey and similar to a military silo type complex. At the end of one tunnel, I am gripped by incredible fear; a man with a large moustache – who resembles Dick Strawbridge – is coming towards me. I cannot see his eyes underneath the green baseball cap he is wearing. He gets closer, and the fear intensifies. I walk towards him for some reason. As I get closer, he veers off in...