I’m definitely a long way behind on sleep at the moment, but the small amounts of sleep that I have managed to get have been littered with peculiar dreams. It’s about time that I catch up on writing about some of them.
Firstly, I had a dream in which Kevin Rudd came up with a plan to curb obesity, it was a novel piece of legislation dubbed “The Two Thirds Policy for Burgers” where people buying burgers would be allowed to have two of the following three items only:
Bread Roll
Meat
Cheese
Effectively anybody buying a burger would have to decide which one of those items that they would be willing to go without. I told Jim Ball about this dream last week and was greeted by a stunned silence followed by a chuckle, and a directive to “go and get some sleep”.
The next dream involved ABC Classic FM’s breakfast show. Realising the error of their ways, the ABC rehired Clive Robertson for the gig, but for some reason decided that, just like many other FM radio stations, they needed to have three breakfast hosts…so joining Clive on the breakfast show was John Laws and John Howard. Unfortunately to cover the cost of having three hosts, the ABC Board decided that they weren’t allowed to play any music, therefore saving themselves the cost of royalties…this led to Clive, John and John launching a barbershop trio (because, according to Clive, the ABC wouldn’t fork out for the appropriate number of staff to form a quartet) and singing for the majority of the breakfast show.
Meanwhile in dream number three, convinced that Civic was not a democratic place after conducting an outside broadcast from a spot just outside Bailey’s Corner, Steve Price decided to make it more democratic by walking around handing everyone megaphones…the theory being that by giving everyone a megaphone, it would make it easier for them to be heard.
ACT Chief Turnip Jon Stanhope, unhappy about having the noise of half of Canberra ranting on megaphones in Civic blaring through his office’s window at the Legislative Assembly, passed a law in the week before the ACT election banning megaphones, a move which saw him accused of censorship and subsequently thrown out of government in a landslide result against his party. For some reason, the electoral commission then decided that a suitable punishment would be to make Jon Stanhope clean yellow megaphones…not that I can work out why.
So tell me, if you had dreams like this when you go to sleep, would you try to avoid sleeping in the hope that the Director Of Dreams would go on holidays?
I must thank Stuart Bocking for talking about tours of the Lucas Heights Nuclear Reactor this evening because it reminded me of a story I saw on Channel Seven’s Sydney Weekender a couple weekends ago.
The Mount Piper Power Station is a new power station near Lithgow, operated by Delta Electricity, and they run free tours daily at 11am. Unfortunately they don’t allow anybody (except television travel programs) to take cameras on the tour, but it would be good to go there and have a look around anyway. Even though I don’t like power lines, I’m fascinated by power stations and substations.
The fact that it is free and that you don’t need to book makes me inclined to disappear to Lithgow on an upcoming weekend as I would like to see the insides of a power station. I’d also be interested in touring a telephone exchange at some stage…not that Telstra run tours of them, although it couldn’t hurt to ring them and ask I suppose.
I had a strange dream about touring a power station the other night. In this dream, if you drive through a tunnel somewhere near Gungahlin, you end up in a power station which has a “drive-by tour” track. I think I’d rather walk around a power station though…I’d see more and it would be much more interesting.
I have previously mentioned the fact that one of the side-effects of the medication I am on is rather vivid dreams. To some extent this has taken the fun out of my intermittent and peculiar dreams because I am now being flooded by peculiar dreams and, as such, I’m not as inclined to share them as I once was.
In many cases, this is probably a good thing. In the last week I’ve had a repeat performance of a dream from about six-eight weeks ago where somebody hung himself in front of me and there was an awful lot of screaming in the room, I have a dream where I’ve been accused of being a stalker (probably justified seeing as I followed a person home from a paddock and knocked on their door so that I could talk to them), and this morning I had a couple odd dreams.
Sadly the mix of being awake for ten minutes or so during the night to check on the progress of a lengthy and mundane task that doesn’t want to work properly, then sleeping for 45 minutes and repeating the process, produces even weirder dreams, in my case I started dreaming about the work that I was doing. I had two strange dreams about this subject this morning, but I only clearly remember one of them now.
The dream started at some sort of backyard function where I have apparently made a clear request for people to not close the lid on my laptop because if that happens, the task it is performing will stop and I will lose a lot of work. Jump forward in time a bit and I’m being harassed by a bunch of gnomes to set up small tables, with a threat of being sued if I don’t do as they say. After a brief argument I walked back to my laptop only to find the lid closed and a girl from one of my primary school classes walking away from it. I ran over to her and questioned her about it, and she claimed that she was perfectly justified in her actions by the fact that I had once touched her property and she was therefore entitled to retribution.
The organiser of the backyard function them walked outside and started telling me off for my task now being behind schedule, for not watching my laptop more closely and for arguing with people when I was clearly in the wrong. I started screaming something about how I was going to commit suicide and that I wanted everyone to leave me alone and not try to stop me. Naturally they didn’t, they called the police instead. I quietly crept out the front and grabbed some keys from one of the police officers before stealing one of the police cars…at which point the police starting shooting at the car and the dream ended.
I’m starting to wonder if these dreams are going to become any less peculiar any time soon or whether they are just going to keep getting weirder. I suppose I should take some comfort from the fact that these dreams are merely works of fiction being generated by my head and they have nothing to do with reality…but it’s hard to take comfort in that, when I know that my head is generating the ridiculous and disturbing scenarios.
Stuart Bocking is on the air tonight, so I sent him an email about the dream he appeared in on the weekend. His joking reference to it being a nightmare could be prophetic, because the other dream of interest I had over the weekend could very easily be considered a nightmare. More on that tomorrow.
How I wish 2UE’s Stuart Bocking had been on the air last night so that I could inform him of a dream I had in which he made a guest appearance on the weekend…although guest appearance is probably the wrong description, he was the main character.
The dream took place in the cereal aisle of a supermarket. It started with Stuart looking at some boxes of cereal, picking them up, shaking them, and putting them back on the shelf. He was then approached by about a dozen people complaining about how the boxes of cereal were only half full. Stuart proceeded to pull a microphone and some scales out of his pocket and run an impromptu radio program on the subject of cereal companies scamming customers. Oddly every box that Stuart weighed came up with the same measurement on Stuart’s scale, regardless of box size…”half full”. I’m not sure how the scales determined that.
The manager of National Cereals just happened to be in the aisle and Stuart cornered him for an interview, during which he was informed that the cereal boxes were being filled correctly in Armidale, and that the supermarket staff must be stealing the cereal.
The manager of the supermarket then rushed over to deny the allegations that his staff were stealing the cereal, and went on a peculiar rant about how “the boxes weigh the right amount if they’re upside down and you don’t read the weight printed on the box…oh and did you know that we’ve increased the price of oranges so that you get one for the price of two”.
The dream ended quite abruptly at this point.
I think I had this dream on Friday night, which would make sense as I went to bed before midnight on Friday and Stuart would still have been on the radio at the time. That would explain why Stuart entered the dream…as for the rest of it…
I was looking back through some of my emails and noticed an email from Tim Malone about the ACT Liberal Party creating a shadow department of government accountability to keep track of the Stanhope government’s “waste and mis-management”. It reminded me that I had a dream about Canberra’s very own brown tree kook, ACT Chief Turnip Jon Stanhope yesterday.
On this occasion we were both towards the back of a supermarket. I was there to get some lunch, and Jon Stanhope was there to show off his brand new red shopping basket. I saw Jon Stanhope and decided that I would like to meet him and let him know that it’s good to see a politician mingling with the public…so I walked over to him, and without needing to introduce myself, he started yelling “No, I’m not talking to the likes of you, go away you awful little man”, and then ran away screaming with his red shopping basket.
Oddly (as if that wasn’t odd enough), the tomatoes started applauding, and the dream ended.
I don’t really like the taste of soy milk, so thinking about this dream makes my stomach churn.
The basic premise of the dream was that a cooking show was being produced in my kitchen, and every recipe had to involve soy milk. It was quite concerning that this did not mean creating new receipes, rather it meant adding soy milk to existing recipies…and even things which I wouldn’t consider a recipe.
The image of a steak being cooked in a frying pan filled with soy milk is one of the most disturbing images I can think of, and I can’t get it out of my head.
I think I’ll stop there, you don’t need to know about the other soy milk recipes.
During my 22 hours of sleep I had a very strange dream that I quit my current job (that sounds grammatically incorrect to me, but I can’t see any way to correct it without affecting the meaning) and was excited to go back to a previous casual job working for Telstra.
The few months I spent working for Telstra are not a time I wish to repeat, it is most definitely not something I would be excited to repeat.
Whilst writing this I noticed that Firefox’s spellcheck function wants to change “Telstra” to “Maelstrom”…I would let it, but then this post would make as much sense as my dream.
I had a very strange and short dream last night about a lotto draw.
The dream started with the lotto machine just about to draw the first number, which was 44, it then went and picked out another number, and again it was 42…in fact the entire draw was filled with the number 42.
The lotto presenter did not seem at all surprised by the result although the government officials could be seen in the background measuring the lotto machine. The dream then ended.
Just in case you were wondering, most Australian lotteries have 45 numbers and draw out eight of them per lottery draw. To have enough of each number in the barrel to have a lotto draw in which the same number filled every position, you would need 360 balls in the lotto machine.
I had this dream on Friday night. It started in the primary school library where a friend and I were trying to find our glasses. Eventually the class teacher (my year three and year five teacher, Ms. Sue Amundsen) got out her box of lost glasses and rummaged through it, but the glasses weren’t in there so she sent two other students downstairs to the principal’s office for stealing glasses.
Ms. Amundsen then got the class to sit down so that she could start teaching us. The lesson for the day was a lecture from her about how wonderful communism is. For some reason she was telling us all about how books are better if you’re a communist, the colour on the television is better in communist countries and you don’t have to eat vegetables if you don’t want to.
Another teacher then interrupted and started telling us about the problems with communism…for some reason the teacher was Abe, Clive Robertson’s producer. Ms. Amundsen did not like the idea of anyone talking about the problems with communism, so she started screaming, and then started throwing sorbolene cream all over the room, before knocking the book case over. As the book case fell over, Ms. Amundsen’s box of lost glasses fell on the ground and my glasses flew over to me (my friend had seemingly disappeared). The police then arrived to arrest Ms. Amundsen for stealing glasses, and as they were doing this the prime minister’s missing glasses appeared.
Abe and I then took the prime minister’s glasses to him, and he knighted us.
In this dream I was living in a building which looked just like my workplace, but happened to be up the other end of the street from it. I walked downstairs to check the mail and noticed a red piece of paper sticking out of my letterbox. At first, thinking it was advertising, I came close to discarding it, but for some reason I started to read it:
“Dear Sir/Madam,
I apologise for the inconvenience but I have stolen every car in Canberra.
Have a good day.
Your friendly international terrorist”
I then went inside and rang the police, who said that it was “terrible” and would give us all helicopters as a replacement.
One of the few benefits of the flu is the amount of sleep it allows me to get during the day when I usually have better dreams, and I had two good ones yesterday. I’ll share one with you today, and the other one I will save for tomorrow.
In this dream I am in my kitchen making myself a cup of tea with one sugar and no milk. As I take out the tea bag and turn around to place it in the bin I notice that 2UE’s Clive Robertson is standing at my kitchen bench stirring a plastic cooking container. I decide to ask Clive a question which has been on my mind for a few days…is he going on holidays soon? So I walk over to him and ask the question, and instead of answering it, he starts to tell me all about the rice he is cooking.
Clive’s story is interrupted after a minute or so by two men standing on the other side of the bench, Channel Seven’s Bruce McAvaney and Dennis Cometti, who both start commentating Clive’s cooking efforts. They both get very excited when Clive puts the rice in the microwave oven, and become increasingly excited as the microwave counts down, and are both absolutely ecstatic when Clive “wins” the game by taking the cooked rice out of the microwave.
After this Clive drinks my cup of tea and the dream ends.
I’m sure Clive will be disappointed that, once again, he is appearing in the dreams of a male.
I had a rather unusual dream a couple nights ago. In this dream a film crew is scheduled to arrive at my house on Saturday morning, however for some reason Saturday somehow turns in to AFL Grand Final day, and the film crew turned at 3:30pm, and then to make matters more peculiar, they turned up with a heap of green mesh and decided to film that.
As it happens a film crew is coming on Saturday, but there is no chance of these people turning up on Grand Final day, and they certainly won’t be filming green mesh.
It’s not very often that I get to enlighten you with a summary of a dream in which I’m using public transport in another city, so today must be your lucky day as that is exactly what I’m about to do.
This dream started with me sitting in the second last carriage a CityRail train in Sydney, the train appeared to be travelling at a normal pace and I had a look out the rear window of the carriage, towards the last carriage. The last carriage then disconnected from the rest of the train and disappeared in to the distance (apparently impossible…but I’ll let Clive Robertson explain why shortly).
Probably in order to prove that the dream wasn’t even remotely real, the dream then managed to make a CityRail employee walk in to my carriage (something which would almost never happen in real life). I alerted him to the fact that the train was missing a carriage.
The train then stopped at the next station and this CityRail employee told everyone to get off the train and wait on the platform (of which there was only one at this station) and wait for the missing carriage to catch up with the train…oddly enough, it did.
To make matters even more odd, the CityRail employee handed me a stop watch and asked me to time the train as it travelled around a loop of the railway station. For some reason the stop watch was able to determine the speed of the train, and determined that the carriage which had previously gone missing was travelling one kilometre per hour slower than the rest of the train.
The CityRail employee decided that we would leave the slow carriage behind, so all the passengers got back on the train and away we went!
This is one of my more peculiar dreams, and I decided that the best person to talk to for an analysis of this dream would be the closest thing to an expert on trains that I know of, 2UE’s Clive Robertson. Was Clive (aka Dr. Cliff) any help? I’ll let you decide, have a listen to our conversation from 3:25 this morning. Incidentally Clive continued his comments about this website from a few days ago in this conversation, and somehow we ended up discussing my peculiar habits.
To answer Clive’s question, the titles are in Georgia font, and the rest is in Arial.
I now eagerly await the email from Clive’s GP, and I pity the poor sod at CityRail who has to try and make sense of that conversation when the Media Monitors transcript arrives later today.
Long-term readers of this blog would know that I like to write accounts of my dreams, those same readers would probably struggle to remember one of my nightmares. Well generally I don’t have them, but as I had one yesterday I should write it down for your amusement.
The dream starts with WIN Television’s local news and the tail end of a report about something. In the dream I wasn’t actually watching the news, the news telecast seemed to be the dream. Anyway at the end of the report Peter Leonard appeared with the next story, and it was him saying that he was driving on the federal highway and got his car stuck in the rather deep gravel trap at the off ramp to the Hume Highway’s southbound lanes, Phil Small then said to Peter with a chuckle that he has been accident free for 15 years, they chatted about their age and what colour the lines on the road should be for a few moments before deciding that they should go to the report on Peter’s accident.
The dream then moved to the site of Peter’s (now cleared) accident. I was standing there looking over at the Hume Highway (looking strangely like Parkes Way) and noticed one car on fire, a lot of debris, and a lot of damaged vehicles scattered all over the place, but there was no traffic anywhere. I spotted a shed on the other side of the road, the sign on the shed said that it was the depot for the New South Wales Parks and Wildlife Service’s Hume Highway Forest division. I decided that they would be the best people to help in this situation and went over to the shed.
When I got there I met the deputy park ranger who said I could speak to the chief park ranger who was out the back, I went over to the back door whilst the deputy park ranger headed towards the kitchen. Something didn’t seem right, and I couldn’t quite work out why I recognised the deputy park ranger, but I went off to find the chief park ranger anyway. As I was heading towards the back door a handful of injured people walked in the front door, and just as I reached the back door the chief park ranger walked through it with more injured people. The chief park ranger was none other than actor Anthony LaPaglia, and he asked me to go and get the deputy park ranger as he was “ready for his assistance with these people”.
I said nothing but noticed Anthony LaPaglia was walking towards the wall with various gardening tools and saws on it, I started to walk around the corner to the kitchen and noticed the deputy park ranger (who I now recognised as actor Craig Charles) was holding a bunch of very large knives, by this stage Anthony LaPaglia was holding a large saw and a hedge trimmer. Both of them were preparing to attack. My instinct was to run, but I instead told them that some movie they had both been in (no such movie exists in real life) had been terrible, and reminded them how much money the film company lost due to it. For some reason they stopped walking towards the crowd, and melted whilst screaming.
The crowd and I then rushed across the Hume Highway and took refuge in the back yard of a house where we all started putting pegs on the Hills Hoist rotary clothes line.
The dream, or more correctly, nightmare, then ended.