As anyone who has read this blog for any length of time would know, I have some very peculiar dreams, and various characters from The Bill have been known to appear in them. Well, imagine my surprise when I came across this music video the other day and found actor Jeff Stewart (PC Reg Hollis from The Bill) in it. I don’t think I can make any sense of what’s happening in this video, but it really could be a scene from one of my dreams. It makes about as much sense as my dreams.
This is Sam Brown’s 1988 cover of Marvin Gaye’s “Can I Get A Witness”.
Courtrooms have appeared in my dreams before too. I had a dream where I was a prosecutor and mid-sentence forget absolutely everything about the defendant I was questioning and the case I was prosecuting. I asked the magistrate for a moment and referred to him as “your judginess” which prompted him to declare the defendant not guilty and find me guilty instead! Yep, makes as much sense as the courtroom in this video.
I was recording the first episode of Samuel’s Persiflage but for some reason I was recording it in a rented office in a busy warehouse rather than a room at home where it was really recorded.
The busy warehouse looked like a cross between Officeworks, Bunnings and a factory. I was recording the operatic introduction (which I still think was wonderful even if the listeners did not) while wandering around the warehouse and was accompanied by actor Richard Belzer who was playing various instruments. It wasn’t at all clear why Belzer, portrayor of Detective Munch was there; he just was.
The staff in the warehouse were trying to avoid us and the noise.
I suppose it’s not surprising that people would have been doing their best to get away from the noise of my opera. It has been known to startle unsuspecting animals. I recall one time when I was looking after a neighbour’s cat and started singing while changing the kitty litter…the cat froze, eyes wide open staring at me, then ran to the other end of the house as quickly as possible. The cat probably thought I was about to explode!
My opera has also been known to entertain, baffle and confuse people who get through to my voicemail, where a lovely dose of 40 seconds of my opera greets people before they can leave a message. The reactions of various callers when they leave a message are quite entertaining, with everything from singing in reply, to mild amusement, and even outright horror at having had to sit through it. I answered a call once from someone who had previously reached my voicemail and he expressed great relief at not having to hear my singing again.
A recording of my lovely operatic voicemail greeting
Pebbles and Shyley are accustomed to it, although Pebbles will often give me a strange look if I start singing, while Shyley may bark at me or join in the singing with a howl of sorts.
I had a strange dream the other day. You could say that all of my dreams are strange and I wouldn’t argue with you about it.
Anyway, in this dream I was a detective in a police procedural / murder mystery show. I was not the main character but rather a supporting character who usually worked on cases unrelated to the main plot and was mainly there to make the office look busy and occasionally have a thought which helped the main characters with their case.
In this scene, the main characters asked how my case was going, to which I gave a rather generic response about ir “progressing nicely” and then the main characters noticed that my partner was absent, and asked where my partner was.
“No idea! I think they’re not here because the show’s budget is being used on your guest star suspect and we can’t afford an extra character with lines this week”
The main characters asked how I knew their suspect.
“He’s been in the promos all week. Didn’t you see them? Look, he’s obviously guilty as the producers wouldn’t pay for him to just be a witness. Get him into the interview room and yell at him for a bit, then encourage him to have a lengthy monologue. That should get him to confess. But not yet. Finish your coffee first. There’s still two commercial breaks left this hour.”
And then I went to get a cup of coffee.
This isn’t the first time I’ve been a character who knows they’re in a TV show in my dreams. I once dreamt I was in a repeat of Third Watch and nobody was particularly interested in doing anything because everyone knew what was going to happen anyway.
Last night while I was watching the federal budget (or the “Magical Mythical Numbers Night at the Federal Circus” as I have taken to calling it, given I don’t think there’s been a believable budget in almost 20 years, apart from one about ten years ago) I noticed Bill Shorten sitting at the far end of the front bench and it reminded me of a dream I had just before the 2019 election when he was the opposition leader.
In that year I was booth captain for a political party at one of the polling places in Canberra. This meant I was effectively the supervisor of the volunteers for that party at that polling place, there for the full day to set up and pack up, and coordinate the volunteers through the day while also speaking to voters myself and handing out how to vote cards, etc. I recall taking a 45 minute break for a late breakfast / early lunch but that was my only real break in the day, and I was there until well into the evening as a scrutineer for the vote count as well. On that day I also helped set up signage at a number of other polling places around Canberra, so it was a very long day, and the days preceding it were very busy with campaign activities too. I am no longer a member of that political party, or any political party for that matter, having become very disillusioned with much of politics and governments since.
Naturally the election was on my mind quite a lot in the days before that election, and it is no surprise that it entered my dreams.
In the dream it was Election Day, probably early-afternoon, and Bill Shorten turned up at my polling place.
The voters didn’t pay much attention to him so he decided to get their attention by making things levitate, including the building being used as the polling place.
The election official in charge, my Year 6 teacher Mrs. Brophy, came out of the polling place and furiously told Bill that “levitating is not permitted within the 6 metre campaigning exclusion zone” and he must “put the building down at once”, so Bill put the building down and Mrs. Brophy closed the polls early and started counting the ballots in the middle of the road.
Seeing Bill Shorten down the far end of the front bench on the TV coverage of the budget, with seemingly a bit of a gap between him and the rest of the front bench, made me wonder if he ever dreams of being back in the leadership role of the Labor Party, and if he could, if he would levitate things in the House of Representatives to make it happen?
In this dream I was in Antarctica and working for Chief Superintendent Christopher Foyle (of the TV show “Foyle’s War”) where I made the great discovery that it was possible not only to detect a murderer by using the magical powers of a teapot, but to restrain a suspect too.
Mr. Foyle was greatly pleased by this as a combination of Antarctica’s occupational health and safety policies and their human rights legislation meant it was no longer permissible to physically touch or hold a suspect in the course of arresting them, and Mr. Foyle was absolutely adamant that those laws must be strictly adhered to, so detaining people by waving a teapot around made working within the rules much easier.
Mr. Foyle informed me that the fact I am a wizard was his main reason for hiring me, as he thought skills involving magic and inanimate objects would come in handy one day.
I had a most peculiar dream yesterday that I was playing golf with dinosaurs. Big furry purple dinosaurs. The dinosaurs were very friendly although they didn’t speak any English and roared occasionally.
To make the game stranger, the par score on each hole was variable. There was the standard par score, but before teeing off it was required that you had to search the hole and catch a crocodile. The crocodile, which did speak English, would then award you extra shots on the hole’s par score depending on a criteria which wasn’t entirely clear but a dinosaur did try to explain to me through roars and placing multiple crocodiles on scales and weighing golf balls.
On one hole which was notionally a par 5 I was granted a par 8 and the dinosaur was granted a par 9. I have absolutely no idea why though.
Yesterday I had a dream that I was back in a previous workplace and I found out there was going to be a national power outage, so I had to run the generator to keep the power on at work.
I went up to the generator room (which looked like a larger and emptier version of one of the air conditioning plantrooms at the Canberra Centre) and started the generator but it wouldn’t get up to speed due to what it claimed was an insufficient airflow. So I went and found as many industrial size fans as I could and set them to blow on the generator to provide it with airflow. I had set up a dozen and was happy with that but thought it could use a few more to be on the safe side, and went away to find some. When I came back, the fans I had previously setup were missing and I found out that my present-day boss had sold them to the department store David Jones. So I went to David Jones to get the fans back but the store was a large maze and it was difficult to find the manager.
Meanwhile, I received a communication from an evil spirit which required my permission to pass through my property as a shortcut rather than going the long way around. I granted permission as long as it didn’t stop on my property, so it went through with a dozen other evil spirits and I had to contend with all manner of peculiar objects chasing me including a floating alligator-elephant thing which wanted to recite strange poems at me.
The other day during my sleep I had a dream that I had taken a job as an actor. I was supposed to play a doctor in a rural town and the filming was to take place in a town about ten hours drive from Canberra. Of course, I am not an actor, so I was hoping that the people in charge didn’t notice my distinct lack of acting skills.
I drove to this remote town with one of the other actors and they spent most of the trip reading their lines from a very small notebook. After we arrived in the town there was a meeting of everyone involved in the filming, and I read through a larger notebook containing my lines, but paid no attention to the meeting so I missed all of the details about the filming schedule.
I then went to the only store in town, which was a very large version of a Go-Lo store (which used to be a discount store with many hundreds of outlets across Australia) which had floor tiles which looked like an Aldi store. There was a wall of discount blueberries, half in small size and the other half in large size. They were very tasty so I decided to buy some, however as the store was very large, it was recommended that customers wear skis so they could travel through the store more quickly. I started skiing towards the checkouts however ended up at the other end of the store in the high speed aisle and found myself doing laps of the store at 80km/h while all the paths to the checkouts were blocked so I was required to just continue circling the store on skis while eating blueberries!
Going back through some of my notes, I came across this dream I had in 2018 about a rather unusual concept in radio programming.
There was a show called “Snoring away the snooze-o-grams”. The show consisted almost entirely of people snoring with only occasional interruptions for commercial breaks. The show was said to be very popular with advertisers as they saw it as a way around the laws against subliminal advertising!
John Kerr, the long-time overnight talk radio host who retired from that life 11 years ago and has been playing country music on Gold Coast community station 94.1FM almost ever since, is someone who long-time readers of this blog will know I enjoy listening to. It was a sad day when he retired from his overnight show and a very exciting day when he resurfaced a few months later with his country music show.
I quite enjoy John’s country music show however I rarely get a chance to hear it live and usually record it to hear later on. On my little internal home radio station the show actually airs in part of one of John’s old timeslots from 12am-3am Sunday. I’m not a big fan of newer country music but some of it is OK. Thankfully John plays a good mix of both the old and new so it is an enjoyable show.
John and his show appeared in one of my strange dreams yesterday. In the dream, John’s show had been networked to other community radio stations around the country and John was touring his show to some of the towns which could now hear it. On this particular week he was going to Tumut, which isn’t far from Canberra (and has a fondness for me as back when I used to present news bulletins for AIR News on a weekend, the community station there, Sounds Of The Mountains aired those bulletins and had a working webstream, so I had an opportunity to hear how it sounded on the air, and an opportunity or two to drop in to the station where manager David Eisenhower was always a pleasure to see) and his show was to broadcast live from a local community hall in front of an audience.
John was all set up to go. He sat at a table up on stage with a big microphone and what appeared to be some sort of glowing antenna behind him to send the signal back to the Gold Coast. John plugged everything in but none of the CD players would work. John’s show had started to go to air so he started telling the audience how technology had let him down once again and he started interviewing the mayor of Tumut who made the startling announcement “oh no, of course those won’t work, we don’t allow electricity in the hall as it’s a very terrible health and safety risk, and I was wondering why you were plugging them in when there’s no power in here”.
John was beside himself. “What?? You’re joking aren’t you?” he excitedly exclaimed at the mayor.
“No, I won the election on the banning of electricity from the hall” came the stern reply.
“Well, do you allow fire?” John asked
“Ahhh, Yes” the mayor replied sheepishly, not knowing what John might be proposing to do.
“Good, well I have a plan” announced John “but it will take a few minutes so you must fill in briefly”.
John disappeared out the back for a few minutes and the mayor started singing. A few moments later there was smoke everywhere. John had setup a boiler at the back of the stage and was shoveling coal into it, with a big fire. He then put three large turntables on the desk of the stage and hooked up a pipe from the boiler to the back of each one and started playing records. They took a few moments to get up to speed but it worked, steam powered turntables!
Unfortunately it was so hot and with so much smoke, that nobody could see much of anything and everyone gathered at the radio station to listen instead, and admire the smoke billowing out of the community hall from a distance.
A regular feature on this blog many years ago was recaps of my very peculiar dreams. In the time that I wasn’t maintaining the blog, my dreams usually ended up on my Facebook page. Facebook’s “memories” feature likes to remind me of them on an annual basis so I see no reason why I shouldn’t entertain you with the back catalogue of the strange goings-ons in my head during the most sleepful hours.
Today we head back to the year 2019.
It was 3am and I decided to visit the Magistrates Court.
When I got there a magistrate and prosecutor greeted me. The magistrate told me I didn’t need to enter a plea, and he found me guilty. I asked what the charges were and the magistrate said “nobody knows…it’s a secret”. He then sentenced me to stand guard outside the railway station until the aliens arrive. At this point the magistrate morphed in to radio host Clyde Lewis, who proceeded to give me a long lecture about the warring alien tribes of Neptune and Mars putting our moon aliens at risk, which would force the moon aliens to take shelter at the railway station.
I then went to the railway station. American political operative Roger Stone appeared with a fax machine and a black jellybean milkshake, and told me President Trump would fax a greeting to the aliens and I had to give it to them. The milkshake was to be my payment. This was a recurring theme in my dreams at this time, that Roger Stone would reward me with black jelly beans for doing things for President Trump.
My lawyer, who had missed everything to this point, stood on top of Telstra Tower and smiled.
Of late I have been going through some of the older episodes of The Bill which I was too young to really see or appreciate when they first aired and which I haven’t already watched. I’m currently working my way, slowly, through the mid-90s. I am also working my way through Inspector Morse. I’d like to say that I’m rewatching Inspector Morse as I was of the belief that I had seen just about every episode, but the more I watch, the more I realise I haven’t seen most of them (either that, or they’re secretly filming new episodes and adding them to my DVD collection when I’m not looking), so in many ways I am actually watching most episodes of Inspector Morse for the first time.
The episode I watched most recently on the weekend was the 1990 episode “Driven To Distraction” and I was quite delighted when the familiar name of Mary Jo Randle came up in the opening titles. As I tend to do when a familiar name pops up in the opening titles of a detective show, I try to work out what role they will play before they appear on screen in person. In Mary Jo Randle’s case, I was expecting her to either be the mother or sister of the murder victim. But to my surprise and even greater delight, her first appearance in the episode was in a CID briefing listening to Chief Inspector Morse outlining the case, before effectively taking over the briefing. She was playing a Detective Sergeant on secondment from CID Training School.
This was particularly delightful because in the episodes of The Bill I’m currently working through, Mary Jo Randle plays Detective Sergeant Jo Morgan, and quite frankly her appearance in Inspector Morse could almost have been exactly the same character with the same mannerisms, personality traits, and detecting style. DS Morgan on secondment from Sun Hill to Thames Valley!
Mary Jo Randle as DS Jo Morgan in The Bill (image credit: ITV / Fremantle Media)
Of course the timeline doesn’t quite work. This episode of Morse was in 1990 and Jo Morgan was a character in The Bill from 1993 to 1995 until she (do we need a spoiler alert for something which happened 29 years ago?) took a bullet meant for then-WPC June Ackland. So I suppose she really would have preferred to stay in Thames Valley with Morse and Lewis.
I had a dream once that I was working for Chief Superintendent Foyle from Foyle’s War but was under investigation by my high school librarian and so got banished to Detective Inspector Frost’s office in A Touch Of Frost, and Frost told me not to worry about it because the worst they could do to me was transfer me to Sun Hill who were about due for another station explosion, before he demanded another cup of tea!
On the subject of actors playing almost the same character in various shows (and Richard Belzer actually playing the same character in far too many shows to count, doesn’t count), I recently finished re-watching Stargate Universe where Louis Ferreira played Colonel Young, and I have just started watching Motive, a Canadian murder-mystery show where he played Detective Oscar Vega. I have only watched the first episode so far, but it was almost Colonel Young Helps Solve A Murder. I’m sure Detective Vega will develop as a character, but at least for a moment it’s nice to imagine what else Colonel Young might be doing seeing as Stargate Universe was very unfortunately cut short after two seasons, when it deserved at least one more.
I actually have some thoughts on how a Stargate Universe movie could warp up the series, even after all this time, with a tie-in to Stargate Atlantis (which was also cut a season too short and it’s a pity the proposed direct-to-DVD movie to wrap up the loose ends never came to fruition), but I think I’ve prattled on enough for one post here, and that idea can wait for another day. Just like my idea on how to revive The Bill for a short series (hint: Lord Mayor Bob Cryer!).
I had a rather odd dream yesterday that I decided to go skydiving before work. Skydiving in this instance could be done from a private airstrip in Fyshwick, but because I was a bit short on time I decided to park in Woden and walk to Fyshwick (how this is quick in any way is beyond me) as the wind was blowing in that direction and if I was to start a skydive over Fyshwick I would land in Woden.
After parking I came across a mobile phone on the ground. Upon examination it turned out to be the phone which was stolen from me in 2009 and I decided to take it to the police station for forensic examination, but due to time constraints decided to do so after my skydive.
Due to a quirk in dream geography, I merely had to walk through a park to get to Fyshwick. Before long I was airborne but the whole process of returning to land was taking too long. Due to the wind rushing past I could not vocally advise people that I needed to return to land faster, so I reached in to my pocket and got out some liquorice sticks and started to spell out “I have to go to work”, but the wind prevented any of the liquorice from staying still. One of the supervisors of the skydiving misunderstood my message and put me parachute in reverse, which caused me to start ascending. Before I knew it, I was over Hobart (which looked suspiciously like Mount Ainslie with buildings on it) which was OK as I knew of a shortcut tunnel in Hobart which would get me back to Canberra with a five minute stroll…the only problem was that I couldn’t figure out how to land and continued to ascend.
The dream ended there, so I’m not sure if I ever did manage to land or get to work. The way things were going though, I wouldn’t be surprised if I ended up flying all the way around the world before getting to work.
I had a dream that a man stormed in to my house to announce that he was starting a convoluted legal process to abduct me. I wasn’t happy about it, but went along with it at first as I thought he was the same man that had abducted a work colleague, and this was a chance to save them.
As part of the legal process, I was evicted from my house, without any of my property except clothing, for 24 hours. I informed the man that he had to record weather updates for my hobby radio station in my absence, and then left. It was nearly 5pm and I realised that work would be expecting me at any moment, but without my phone I could not inform them that I would not be coming in as I was being abducted.
The next thing I knew, I was hiding in a cupboard so that the court-appointed pre-abduction psychiatrist couldn’t find me. Unfortunately the cupboard did not have a door, but only a curtain, which the psychiatrist stuck her nose through.
Suddenly I realised I was sharing the cupboard with a dingo. The dingo scared the psychiatrist away and then kept me company. I gave the nice dingo a pat. The dingo seemed to enjoy this.
A short time later, one of the dingo’s army friends came over and told me he could help me with my abduction problem. The dingo trusted him, and that was good enough for me.
Alas I was then woken up by a phone call and did not find out how the dream ended, but based on the fact that I was feeling safe for the first time in the dream in the presence of the dingo and his army friend, I suspect the dream may have ended well. Either that, or it would have cut away to another semi-related scene without any sort of resolution.
One of the things I have noticed lately is that if I leave my electric blanket on while I’m sleeping, I have more vivid dreams than I do when the electric blanket is not on. I suspect this may have something to do with my body temperature being higher with the electric blanket.
This morning was no exception.
The dream started with me driving home down a steep hill. A warning light appeared and then the car completely died…the steering didn’t work and the brakes only partially worked. I slid down the hill and eventually came to a halt in the ambulance parking space of a hospital’s emergency department.
I didn’t believe I was injured, but the hospital people came out and made a fuss. They picked me up and wrapped me in various bandages and wools, and then had their on-site insurance assessor do much the same with my car.
Once the hospital people had finished with me, they took me to see the insurance assessor. He was attempting to refill a pen by putting it in a pencil sharpener when I walked in to his office. When this didn’t work he got a large stick out of his desk and started waving it about angrily, and told me that even though I didn’t do anything wrong, the insurance company would only pay to repair my car if I agreed to tell the police that I was trying to reverse down the hill. He then rather sharply said “good night” and ran behind a green wall.
I wasn’t going to comply with his request so I decided to visit an old friend who was a more important person within the insurance company than the man with the big stick, but was also regarded as “rather odd” as he had paid the Western Australian government a large sum of money to build a train tunnel a couple metres above ground level so that he could put matching train tracks under the tunnel and also build his office there.
I caught a train to Western Australia and jumped out of the carriage at the appropriate point in the tunnel. I then proceeded to the tunnel’s exit and climbed down in to the dark areas under the tunnel which comprised mostly of wet grass, partial tree trunks, and fragments of train tracks. The area under the tunnel was also a bit of a maze and so when I saw the person I was looking for around a bend, I knew that it was going to take longer than I expected to reach him.
I walked around a few tree trunks and was then attacked from behind. A small altercation followed in which neither side fared particularly well, and then I realised that my attacker was the person I had been looking for, and he also recognised me.
We walked over to a nearby shopping centre through a field which looked like a dry version of the field between Henry Melville Crescent and the Monaro Highway in Gilmore, and ended up at a shopping centre which looked like Kippax Fair.
In a takeaway store we ordered coffee, and while we waited, a Western Australian local news update appeared on the TV. It pixelated a bit and the audio cut out while the newsreader was pronouncing the name of a small and remote town, but then something interesting happened in the update…the newsreader announced that my insurance claim had been unconditionally approved and the car’s electrics would be replaced with modern and reliable steam technology, and lighting would be installed in some sections under the railway tunnel.
We then walked back to my friend’s office under the tunnel, walking past the newly-installed lighting in the process, and found my car was ready to go, and the angry man with the pointing stick was standing there pointing at the car with his pointing stick. He said “good night”, and then I woke up realising that I had overslept a bit and had to rush off to work.
