Another "...what??" Dream:

To entertain the masses! (all…one…of you) Here are the details of the slightly weird dream I had last night:

To start with in this dream, I was walking in town wearing a knee-length skirt (which is something I very rarely do. In fact, I haven’t owned a skirt that sits above the ankle in years) and green tights, a black vest top, a yellow cardigan, a brown leather jacket and calf-high purple boots. I also had my (usual) large shoulder bag. These details were very precise and clear.

Anyway, in this precise and very hip and fashionable getup I was strolling – neigh; almost skipping – through a busy town with my dog.

And my dog was behaving impeccably, which should have twigged me that it was a dream, actually. On the whole I think he is reasonably well behaved, but in a situation he is not used to, i.e.; a busy street in town, with masses of sights and smells and sounds to distract him, he would have been pulling me this way and that like a dog possessed, yet in the dream he was trotting along by my side, good as gold as I almost skipped my way along, looking about me appreciatively.

The town wasn’t the town I lived in. It was somewhere big like London. I’m not sure whether it actually WAS London, but it was a very London-ish sort of place. But in any case, there I was walking with my dog and peering into windows of the various shops. Then we went into a few of them - both of us, that is, me and the dog. And nobody minded. It was if large black dogs walked into bakeries and furniture stores all the time - and mooched, buying nothing. Then I meandered into a jewellers and swooned over a diamond necklace, which I decided to buy with all the money I seemed to suddenly have.

A few minutes after leaving the jewelers, necklace in hand, I bumped into Stephen Fry (he is my favourite celebrity, closely followed by David Attenborough, but he isn‘t involved in this), who greeted me as an old friend, giving me a great big hug and squeezing my bottom before helping me put my necklace on.

I chided my old friend Stephen for being drunk, and he swore, whilst slurring his words and swaying a little, that he was sober as a judge, as the saying went.

He invited me out for cocktails, which I accepted. Bingo (the dog) wasn’t allowed into the cocktail bar, so I hailed a taxi and popped him inside and instructed the bored cabbie to take him home. The taxi drove off, and then Stephen and I weaved our way to the cocktail bar, with Stephen pawing all over me like an old letch whilst being overly camp and making overly loud comments regarding passing males (neither of which he is known in real life to do).

While drinking the cocktails, he complained about his live-in boyfriend Clive, and I moaned about my cleaning job. Then I suddenly remembered that OH MY GOSH! I had left my laptop on the side on an escalator! So up we jumped and off we went.

As we rushed along the streets - with Stephen still pawing at me and making loud, lewd comments mingled in with recitals of classic poetry - I agonized over the probable loss of my laptop. But when we got there, it was still there, safe and sound, balanced perfectly on side of the escalator (a real-life physical impossibility as the damn things move) and beeping at me reproachfully as if it knew it had been abandoned and hated me for it. I scooped it up into my arms, but wait; it was plugged in! But where? The obvious choice was the follow the lead, which we did. It stretched for miles, with us negotiating our way skilfully - despite Stephen’s drunkeness - through the crowds. By the time we located the source, we were back in Kidderminster and stood outside Shipley’s Amusements in Worcester Street. The cable led the way directly inside. This posed a problem as they had made me redundant (over two years ago, mind) for the crime of being 26 instead of 18-20 and not having a size 0 waist. 

I did not want to ever set foot inside that beastly place again, let alone have to explain what my computer cable was doing inside their premises; but I could hardly send Stephen in the state he was in, so in I went. The damn thing was actually plugged into one of their own sockets, and I had to nudge the manager - the one who hadn’t liked me at all - out of the way to reach it and then engage in a tug of war to keep it, which of course with me being huge and him being tiny and shrimp-like; I won. 

Having reclaimed it, I then beamed at the manager’s furious face, made my apologies for the intrusion and left.

Once safely outside wed made haste to leave the area to hopefully avoid being arrested and I rang mum to enquire why on earth she had decided to plug my laptop into a socket inside Shipley’s amusements. It had to be her, I reasoned to Stephen (who wasn‘t listening, having made a beeline for an attractive young male stallion and started earnestly talking to him), because it hadn’t been me.

Her answer was simple. The thing needed charging, electricity was expensive, and she wanted to get back at the sods that had sacked me, so she decided to make them pay for charging up my computer instead of us.

“What possessed you into thinking that was a good idea?” I demanded.

She started to repeat her previous statement, but I didn’t hear it because at the same time a homeless man approached me and asked me for money as he was starving, and Bingo strolled up with what appeared to be a blooded human foot (attached to an ankle) in his mouth and sat down in front of me, and Stephen strolled up with a beaming smile on his face and said “Alice, we’ve been invited to an orgy! What fun!”

Bemused and exhausted, I looked at the tramp, and at Bingo, and at Stephen, and after a few moment’s silence as I counted to ten inside my head, I told them I had had enough and was going home.

I handed the homeless man the diamond necklace.

I told Stephen that I was sure he would manage at the orgy without me.

I took the blooded foot out of Bingo’s mouth and threw it into the basket of a passing bicycle, which then crashed into a bus, after which the bus took to the sky and crashed into bumper first into a twenty foot electronic billboard proclaiming that a jelly wrestling match between Audrey Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe was going to take place in the Hippodrome Theatre at the end of April (first two rows free).

Then I walked off.

That was when I woke up. And sitting up in bed, I said; “…what??”