The end of the world cake

A couple of days ago

A giant interstellar storm was approaching earth and was going to destroy it. There was one large spaceship on which a select few (not myself) were going to escape, including the 'royal family' – not the British royal family but a sort of global one, loved and revered.

The storm was coinciding with some sort of anniversary and the race was on to get the traditional gifts ready and onto the spaceship (royal family being already aboard) before the world ended. I helped carry the traditional large rectangular iron plate (like a manhole cover) stamped/cast with good typography, then was on my way to my next destination when I saw a design and art shop had an end of the world sale on. Although anything I bought would be a short lived pleasure, I thought it worth ducking in for a quick look, but there was very little left and the place was almost ransacked, though I did pick up a nicely designed flyer for an upcoming art show.

I continued on and found my flatmate Diego frantically putting the finishing touches on another royal gift, a giant heart-shaped chocolate cake. He was carefully poking chocolate buttons into the icing on top but in a very deliberate and evenly spaced way. Firstly I urged him to get up to the spaceship and finish the cake on board, just in case, but he reminded me that regardless of the approaching apocalypse, the cake HAD to be prepared on earth for it to be 'proper'. I then asked if I could help him by placing some chocolate buttons on the cake top as well, but he said "no this is a traditional Colombian way of decorating, it cannot be shortcut".

Later, somehow I was walking across a footbridge across the River Thames and found a small camera, so was taking some shots of the approaching apocalyptic storm – sort of like a giant bruise in the sky. I never found out if Diego got the cake to the ship in time.

Whale wakeup

This dream was a couple of weeks ago, simple yet convoluted...

In the dream I was asleep on the sand of a Coromandel beach, similar to Cathedral Cove though not exactly. I was woken (in the dream) by a puffing sound and sat up to see a Minke Whale stranded in the shallows, tangled in enormous amounts of nylon fishing line. I realised that the puffing sound was it 'blowing'.

I then briefly woke up (in the real world), heard the whale 'blow' again and realised in my half-awake state that it had been my own breath / sighing that I had heard, and turned into a whale sound in the dream...

Afghanistan

This dream happened a few weeks ago but was extremely vivid and a bit distressing though at least not a 'nightmare'...

I was in Afghanistan with a team of troops from some obscure Eastern-European NATO country who had a token contingent there. We were sitting on the curved low steps of a derelict building in a rubble-strewn street, on an incredibly hot day. The entire squad was basically asleep from the heat and I realised a lot of villagers were starting congregate and gawk at us, so I was yelling at the squad to get up...but it was so hot it was impossible to wake them and I myself could barely get on my feet with incredible yawning and drowsiness. I staggered down the street a little and a small Afghan boy about 8 years old was walking towards me holding his arms out and yelling something at me. In the dream this was suspicious and against 'protocols' to let him get too close, so I was yelling at him to stop/get back but he didn't so in the end I was forced to shoot him with an old FN FAL ("SLR") rifle.

He fell and I realised he hadn't been a suicide bomber or anything so I rushed over full of remorse. He was shot in two places but alive and I was desperately trying to save his life, and I realised my team, still asleep on the steps, had a medic in it who would be able to save the boy so I was yelling and cursing at the troops to wake up, even in the end firing my rifle in the air to try and wake them up...

Vanessa and the Walrus

26 July 2011


I dreamed I had a date with a woman, a celebrity/big star called "Vanessa Vanilli" – but she lived in the Bahamas, so I was going to borrow a WW2 Supermarine Walrus amphibious plane and fly down there for the weekend, though I was a little worried about whether I was good enough a pilot to take such a long journey.


But then I heard someone had booked it for the Sunday so that wasn't an option, and also a fog rolled in (a bunch of us were standing on a pier discussing this) so I couldn't take off anyway. It was a once in a lifetime opportunity so I was wondering if I could take a commercial flight but someone said 'nah, just text her you can't fly in this fog'. While standing around on the pier I noticed someone had ordered takeaways, which were sitting in a bag but going cold so I helped myself to a huge burger which included as a filling an entire toasted sandwich. I was trying to fit it all in my mouth then realised the takeaway person had just put two orders together by mistake so I took the toasted sandwich out, but got a dirty look from my friend Daryl who thought I was wasting food...

Hose

6 February 2011

In this dream I had a few hours layover in LA airport and ran into Ben, one of the people from my Antarctica voyage, and since he was setting up an exhibition stand at the airport I offered to help. He was keen but said he wouldn't need me for a couple of hours, so I wandered out to a supermarket and rented a hose for a few hours to kill time. When I say rented a hose, I mean not just in a packet, but one that was connected and running. So I wandered several blocks of LA trailing enormous lengths of garden hose and dribbling water behind me. At one point I came to an alley with some neat little shops, but a local man hurriedly advised me that a squad of the neighborhood authorities (not police but more like community constables with a bent for street cleanliness, grey-clad, almost like a militant wing of rubbish men in a way) were coming and flagrant use of hoses was forbidden. Luckily he had an idea and as the squad arrived on foot he was using my hose to blast off graffiti from a wall. The squad grudgingly acknowledged this and moved on, so in thanks I went to the man's father's shop and bought an interesting boxed set of stylised and abstract toy soldiers made sculpted from stainless steel. Then with time running out before my onward flight, I caught a taxi to the airport – though also bringing the hose with me still as that was due back promptly as well….

The white men

I had many dreams while on board ship in the last month but most were fragmented, too dimly remembered or even dull to make them worthy of blogging. However this one stood out and is pretty bizarre even by my standards.

27 January 2011

The white men

The title doesn't refer to anything racial, instead these white men were a supernatural force dedicated to the colour white. They weren't men in the conventional sense, but (man-sized) smooth and nearly featureless plastic-like figures with a single 'leg', who hover and are invisible – though not truly so, more in that they existed slightly beyond our perception (see epilogue). These white men would commit criminal acts and whatever it took to champion the colour white – I have a vague sense of them doing something macabre in a corner shop earlier in the dream. But primarily in this dream they were out to correct the world of art. In a vast wooden-floored art gallery (the sort of restored old warehouse such as the Britomart district in central Auckland) they roved through after hours splashing white paint over an exhibition of colourful paintings. Then, some weeks later, a new exhibition opened which instead of on canvas, was large square areas of the gallery floor painted white in broad and anarchic brushstrokes – but with a hint of colours at the very edges, as if colour had been covered up and conquered by white. At the opening function, a sit-down dinner, a beautiful woman was sitting at a table and one of the white men hovered up next to her, leans over and in a creepy tone says "I LIKE this."

The white men also could make women swoon with their (detected on a subconscious level) presence and in the latter part of this dream several women had stripped nude and writhed sweatily on their chairs as a white man randomly molested them, then had his way with one of the celebrity attendees, Victoria Beckham.

Epilogue: I'm not sure if this was part of the proper dream or if I had woken a little then fallen back asleep and semi-lucidly introduced this aspect, but some days later there was a pitched battle between the white men and a special squad of the SAS soldiers who had been trained to be able to see them. At some stage one of the white men expressed amazement that they could be seen and one of the SAS soldiers snarled that did they think they hadn't attracted attention? In any case, a further bit of symbolism for you to interpret if you will is that the SAS soldiers (as they do anyway) were clad entirely in black.