dreams and inspirations

In this dream the main character is a guy who looks like Johnny Depp did fifteen years ago. He/I is/am on a cruise ship for work. (It is not at all clear what this work constitutes.) We are being pursued by a girl and also by the girl’s mother. Their intentions are not pure. It is especially awkward when they both make a move at the same time.

A man is marching up and down asking everybody he sees to give him a name. He doesn’t have one, and he only has a single tooth in his mouth. Once he has a name his tooth problem will be solved as well.

Two of my friends throw a huge party to announce that they are going to adopt a child from a third world country. I am worried that they are doing it to make themselves look good, as a public performance to demonstrate that they are The Right Sort of People. When I say something about it they become extremely angry in that way that means I am right and they were hoping nobody would notice.

***

I am talking on the phone with a friend who has gone to Perth to correspond with Che Guevara. He asks if I am avoiding the subject of the house I am supposed to be getting for us both to live in when he comes back, and he is extremely angry when I have no idea what he is talking about.

***

I am staying at my father’s house and eating crumpets and English muffins straight out of the cupboard. Some of my friends are supposed to be staying there too, but two of them aren’t engaged anymore and two others have gotten back together and I haven’t seen any of them in quite some time. I go to catch a train, and I have to sprint fifty metres along the platform and then force open the door to get on the train.

***

I am supposed to play with a band that lost their saxophone player. There is something wrong with the music they give me; it is actually a rebus that I manage to decode. It says “bullshit”. Suddenly my friend comes along with a ring on his finger and tells me that he and his fiancée are engaged again.

***

One of my co-workers can’t go out for lunch with me after all, because she has to hand in her thesis. I am going to ask my very favourite co-worker instead, but instead I wake up.

We are visiting my maternal grandmother. We are telling her that my father’s sister is definitely still alive, although a letter sent to her in 1964 has just come back to my grandmother with a note from Australia Post saying it was undeliverable.

Then I am at share house I once lived in, where they have turned one of the bedrooms into a butcher’s shop because they could never finish a whole turkey meal without getting up. There is a running gag about the refrigerator.

Finally I am at my mother’s house. A man is at the window asking for water, but I notice that there are other people standing all the way around the house, waiting. They have done something to the telephone connection, because when I try to call 000 (on my mobile phone) all I can hear is someone saying “boards” over and over again. I tell my sisters to get outside and run, but they are cut off by bad people. I make it out of the gate and then I have no idea where I am running to.

My improbably attractive friends and I are driving all over the country, and I am documenting the process by taking pictures of the sights, the laughter and the moments of introspection. I can tell that we will look back on the pictures later and wonder how life could possibly have been any better.

In this dream I am basically Peter Hughes.