I'm in a library. It's like my local public library, but seems colder and greyer, and also the aisle I'm in is caged with wire fencing, unlike any library I've ever been in. At the end of the aisle, I see a large grey book called:
100 EPIC
DJ SETS
SUBSCRIBER'S
EDITION
I wasn't a subscriber, so I hastened to pick it up. Opening it to a random page, I found that it wasn't about DJ sets, but some sort of music technology. Unusually they had chosen to illustrate the character of certain beats with circular diagrams. I could tell that the diagrams were basically an oscilloscope trace of the sound wrapped around to connect the two ends together. I think this might have been inspired by an article I read once that claimed that vibrating superstrings could be thought of as a loop of superstring in which vibration occurred and was sustained. I was just thinking about this when-
"Hey"
Someone spoke behind me. I didn't turn around because I assumed he was talking to someone else, which is something that often happens in waking life but in dreams-
"Hey"
Of course, he might be talking to me, but I didn't want to turn round into the conversation of two strangers, because that's always awkward, and-
"Hey"
I turned round. A tall black man wearing a grey coat, with a blank, slightly sad expression was standing at a distance.
"Have you ever used a 1000bpm strawberry shaped beat?" he asked.
"No," I said "Isn't 1000bpm a bit .... ?"
"Yeah". He nodded.
"There was that Moby thing-"
""Thousand"" he confirmed.
"But that was... yeah."
After this conversation trailed into silence and eventually I went to check out my book.
* * *
I found myself in a large shop in my home town that doesn't exist. I'd been here in a previous dream, when it sold pointless kitchen gadgets and accessories. Now it also sold clothes. Still, I took the opportunity to wash my hands in their demonstration sink. I was just drying my hands when a distant friend appeared. He seemed pale, and didn't say much. I recalled that he worked in a nearby shop. He doesn't and has never done so, not least because the shop doesn't exist either.
At this point I woke up to choke and cough unpleasantly. The encounter with Dan was somehow unsettling. If I believed that you could be visited in your dreams by the recently deceased, I'd be phoning him up now to see if he was still alive. But I don't. For the record, I woke up at about 10 to 10, so if I find that anything happened to him around then, that would be evidence enough for me to start wondering about that particular conviction.
I got up briefly, but went back to bed to enjoy being nice and warm and not having to get up, and inevitably fell back to sleep.
* * *
I found myself driving around town on a small green motorcycle. I didn't know how the hell to ride it, so it took a long time to get anywhere. I was trying to get to a different city, but somehow was just going around and around.
Suddenly I was in another town, but not the one I was trying to get to. Problematically, I didn't know where it was, or how to get back. The town seemed to be a mixture of unexceptional towns that I've been to.
Fortuitously I happened to meet another friend somewhere in the outskirts of the mystery town. Like many NDCs in dreams, he seemed unconcerned about how he would be getting out of here. Interestingly he was a person who, in waking life, only days before I had recommended should not purchase a motorcycle, small, green, or otherwise, on the grounds that he was enough of a danger to himself and others even without one. I suggested we use his web-enabled phone to find out where we were, to at least give us a clue on how to get back. I parked the small green motorcycle in a handy road and we retired to a teashop/pub. On the way there we had a brief argument about my use of "MapQuest" as a generic term for looking up maps on the internet / all sites offering map searches on the internet. We came to the conclusion that MapQuest was the original site to look up maps on the internet, but "the guy got shut down for using illegal maps". Which is complete nonsense, but what do you expect?
At some point there was a riot in the teashop, and we were ejected. At some point I found myself running through a rectilinear maze of unpainted fence, perhaps brought on by playing too much Ghost Recon. Later I was walking along a pavement lined with trees at the edge of a park. I thought I saw Steve Lamacq, and went up to greet him. It actually wasn't Steve Lamacq, and didn't look anything like him, but the man did attempt to impersonate him. Then he came onto me.
* * *
A strange interlude where I was not physically present, where my dad told someone that someone else that they both knew of had died on a train in Twickenham, just where it passed a particular allotment. This was significant somehow.
I suspect that this was inspired by my earlier thoughts about the possibility of my earlier dream having been a message of death.
* * *
Another interlude, confused and blurred, where a group of people with special abilities were gathered together at a small house for a particular purpose. One of the people was some sort of contrived genderbending plotline, to his dismay, probably inspired by some dodgy manga I've read recently. He ended up dressed in women's clothing, riding pillion with some kind of kickass motorcycle maiden.
* * *
The dream turns into a movie. A strange variant of Batman is being guided through dark water in a bubble projected by his companion, who looks like a cross between Killer Croc, Judge Dredd, and the Martian Manhunter. Two tall skinny lizard people swim past staring malevolently into the bubble.
"Hmm," Batman muses, "They weren't supposed to be present in this dimension."
Superman, floating down a huge ice crevasse. Embedded in the walls, encased in clear ice, are a legion of humanoid gold robots.
Batman, knee deep in water in a dim brick tunnel, stabbing a harpoon into something beneath the water.
A sheet of thumbnail images of comic book covers. The one you focus on is a Green Arrow cover, showing a hand pulling away the golden cloth mask of a golden humanoid robot, revealing a suprised human face.
A team of superheroes, including Judge Manhunter Croc, led by the Batman, scout through a maze of grimy, dimly red lit tunnels, slogging through water. Someone kills a mutated shark, snapping with electricity.
This is some kind of mixture of many comics. Batman isn't such an interesting character when accompanied by actually super-powered people, so I guess that the rest of the scount team would also be Batman style "really good but still human" vigilantes. There was someone who looked like Wonder Woman, but maybe she was a revolutionary inner city daughter of the times version. There was more than a flavour of Rorschach's parts of Watchmen.
* * *
* *
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