Wow. Had another cracking dream last night about a covert (and then not so covert alien invasion).

Basically I started hearing more and more conspiracy theories amongst some of my friends (including listening to dodgyhoodoo waxing lyrical about it one drunken evening down the pub for a meet up) and also started to see odd things both on the net (well, what's new there!) and also in real life.

A few people started then going missing or changing their minds about the 'threat' which was even more spooky because much of the rumour mongoring and conspiracy theorising just went absolutely quiet. A bit like the calm before the storm I guess.

This seemed to make a few others nervous, whereas the majority of the population carried on obliviously to the sense that 'something was up'. This caused a second generation of concerned theorists but this time they kept their thoughts to whipsers amongst very close friends.

We then started to see more government and police presence on the streets and odd incidents involving them that you couldn't explain (but ususally involved 'terrorist cells' when the media did report them - which was getting rarer in itself). The media seemed to be concentrating on other 'feel good' stories along with problems abroad in third world countries such as starvation and disease and less on the policies and problems at home and in the West.

Then, months later and late at night on the way home from a friends house I saw an empty police car blocking a side street and some very bright and quick flashes of a brilliant blue coming from the street. I had to pass the street anyway so walked, carefully, to the corner and looked down. There were two policemen standing with their backs to me and in front of them was a third figure, a man, who had this blue electricity coating his hands and forearms and was firing it into a lone figure lying on the ground a few feet away. Next to this figure was two other bodies. The 'man' seemed to be talking to the person on the ground - interrogating him.

I must have gasped, or something, but in either case one of the policemen turned round suddenly and spotted me as I started to take flight. I brilliant bolt of blue just missed me as I ran from the side street. And ran. And ran.

I remember spending the night hiding out in a park. Too afraid of going home incase 'they' were waiting for me. I spent the next day and night outside too trying to figure out what I had seen, what to do and staying well out of sight of any police vehicle just incase. I spoke to daver2323 (one of my housemates) on the phone and said I'd pulled whilst out at the pub and was staying with the girl for a few days (which in itself alerted him that something was wrong - says alot about my pulling power doesn't it! :p). Dave indicated that everything was fine at home and no one had been round wondering where I was. This gave me a little confidence and after staking out my own house for a day I eventually went home.

It was largely unspoken but you could tell more people were becoming worried again. Many people started moving out of the city, some even going abroad to stay with friends or family, in the hope it would be better there. It seemed that more of the pretense of normality was falling and the hidden agenda that the authorities had been keeping quiet was becoming less important to be kept quiet.

You saw chases in the street, more 'terrorist' attacks and garffitti claiming aliens were amongst us springing up all over the place. Pamphlets started appearing, through letter boxes, left on tables in pubs and bars, scattered in the streets, placed in books and between food packets in shops - informing you what was 'going on' and ways on how you could help disrupt it.

Many people were scarred. Many also started doing little things to defy the authorities who apparently weren't 'ours' anylonger. Needless to say I became more and more involved in the 'resistance' trying to do what I could - with small groups of friends - against whatever was going on.

Then  the pretense was gone entirely. The media announced that contact had been made with an alien spacefaring species. These 'aliens', who looked exactly like us homosapiens and could speak our language using some sort of throat and ear translator, came in peace and had brought with them cures to many diseases and powerful seeds that would grow crops even in the most harsh and dry of desert climes to help eliminate starvation. They, in fact, seemed to have answers to many of the problems that the media had been highlighting over the past 12 months...

Their 'uncloaking' seem to polarise people. Some accepted them with open arms, others fought even harder now that they perceived their 'adversary' had stepped out of the shadows, others either ran or simply disappeared.

I was at the shop (the old location for those who know where I work) one afternoon about to close up with a couple of friends when this bearded man with smoke-tainted white/yellow hair came in to the store. I instantly got prickles up my spine that soemthing was up. One of my friends said we were about to close when the mans hand shot out towards him and a streak of electric blue light cascaded from his outstretched hand and hit my friend in the chest. I immediate ran to the back room (narrowly being missed by another streak of blue), grabbed my coat and darted through the back door as the old man came through to the back room and fired again, hitting the brickwork next to the door frame. I charged out of the building, through the gate in the backyard and two other people were waiting at the end of the driveway blocking the road. I just got my head down and charged them - hoping to bowl them over and escape.

I charged into one of the figures and seemed to pass straight through it - as if passing through a sticky, humid, barrier. I came out the other side unable to breath. I realised that my enire body had been coated with what seemed to be some sort of elastic gel - covering me from head to toe. Covering my eyes (although I could still see), covering my mouth and nose (although I could neither breath nor make a noise).

I ran a few steps further but fell to the ground in the suffocating gel. I clawed at my jgel-coated face with my gel-coated hands - making no difference at all. The two figures from the driveway were now standing over me. I tried to gasp, to breath, but i couldn't.

I blacked out.

(Then I woke up - dammit :( I would like to think my dream would have carried on from there but I have a feeling that my 'war effort' was over at that point. It was also interesting to see that in my dream the aliens had different powers that we'd usually associate with comic book superheroes/villains. They could shoot energy from their hands, become incorporeal, some could read thoughts (although apparently translation was difficult if the person thought in words and not pictures), levitate and a whole host of other things. It was a very powerful dream and I loved the feeling of being totally alive yet totally afraid of what was happening).

...sadly only in a dream though.

It was a really weird one too.

I was searching for this really old book and a friend of mine told me of this market somewhere in London that 'had everything'. So he took me down there one weekend and it was in this massive old Victorian building (possibly an asylum by the looks of it - but with a lot of big open rooms in). The first room we enetered had the floor covered with mashed ice and dozens of stalls selling all kinds of fish and crustaceans - many of which I didn't recognise (and I doubt were from this planet/plane).

We wandered through the halls, with me trying not to be amazed at all the weird and wonderful things on offer, until we got to a large book stall near one corner. An elderly gentlemen and his daughter were running. My friend went to speak to the older guy as I was left to rummage through the titles. His daughter (in her 20's) came and asked if I needed any help and we started talking and just seemed to really click. She was a teacher during the week and her father owned a number of businesses - including a horse farm in West London.

To cut a long story short - I got the book I wanted, we ended up seeing each other again and found that we really DID get along very well and decided that we'd try and give life a shot, and then these weird giant skeletal things tore a portal in reality and invaded Earth with me and my book being two of only a handful of things that could hold them back.

I enjoy my dreams but sometimes wonder why they can't just be fairly simple Boy Meets Girl type affairs...

What a weird night for dreams. I had four very distinct, very realistic dreams.

One of which saw me as a supernatural detective (think Harry Dresden I reckon) on the trail of a mass murderer. The tricky bit was that the mass muderer was largely incorporeal apart from when he committed the crimes and could phase in and out of our reality and the Other Side. There was one bit when I was leaning over his latest  victim and I could hear him getting closer and closer with deep resonating wheezing sounds getting louder with each phasing in. Woke me up shit scared!

Another was slightly more 'Heroes'-esque. I was with a group of people with superhuman abilities who were on the run from an agency which was tracking us down and killing us. The most significant characters I can remember was Rosie (imagnocean) , a rather fat guy who was always terrified he'd be caught, and a girl who was a girl during the day but a guy at night (that was her power?). Anyway, I remember having a major arguement with Rosie about what we should be doing and she stormed out to go to a dancing lesson in an old warehouse where fatman was currently also hiding out in. Scene shift to fatman being cornered by the 'Agency' and basically selling us all out for his own life. He traded the fact he'd pass information to them about us if they let him live. His first bit of info was where Rosie was. So as the poor girl was dancing a bundle of agents burst in, fought her (she had some really good fighting powers) and then decapitated her with a katana. I, back in the hideout, had a vision of this and was, as you could imagine, less than happy. In fact I ended up rushing to the warehouse with a girl who could regenerate and a kid who was a speedster (could move very fast) and confronted fatman who claimed he'd hidden away when the Agency had broken through and couldn't have done anything to stop it. In my anger, and also disbelief at him as I knew he was a worthless cowed, I fried him (I had flame powers) and burnt the entire building down. I then progressed on a rampage/crusade against the Agency taking the fight to them with anyone else who wanted to join me instead of trying to run and hide.

The other two dealt with cats (of the usual variety luckily) and a mildly homo-erotic 'coming of age' dream which also involved a friend of mine who later became a policeman. Odd.

There are some locatons that exist within my dreams that I return to every so often. Sometimes only days apart, sometimes years apart.

Some of these locations are very mundane and others are incredibly fantastical or spiritual.

One of my regular 'dream' haunts is a pub in the countryside. The pub is on the main street in the village and the village at various points has had both bus and train links into London. I've visited this pub three of four times in the last year when I went there last night I found that half the pub was cordoned off for refurbishment. Large white chipboard planks had been erected partway up the bar and blocked off most of the lounge area. Thus I spent the night at the bar with mooncadet drinking and chatting but unable to play pool.

Does anyone else have reoccurring locations in their dreams?

Has anyone ever experienced one of those locations actually undergoing refurbishment? I have no idea what it all means but I look forward to my next visit to see what has changed!

I had one of the most stunning and interesting dreams yet last night.

I'm not sure what you'd call it. It had a lot of elements of 'horror' in it but it wasn't a scarey dream from my pov. It was a kind of cross between Hellraiser, the RPG imagery of Kult and the X-Files. I think I was the same 'dream character Angus' that I was in my dream last weekend when I went demon hunting/world saving.

In last nights episode I had to die first to get to where I needed to be. Now I'm awake I'm not entirely sure of my goal but it may have been to either track down and 'help along' one of the residents living in Limbo or to try and find a missing person who'd passed over and got stuck there.

Either way the characters/creatures/situations/imagery of the dream were fantastic and very immersive.

The world of Limbo (I'm calling it Limbo now although I don't think that's what it was called in the dream - I can't recall hearing a name) was very similiar to the one we walk in every day. Only it is co-inhabitated by races of what we'd call demons as well as 'lost souls'. The lost souls are victims of premature death before their time - be it through accident, suicide or murder - some of these lost souls are aware of their plight whilst others still believe they are alive. It is a partway point that many visit on their way to 'elsewhere' but many seem to get trapped here or eventually sold into servitude and taken to their new owners domain.

The dream was very dark and gritty (think Angel Heart) on the whole. Things were messy, damp, slightly decaying in areas. I remember one scene early on when I'd just arrived when I was using the toilets in some sort of 'waiting lounge' - similiar to that of an airport (and there were hundreds of them - it was one damn big 'kinda airport'). The toilets walls were this sort of sickly off-yellow whilst the floor was alternately white and brown tiles with a sheen of water (and gunk) overlaying it. The cubicles themselves were an awful affair as was the stench in the whole toilet area. Obviously being an entry point for those 'recently deceased' there were some very interesting characters there who hadn't managed to discover their ability to heal there mortal wounds as yet and start looking 'whole' again or transfigured into a new form they wished to adopt for their time in Limbo (humans apparently had a limited control over there appearence in Limbo. Many choose to copy the shape they had had on Earth, some decided - or more likely never mastered shifting - to retain the form they had upon death on Earth, whilst others mastered the ability to shape they form into something else entirely. This last one sometimes made it hard to know if they were a lost soul or a true demon which caused a few complications later in the dream.

The dream went on from there into a scenes involving open-air market places with high clocktowers at the side of the square, a young woman who refused to acknowledge her death who needed to accept it or be trapped in Limbo and sold to a particularly ruthless demon lord, and a shanty town for those 'lost souls' who had become so morose over their plight that even the demon inhabitants of Limbo had become so bored of their wailings that they exiled them to an even more squallid area outside of the main city which seemed to exist in eternal night next to a very foul and dark river in which resided somekind of fierce crocodile-type species that roamed the shanty town every evening to devour it's citizens. These citizens - who you would have thought would be happy to finally die - unfortunately awoke in their squallor again a few hours later with the wounds they'd received from the bites burning. A burning that would last hours amd usually only just started fading before the next croc attack.

There was also one scene I remember very well which included a child who probably wasn't older than one. She couldn't walk as yet but had mastered crawling. The kid was looking through a glass conservatory door from her living room looking out at the 'real world' (there were places in Limbo that could still 'rub shoulders' with our own physical world). I don't know if it was her old garden back home or what but she sat by the door giggling at the antics of a cat (cats could tell when citizens of Limbo were there and I even saw cases where they could briefly cross over the borders, I'm guessing this was a reasonably regular occurence as the demons paid them no attention although the cats usually drew a lot of attention from the recently arrived lost souls - dogs on the other hand could obviously detect Limbo as seen through their barking and general aggitated state but would never come near the place or its inhabitants). You could also see in the garden some black shapes moving around. Now whether this was the residue image of the live humans who lived there that we - from Limbo - could not see clearly (as you would a ghost from this world) - or something else I can't recall.

Anyway, plenty of other things happened including me somehow managing to bring a live human mother/father over into a nicer area of Limbo to see their daughter whom they'd lost six months earlier. She managed to tell them where her body could be found thus assisted them (and the police) to finally track and catch her killer and the meeting in general helped ease both sides and - with my reassurance that the girl would now be able to go to a much nicer place both sides were happier at the end of the meeting - to the extent that the girl could make the transition to wherever she was heading.

Fantastic dream and this probably goes up there with my post-apocalyptic Wizard of Oz, weird 'deep south' gypsy end-of-the world detective tale and a few of the others as one of my favourites so far.

I know it's wrong but the first thing that came straight into my mind when I read the below news headline was "For the first time ever!" my second thought was "Wish he had when he was alive" (meaning awake as he is technically still alive at present).

Sharon 'showing brain activity' (BBC News Online; Sunday 15th January 2006)

Had a very weird dream last night where someone had accessed all the launch codes for Russia's nuclear arsenal and had launched them. The news come through whilst watching a football match (at work no less?) and then having a very resigned feeling waiting for about 5-8 minutes with Tony and Mike to see if London would be hit. There was nothing we could do so no point panicing or trying to hide. Sean wasn't working so he should have been safe and sound with his family and Keyvan left as soon as the announcement was made to try and get back to his wife (akthough that'd never happen in under ten minutes...). I remember looking at the sky and going to buy a few bottles of water just incase we survived the initial blast. The whole place was eerily quiet as most people just resigned themselves to waiting as it was such a short time. There was no point phoning as the mobiles were jammed and the landline was taken down. Strangely broadband was still working though as I managed to make a quick post saying thanks to everyone and hoping I'd be able to comment later if all went well. It was quite spooky.

My second dream had Melissa, Cressida and myself sitting on a wall in Barnet chatting and then deciding to go for a drink. Cressida (who was a kick-ass demon hunting) was having problems as she'd been forced into a demonic contract that was going to make her do something (think world-threatening) and I was determinded to defeat the demon and null the contract. I had some kind of weird secret base with both high-tech gadgets and lots of occult paraphenalia plus a team of people who worked with me. One was in a coma from an earlier mission (and had been apparently for about a year or more) who suddenly woke up to declare the world was going to end. This tied in with Cressida's problem. It was actually a really good action-thriller dream with lots of fire and brimstone, midgets, mother nature going haywire and badguy ass kicking. Needless to say we won at the end of the day - but not after a lot of trauma and destruction.

Phew. Who needs the cinema when you can dream....