Dreaming of 2025
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I’ve kept a journal since 2015. Most of it is fairly quotidian, as much a calendar of reminders as a diary. But also, to my deep and everlasting shame, I sometimes write down the dreams I have, if I remember them the next day. Here are the best ones from 2025. If you see anything deeply Freudian in here please keep it to yourself. My nerves are bad enough as it is.
April 6: Dreamt it was a common assumption that the Kubrick film 2001: A Space Odyssey was based on a play by Dryden, which drove me mad because no one would listen to me when I said that couldn’t possibly be true.
April 8: Whoa, I think the Dryden dream was my subconscious trying to warn me that I was confusing Dryden with John Milton [in the piece I was working on for the Samuel Pepys Club Journal]. I caught the error today and saved myself some embarrassment down the line.
July 27: Had a dream I was driving a friend around the city to help with errands but also to show her around. She was an amalgamation of a woman I used to work with and a neighbour I had when I lived in Nova Scotia, and the city was an amalgamation of Edmonton and Halifax. When we finished we decided to park on the outskirts and walk into the downtown to meet up with friends. It became one of those repetitive dreams, always walking somewhere but never arriving. After a while my hand brushed my pocket and I couldn’t feel the cars keys or my wallet. I was too embarrassed to say anything for a while but then just as we arrived I said I’d left the car keys behind and I had to go back and maybe break a window to get in because I always lock car doors. I’d have to run if I was going to make it on time, and then the running woke me up.
August 3: Was dreaming it was the first day of high school all over again, except no one could get into the building because there were hundreds of medieval role players dressed in clanking plate armour blocking the way, parading around with banners. So I sat outside with kids from my neighbourhood to wait, and when the principal started speaking to us I mimicked his hand gestures to make fun of him, but I didn’t know that this was a spell that would kill him and maybe also my friends, who fell down as if dead and were then rushed away on ambulance stretchers. Later I went to visit one friend who was working after school at a convenience store to apologize, and I wanted to buy a bottle of water so it wouldn’t be weird, but the debit card reader made me fill out government forms and it took forever, and some kids from school were getting impatient behind me. The screen on the debit card reader kept unfolding to reveal more forms to fill out.
August 10: I was helping to move a couch. It got stuck in the doorway. I sort of tripped backing out of the doorway. It turned out I was atop one of those firewatch towers they have out in the woods, and I had to take it down hundreds of ladder steps, alone. No vertigo, but was self-conscious about the dozens of bears gathering below to watch—more embarrassed somehow, than worried about my safety.
August 11: This old lady, sort of an amalgam of teachers, mentors, aunts, etc, is working on some academic paper about how the gov’t is bad and fudging the numbers. She takes me to an apartment I’ve never been to, and we have to convince some people to sign some paperwork. Then I get onto her car, which is actually one of those couches with no backs? and rip around town. Soon the couch becomes a horse, and I’m on the back. We’re stopped by police goons who want to see our papers. She hands hers over but talks to the guy to distract him, but still I insist on handing him my social insurance card, which is deemed insufficient. He pulls me from the horse and slaps a handcuff on one hand, but then puts the other cuff to his arm and tells me I could cut him with the metal if I wanted to. I don’t want any of this, naturally, and begin to wake up.
This should all be caveated by the information that I use a clock radio set to the CBC news for my alarm, which I slept through this morning and I think this was influencing the dream. I think the lady was the radio host, and all the stuff was the news.
August 12: Dream: I was at an airport and struck up a conversation with a woman while waiting for my luggage at the carousel. I was really impressing her with my knowledge of business but it was all just stuff like ‘if you get paid money, you can store it in a bank and access it via a card or app’ etc. Somehow I realized she was the inside guy on a stickup crew planning to rob the airport. I appeared in the van where two guys were putting on balaclavas and racking guns, and I tried to explain that an airport is a bad place to rob because people mostly just put clothes in their luggage, not cash. Somehow trying to talk them out of it made me complicit, and as the robbery started I was afraid the cops would shoot me too. Out on the runway there were huge trees growing, but the planes seemed to land among them without issue.
October 5: A group of cool people I didn’t know were showing me their tattoos trying to convince me to get one. I have nothing against tattoos but I have never desired getting one for myself. Then they showed me the cool new thing, which was getting indents on the bottom of your feet which match the patterns on the bottom of sneakers. I said ‘this I actually have an issue with because it sounds dumb and you’re feet aren’t even hardened by it.’ And they said yes but here’s the thing, the police won’t know we were barefoot when we robbed this cottage. I said that’s even more idiotic because now your footprint is basically a fingerprint. Some of these people put their shoes on to cover their tracks (literally) but I was pretty sure it was the same pattern as on their feet.
October 8: My mom asked me to drive her to a new town that was just discovered called Bucharest. I was annoyed because that’s not how towns work. She didn’t trust the directions app and kept stopping at stores or holding up traffic to ask busy people where this new town had sprouted up (I sensed there was something mushroom-like about it), which I found embarrassing because again that’s now how towns work. Also she had a cellphone with a spatula attached as an antenna and I found that embarrassing too.
October 21: Not really a dream, but I started to doze off while reading, and half awake I thought of the name “Dennis Horselaw, pronounced like coleslaw,” and even in that dreamlike state I found it so funny that I woke up and started laughing. Want to use the name in a short story now.
November 25: Was staring out a window, watching a building with a big smokestack burn. Then I was with a lot of guys, everyone in blue work overalls, in a sort of electrical substation. We had lost a war and were about to be marched off by the victorious soldiers, but someone threw a bag full of grenades at a big electrical panel/circuit board the size of a building. I tried climbing over a barbed wire fence in the chaos. No one noticed me getting away but I was embarrassed because I’d ripped the crotch of my pants on the fence.
November 28: I was watching a jazz trio play at a small, intimate venue in the company of some friends. All very classy stuff except their gimmick was that, to add to the percussion, they’d have a guy in an old-fashioned, striped baseball uniform come on stage with a wooden baseball bat and hit a ball pitched from the audience in time with the beat, and of course the ball would always hit someone in the audience or crash into a stack of glasses or put out a light or a window, and we all had to take cover.
December 17: Just remembered a recent dream: I’d stumbled onto a conspiracy that people weren’t using the number eight anymore. They were just taking two threes, flipping one, and joining them together. Once you saw it, it was everywhere. No idea what the purpose of this was, but it was definitely some kind of scam. Then I had a bunch of mountain goats in my childhood home, standing on the walls as they do on cliffs. I was sent a trio of lions to deal with them, which I immediately realized was overkill. I locked them in a bedroom but the door was weak and they’d bust out soon enough, so I spent he last part of the dream preparing myself to grab them by the tail, or telling myself it was okay if they bit my forearm instead of anywhere else, as if I’d survive that.
Sometime around New Year’s (I forgot to write it down the next day but kept thinking about it days afterward): former UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was punished by the Tories (boo! hiss!), by being made to be a waiter at a fancy restaurant, and I accidentally saved him from an assassination attempt when I walked up to him on his break to speak with him. He was looking at his phone in a glass vestibule area, and the assassins around him were pretending to look at their phones, but dispersed when I went to say hello. Then later there was something to do with rappelling out of a window—I can’t remember if it was the assassins or Corbyn. I remember being very impressed by his demeanour as a waiter: he didn’t want to be there and held the job in some contempt (the other waiters were all lickspittles for the upper class), but due to his respect for the working class still had sort of a steely resolve and determination to do it right. Possibly I was confusing/combining this aspect of Corbyn with Alfred from Batman.
Thank you for the entertainment!
The tattooed robbers crack me up every time. Great story material in there!