MAKIN THE LAW MAKIN THE LAW

1: I was towards the front of a crowd of people being charged by police on horseback — i got out of the way by running back through the crowd along the top of a railing (not the spiky kind, the aluminium tubing kind you'd maybe see at a cattle market or similar).

2: I was in a very very spacious modern leisure centre/concert hall/conference hall type space, which had many levels and stairways and balconies and so on, and large floor to ceiling windows on most of the outer walls. There were a lot of people there, everyone in elaborate Venetian carnival-level fancy dress: present for some kind of huge awayday team-bonding role-playing game, in which we were required en masse to submit to a not-yet-very-clearly specified, mildly authoritarian regime for the duration of the game. I was cheerfully boasting about how little I'd be playing along; ppl were trying to shush me or moving away from me, saying "They'll hear, you know," and similar. As the main hall emptied, with ppl moving off to their allotted spaces, it became clear that they had heard: that I was still here, without an allotted role I'd be informed of, because I had been allotted a darker and more frightening role without being told -- perhaps of ritual scapegoat, or anyway of the only person in the game that it wouldn't turn out just to be a game for. I was beginning to imagine difficult encounters and confrontations and worse; and wondering if it wasn't already too late to start playing properly or safely, or just leave — and also strongly feeling that actually I *wanted* to confront whoever it was going to be, and morally face them down. Except was I really made for this kind of stuff? Can I handle pain or prison?

3: an elderly and valued colleague was leaving the company, and we had gathered in someone's home to see her off, give her her card and present, celebrate her time with us, and have a nice party. The colleague in fact being an old lady who lived down the village where I grew up, an extremely sour-looking woman (known to cheekier locals as "lemonface") with an unexpected, almost twinkly sense of very very dry humour: she died, in her late 90s, about ten years ago. I was worried I was late; I was early. I started to wonder if having bare feet was appropriate; and had I remembered to sign her card (which she was looking at)? She handed it to me, and I began to read it: what looked like a very tidy list of names turned out to be a list of roles that the card's writer was saying, in a vast paragraph written in tiny very neat letters, she had played, symbolically, in her job: "mother, chef, cop..." it began.

The third doesn't seem much like the other two in terms of actual sense of threat to me, but the level of anxiety I was feeling was really much the same. Without the anxiety, the third is also more like the kinds of dreams I often have -- the first two, the first especially, not so much.

(I haven't been writing dreams up much recently -- mainly because I don't seem to have been having memorable ones for a long time. I don't really know how this works: it seems to go in phases, but I don't know what it relates to.)

i: that my school was celebrating old boys reunion day with a vast international anarchist festival, and my gran that was an actual real cambridge communist and knew anthony blunt and everything was meeting me there -- she said she was feeling a lot better (which she clearly was as she died in 1997) and that her doctor had said she could wear a bra again

ii: the theme of poptimism was 'prepared pop', and carsmilesteve had prepared by pouring chicken fat all over my LPs

(Maybe I posted this before but it DESERVES REPOSTING)

Upset stomach all week climaxed in a bout of high temperature and summer flu: went to bed early, and when I eventually dozed off, I had one of those serial dreams -- that seth edenbaum and i were somewhere in rural hampshire planning against the flooding of the meads and glebes near the river test, small and fast-running and all set about with pollarded willows: and at the same time definitively solving the issue -- which is to say, developing an alternative -- to price signalling as a means of structuring decisions

I dremt that John Lydon was a contestant on X-Factor. He had learned to sing quite well, and in pitch, but kept forgetting the words. Also he wore nothing but a loin-cloth made of sacking and had a pudding-bowl haircut.

I dremt it was the last day of my last term at school. Except not actually, the last day -- there were a few weeks to go. And not the last term, either: the second-to-last. But we were busy tidying up for the last day of the last term. My job was picking up the tiny brightly coloured little rubber monsters all over the floor, and returning them to their owner (one Julie Burchill) (who I wasn't at school with btw).

And that's it. I woke, and thought a little about this, and felt a wave of unspecified sadness. My actual last day I do remember bits of. Being in M's room, with a bunch of people -- the throng gradually dwindling, and other people popping their heads round the door to say farewell, and S cheerily calling "Have a nice life!" to them all as they went. I hope some of them have had.

i: I dremt my grandma was singing a song about a small girl in yellow wellington boots. I said "you know there's a whole genre of pop called twee...?" and she replied: "I do. I've heard it. It's rubbish."

ii: I dremt I was throwing a party for the gang in Friends and the gang in This is England 86. But so far only Combo had turned up, and I was beginning to get cold feet.

i dremt i was by mum's parents old house in s'bury, but it had been knocked down and a large dark green house designed like a chest of drawers with windows built in its place

i started to text my sister to tell her the sad news, except i remembered that she was in shrops and I WASN"T, so this must be a DREAM i'm having

interestingly, i don't recall such a straightforward use of logic, reasoning and recent accurate memory to conclude i was asleep -- but i *am* reading a book about sleep science (very sceptical any versions of the possible interpretation of dreams); the book claims we never dream in such a way as to plumb ourselves into remembered facts from more recently than several days ago... NOT SO in this case, as i clearly responding to (a) actual fact that b3cky is indeed in shrops as of sat morn; (b) my own disagreement with some of this book's claims!

my sleep-thru machine seems to have been a bit rear-ended also: i basically had a sequence of abt 10 very short dreams, waking after each one... this was the scientifically pertinent one, though

i forgot all that i dremt, except the final words, spoken urgently, by a desperately posh unseen woman: "FAIND PEDDINGTON BEAH!"

i drent that when the hobbits met the elves on the eaves of the shire, the elves were there to get planning permission to open a big DIY store on the outskirts of hobbiton

i: work's two faxes are broke, and the editor and assistant editors are both away till next week -- result, work has slowed to a total stop...
ii: i dremt i dremt about GLITTER BEEF* last night

*ie that we went somewhere to eat some**, tho we did not actually ever encounter any, so i am no more the wiser than you, deah readah, as to its make-up
**somewhere with bright yellow plastic seating!