Dream Diary 21.10.2016

Between 5am and 7am.

I am in a town, or finding out how to get there, and the town is more or less like Lewes, but with some of the buildings including my childhood home in Acomb. I am there with my old boss, who is running some kind of artistic event, though it turns out to be more like an activist gathering. Who the activists are is very unclear, but it turns into a conference which people from all over the world are attending. Kim Jong Un is there and Dolly tells me that I have to meet him because I won't get the chance to meet him again. I start to talk to him and feel I ought to bow to him which I do and as I bow something radiates from my head like paint spray and in tandem with my bow a tie appears around his neck and following my stoop descends down to just above his waist. If I stay bowed he will be wearing a tie but if I stand up it will be gone. I stand up and it is gone. This is the first hint at lucidity. Then Keston comes over and shouts "of course!" and shakes Kim warmly by the hand at which point the Internationale comes on. Kim doesn't know the words, even though I am able to sing it in any language I choose. I sing it to him in Korean then French. He can just about make it through the first verse in French. Keston whispers to me that we should leave him alone because he's evil. We talk about innate evil with a group of activists from Denmark who turn out to be extremely Islamophobic. My new boss has taken over the event and the event is now studded with my colleagues from work. They seem to be friendly. I can trust them where I can't trust the activists. My new boss says the police are coming for a routine search. I suddenly realise there is a rucksack that I must hide. It isn't mine but it has my name on it and it is full of drugs I've never heard of. I open the drugs education pamphlet I was given in year seven, but none of the names or pictures match. I don't know what most of the drugs are anyhow, but the rucksack which isn't mine has to be taken outside where me and a school friend from year seven put it under a very light millstone with space below it and cover it with grass. Two police officers appear and ask me where the rucksack is. I decide to be honest, remembering when Colin Baker (playing Doctor Who) in Trial of a Timelord stated "the truth can't harm me" before being led standing on a cart inside the Matrix to his executing - remembering that he himself is putting himself to death, thinking about the passage Keston sent me from Beckett's Molloy and about containers. I am not scared but I will go to prison so I am scared. I keep sliding between not being scared and being scared really quickly as I open the rucksack for the two smiling police officers and pour out bags of crystals and herbs which they decided before they came to work were now illegal. I will go to prison for this. My best bet is to play the "mad card". I asked them how they knew about the rucksack which I now know was mine all along. They tell me the name of the workmate who tipped them off. She is a very kind person indeed, and I cry to her asking her why she has done what she has done. She seems nonplussed as she explains that if the police ask you something you tell them something.

I am called in for my interview which I assume will be with the police or with a lawyer or a judge and suddenly know that I know nothing of the law, of my rights, of what I can and shouldn't say and how the entire structure of law works in any case at all. It's a huge relief when I discover that my interview is actually an interview about poetry conducted by the poet Laura Kilbride, and that my lover, Dolly, will be there. We will be discussing the divergent methods of poetic composition we use. We will answer the questions in turn. We are in a giant cot and Laura Kilbride is at the bottom of it smiling at us and pouring completely green tea while asking us a really difficult question about poetic forms we've never heard of, and anyway in the parallel, the conference, I have to get a train home soon. The giant cot lurches forward and I realise that though I am extremely comfortable and relieved to be in it I am also restrained, whereas Dolly is not. A small face appears in the wall smiling uncomfortably at me. I use my slightly awake mind to undo the restraints, and then give a blistering answer on the form that I've never heard of. Dolly gives a still more blistering answer; the form starts to appear as a physical object which is irresistibly beautiful. Laura touches it with her left foot and it spins around. We make jokes about the terrible concrete/sound poet we met in Athens. But the restraints are back and the cot is gently rotating and my new boss falls past the window, which is the train I am missing. And then I woke up and it was all a dream.