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Hitch Hiker Dream

In a BBC office, some people who I didn't recognise were talking about how pleased they were to have been contacted by Arthur Dent, from the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, who everyone had thought was dead. He had offered to write some essays for radio and the web and they were quite excited, as, obviously, he hadn't written anything for a while and everyone thought he was very funny.

When the first article arrived, however, it turned out to be a devastatingly well argued attack on the Government's ID card policy. It was so incisive and powerful that there was no doubt that ministers would have to resign as a result of its being read out on air.

Puzzled by this change in the tone of his writing, the BBC dispatched a reporter to Arthur Dent's house to see what the problem was. The reporter's suspicion that an impostor had sent the article was proved to be correct when I was found to be hiding under a bed in the house, wearing Arthur Dent's dressing gown.

Notes for Freudian Analysis

Freud reckons that the material, if not the subject matter, of people's dreams invariably comes from things they have encountered during the day. However, I am certain that I didn't think about the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy yesterday. I was in a pub with someone called Ford, though, as was Arthur Dent just before the Earth was blown up, but I think that's a bit of a stretch.

It is Douglas Adams who is dead; Arthur Dent doesn't die in the books, as far as I can recall. He wears a dressing gown for, at least, the whole of the first two books, though.

While I was making my tea last night, I listened to Alex Salmond and Anne McGuire on the radio, talking about ID cards. As I was alone in the house, I was able to participate vigorously in their discussion and point out many more reasons why ID cards are a bad idea than Alex Salmond was allowed to by the presenter. I won the debate, of course.

Distortion

How odd. In the previous entry, I wrote about the fact that the new Parliament building never appears in a distorted fashion in my dreams and is always exactly as it is in real life. Today, in what could be a startling example of Jungian synchronicity, I received an e-mail from a colleague -- who doesn't read this site, as far as I know -- which describes a dream set in an extremely distorted Parliament.

"I've just remembered that I had a dream about you and Ellen and Henrietta [our editor - DM] last night. The Official Report office was divided over two floors and a rooftop garden. This is where Ellen was working. I didn't recognise her colleagues, but they seemed to be part of a theatre group and Ellen had on a strange, layered woolly outfit that was quite appealing. One of the floors, where we worked, was actually the Marque Central, the restaurant attached to the Lyceum, and I think there was a water garden in there. Henrietta was on the other floor and her desk faced a wall upon which was mounted a giant plasma screen. Whatever she typed appeared on the plasma screen, but I don't remember any details, which is a shame. There was a lot of running around up and down staircases and that's about all I can recall at the moment. You were hyper, which was unsurprising."

Exhibition Dream

A colleague of mine, Simon, was having an exhibition of his photographs in the stairway that leads up to our office. They were all very good, black and white pictures and I complimented him on one of them in particular, which showed a dinosaur skeleton with smoke and light coming out of its skull. However, as I looked at it, I had a feeling that I'd seen it somewhere before. Hadn't that very scene appeared in a dream I'd had some months ago? And the next picture, too, showed a scene from one of my dreams. It was a photograph of an empty Spanish town square with dead palm trees. In fact, all the pictures showed things from dreams that I'd had. Was this a coincidence or, perhaps, something more sinister?

Notes for Freudian Analysis

Simon isn't a photographer. The night I had the dream, however, I'd used him as an example of someone who I assumed must have a huge amount of free time because he doesn't have any extracurricular activities (that I know of). I was talking about the sense of freedom that I'd felt the previous day when I realised that I didn't have any drawing or etching to do this week as I'm printing from photographic plates at the moment. The prints I'm working from are from old Evening News photographs from the 1960s of people working in a factory.

I had the dream about the Spanish town when I was 15 or so. It was one of those dreams that you quickly scribble down on waking because they strike you as being exciting and intriguing but, later on, seem like irrelevant nonsense. Yes, just like everything on this website.

If I was to suggest a starting point for a Freudian analysis of this dream, I'd point out that this website is very much like an exhibition of snapshots of my dreams and that, therefore, it's possible that the dream deals with my feelings about making my dreams public on the web. However, why would the stairs to my office represent a website? Why would photographs represent blog entries? Why would Simon be the creator rather than me? Where is Sigmund Freud when you want him? (Here, as a matter of fact.)

In all of my dreams in which the Parliament has featured, the building looks exactly as it does in real life, with none of the usual dream distortions such as it having 80 storeys or being made of chewing gum. Freud's theory of dream distortion would suggest that this means that the building is not a stand-in for something that I'm suppressing and is, in fact, just the Parliament. Freud is supposed to have once said, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar," but I can't find any proper reference to when or where he said it, which means he probably didn't.

Another Zombie Dream

For the second time in a month, I dreamed that the world had fallen victim to a zombie plague. I was at work, in the new Parliament building. At every window on the ground floor, of which there are many, sad crowds of dead people -- some recently deceased, some badly decomposed -- were feebly banging on the glass. People with guns were sitting by all the entrances, stairways and lift doors but, although the situation seemed to be under control, I knew that wouldn't last long because films like this always end up with all but two or three of the embattled survivors being eaten. Obviously, I'd be alright, but I felt quite sorry for everyone else. Didn't they know they were for it? Hadn't they ever been to the cinema? Good luck, guys!

Notes for Freudian Analysis

I spent the afternoon before I had this dream sitting in the Parliament's committee room 5 enduring an unbelievably long and dull lecture on the Freedom of Information Act. Three hours! At points, I wished I could die. However, the windows on one side of the room looked out onto a little empty corner between two of the high towers and, as the afternoon gradually turned to dusk and then to night, I took great pleasure in looking at a pile of dead leaves that the wind had blown against the glass. From time to time, the wind would gust the pile into a new shape. It was a pleasingly melancholic scene. At one point, a yellow-jacketed policeman walked into view, looked at something on the ground and then kicked the leaves around a little as if he were searching for a hibernating hedgehog. Three hours!

Earlier in the day, I'd read an interesting article about Romero's Dawn of the Dead, in which the heroes barricade themselves in a mall in order to escape the hordes of zombies that are roaming the land.

Three hours I spent in that damn room!