MONKEY!

I don't remember many of my dreams these days. It takes plenty of fish, cheese & salami to give me the dreams I used to take fo granted. Oh well.

I guess it was due to the very yummy fish I had on Sunday night with Bear and Suyin that I had a decent dream last night. It was pretty good, though I have forgotten most of it.

I also dreamt on Sunday night, but that one was nasty (as most of my dreams now are) invloving ripping my new jeans; in fact the blue pair just fell apart, and I also lost my bicycle. Annoying, as I don't own a bicycle. And I got lost. In the rain.

Anyway, in the dream last night I was in a marketplace. I would like to say it was somewhere exotic, like Thailand, but it wasn't, it was just in Jeamland. There was a great stall selling T-shirts, run by Monkey, Tripitaka, Pigsy, Sandy and Horse. This is more like my kind of dream! It was great to finally meet them in person (as such). Pigsy was both Pigsys - he kept changing when I looked at him (a sure sign of dreaming). Masako Natsume (Tripitaka) was delightful; it is always wonderful to meet actual residents of Jeamland (Masako passed away on 11 September 1985 - suspiciously very close to 20 years to my dream. I did know that she had passed away, but I thought it was around 1982, and I did not know the date. My subconcious might have, of course). Anyway, they were selling T-shirts of the Monkey series, rather good ones. Black with the faces of the cast on the front with Monkey written over the top in red in English and Chinese. On the back was a rock-style 'tour dates' list with places like 'India' and 'Nepal' written again in red in both English and Chinese. I bought 3 shirts in slightly different styles. I had a chat about whether I was more like Pigsy or Sandy; sadly I have very little Monkey or Horse. Masako (at this point blending between Tripitaka, Masako Natsume and my friend Masako in Tokyo in that confused-but-not Jeamland way) noted that I should perhaps try to be more like Tripitaka (message in dreams? for people outside my head this is like a giant neon sign). Well, yes, of course.

The dream ended, with the usual I-have-a-really-great-idea-for-a-story; which I forgot just after I had a shower. Good ideas are very, very fragile. Going to my clothes rack, I though I would wear one of those Monkey t-shirts today... gah! I hate that. My term for that is 'ripping dream' as it feels like I have torn something in my head when I discover reality and dream are not the same. I actually usually feel a bit dizzy & nauseous when it happens too, I expect an EEG trace would show some nasty spike or other. Probably something going all quantum.

This was my first decent dream for while that didn't involve nastiness like the 'Lizard-eating-me-alive' nastydream of September 1996, where I woke to the echo of a scream (mine); or many of the lost/missing/have-to-do-the-HSC-again-tomorrow dreams I have had recently. As I said, nasty.

Jeamland, for those who don't know it, is proposed and described in Michael Marshall Smith's superb novel 'Only Forward'. I have used that term ever since to describe the wierd quantum world of dreams, despite my internal cringing that I am appropriating somebody else's literary invention.

I sigh inwardly and repeat my 'Nothing-new-under-the-sun' mantra.