
This is just a glitch, I do have friends really. No, really.
This is an account of a dream I just had. It was an interesting, involved dream, and not everything made it across to my bedside notepad, and even fewer details were jogged when I read that with my morning tea, so this is like the movie trailer for the agonising three-hour epic I just watched.
I'm also doing well, thank you, and you? I'm back to nights tonight, so back to trying very hard to get lots of things pitched. Any freelancers reading this, might I ask: what the hell do you do over Christmas? It's approaching like a big white cloud on my calendar. I suppose I'll nag some websites, or... hmm.
Anyway, the mental dream.
Dream Log, Tenth of November, Two Thousand and Nine.
I am on a train. I know that this train is running between the streets of Glasgow, but the windows look out onto vast Scottish hillsides streaked with moody rain. The embankment beside the train is sunny, and students are lying in their thousands there, sunning and reading and laughing. The roaring train doesn't bother them.
We arrive at George's Square - I read the gold letters. I am not on a train, nor is there any sign of one. George's Square is about as large as a McDonalds, decked out with exuberance and greenery, black buildings with gold plate. It's more like a little plaza - it faces a waterfront where the sun is setting, although the light in the square matches high noon. In the back of the square is a blueish wrought iron staircase. The steps are too high. I climb them. I am going home.
I live in a house almost exactly like the one in the last level of Braid, except for that this house is atop the tallest, dingiest building in Glasgow and, inside, it looks exactly like my bedroom in the waking world. I don't linger.
I take the train again. The bouncer from the local night-club sits next to me - he's a sweet guy, about seven feet tall, and I've known him since school. Enormous, but gentle. He has a silly expression, like he's been giggling all morning. I get off the train at a lonely platform and make my way alone through the countryside, uphill, along cobbled roads dusty and cobwebbed, and I reach a huge derelict house. It looks like the house from the Narnia books, but sagging, rotten. I go into the main room and sit on the floor and take out my laptop and write. I'm writing a review that I recently wrote in the waking world, and it's coming out word for word.
It doesn't last long though - soon the day is over, and I'm on the train again. I'm aware that a day has passed, and I'm commuting again from my house above the tiny George's Square, this time to the university where Lisa is. I'm not sure if she's teaching or studying, but I'm writing on a notepad on a study table in a hallway. I'm opposite a professor's office, which is open.
On the desk, at which nobody is seated, lies a name-plaque: "Herne Hornes". In the room, a teacher is busying about. I know it isn't Professor Hornes - I know the teacher shares a name, but not a likeness, with one of my teachers at school in the waking world, but I can't remember which.
The teacher is peeing in a punch bowl on the drinks cabinet. He has filled it entirely with pee. Then he takes the bowl and pours it over Herne's desk, and replaces the bowl, and briskly walks out.
Some young guys are congregating in the hallway, and the teacher accosts them. "Hello, have you gents submitted your 'Least Favourite Professor' yet?" He's trying to get them to put Herne Hornes as their worst teacher. He sits next to me and the rest of them crowd around demurely, while he passes out forms, which are signed and return, and then collates them. He mistakenly bundles my Portfolio together with his paperwork. I tell him that he's got something of mine, and he apologises, and when he hands it back, it reeks of piss.
I'm in George's Square and suddenly it's the real George's Square, the big one that isn't a nice residential plaza. There's a train track running right through it, and beyond, I can see the little stair case with the tall steps that leads home. I just need to get there. I cross through the train and it starts moving while I'm in it. I start panicking about being whisked miles and miles away when all I want to do is go home, when suddenly the train is a bus, and it's stopped at the end of the dirt track to my parents' house (which is where I live in the waking world). I step off the bus, and wake up.
Written by Jaz McDougall for publication on the 11th of November 2009. I've never went for my notebook so fast as when I woke up from that dream. By the nine.
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