Franz

Cheese: Cheshire (approx. 50g)

In what was a truly bizarre and disturbing dream, many things happened, and on waking I found it very difficult to piece them all together.

The central theme of the dream, as I recall, was my 10 year old ethnic Bolivian second cousin was marrying his 34 year old primary school teacher, and to be fair to my little cousin, she was an absolute hottie. However, everyone, including myself, was very concerned at the prospect of a ten year old boy getting married.

There were many comings and goings as we tried to get to the bottom of what was happening, and indeed how such a union could possibly be performed. My cousin didn't care though, despite being only ten, the benefits of shacking up with a red hot babe were clearly not lost on him, and he was truly excited by the prospect. He seemed to be genuinely enamored with his would-be bride too.

The wedding was clearly very close, as everyone was dressed in their finest and we were in some plush hotel, which I could only assume was the wedding venue. While all this hoo-ha was going on and everyone was trying to get to the bottom of what was happening, I suddenly noticed German football legend Franz Beckenbauer, the only man to captain and manage World Cup winning teams.

However, this was not Franz as he is now, but a much younger Franz early on in his playing career (well before growing his ridiculous 70s sideburns). I got talking to him, and he told me he was there as a guest of honour at a football tournament going on in the hotel grounds. He said he could show me where the tournament was happening.

As we walked out of the hotel, I asked him if he was going to return the 1975 European Cup to its rightful owners. He smiled and mumbled something about it not being his fault. He said he got the ball when he brought down Allan Clarke, I said 'That's absolute bollocks, he did you like a kipper and you were nowhere near'. He smiled again.

Round the back of the hotel was a massive field with about 20 5-a-side pitches and game happening on all of them. As I wandered round, I noticed one team had a few guys I was at school with in.

One of them was taking a throw in, and managed to throw it from nearly the half way line right into the net. The referee correctly disallowed it as you can't score from a throw in.

Freakiness: 8
Nightmare Factor: 6
Amusement Factor: 3
Enjoyability: 4
Coherence: 3
Vividness: 7

World Cup Dreams

I've been working away quite a bit recently, hence the lack of posts. Once I've finished my stint (in a couple of weeks) I'm hoping to be more prolific in my posting (and the World Cup has finished too).

Cheese: Mature Cheddar

I was watching the World Cup final, and I'm not sure how or why but South Korea were in it, and doing really well. Everyone seemed to be supporting them.

I was watching with my late grandfather (my favourite aspect of dreaming is the ability to bring the dead back to life, albeit fleetingly). He was getting really into it and was regaling me with stories of when he used to play centre half for his university college.

It was the end of normal time and extra time was about to start, and I decided to go down to the pub to meet my mate Al. We got down there and the footie was still on. Everyone was supporting Korea and they got a penalty.

When Ji-Sung Park stepped up to slot it in, everyone went absolutely nuts, and Korea won the World Cup. After the trophy was collected, me and my mate decided to order some food at the pub.

I went up and ordered two food dishes and two drinks. They said they would bring the drinks over to us. We got into a long and involved conversation about the football, and a while later our food arrived, and we realised we still didn't have the drinks.

I went back to the bar to see what had happened to the drinks. I explained to the bar maid what had happened, she asked me what drinks I'd ordered - a J20 for me as I was driving and a pint of Tetley's for my mate. The bar maid then tried to charge me, and I explained we'd already paid.

At that point the bar manager intervened and I explained to her what had happened. At that point she asked me if I was driving, I said yes, and she told me I shouldn't drink and drive. I told her I was having the J20. She then tried to claim that J20s were 2.9% alcohol. I told her to fuck off and said that even if they were 2.9% alcohol, which they weren't, it would still be well under the drink drive limit.

She then started lecturing me about how I shouldn't drink at all if I was driving. Eventually I got the drinks off her and went and sat back down again. We ate our food pretty quickly, and I explained to Al what had happened, he thought they were an absolute bunch of jokers.

We left, and as we walked back to the car Al decided to show his dissatisfaction with their treatment of us by urinating against the back door of the pub. 'I'll give them customer feedback!' he yelled as the hot steaming piss gushed down the back door.

Freakiness: 4
Nightmare Factor: 5
Amusement Factor: 7
Enjoyability: 6
Coherence: 7
Vividness: 7

Cable Car to The Jungle

Cheese: Cambozola (approx. 75g)

I was in a ski resort of some kind. It definitely had an Alpine feel to it and I think it must have been close to Christmas as there seemed to be a lot tinsel and general Christmas type stuff around, although I wasn't really paying attention closely enough.

I was on a mission to climb a very large mountain, and this trip started with a cable car journey. The cable car took us high up over the resort and over some Alpine forest, before we disappeared into thick cloud.

The car didn't come out of the cloud until we arrived at the top. It was at this point that I realised I was in some sort of jungle or swamp. I was suddenly very hot, and had to take all my thermal layers and coats off.

Once I was ready I joined the rest of the climbers and we tried to make our way through the jungle. It was a bit of a swamp and there was water up to my ankles almost the whole time. It was hot and sticky and very tough going.

The water seemed to be getting deeper as we went along, which made no sense as we were supposed to be going up hill. At this point, a few of the explorers decided they'd had enough and headed back. I decided to join them as I'd lost faith that we knew where we going.

We headed back to the cable car, which we got back to much quicker than the outward journey. As we headed back we all started putting our jackets on in preparation for the cold, and the man in the cable car started serving us hot gluwein which was really nice.

Freakiness: 5
Nightmare Factor: 5
Amusement Factor: 6
Enjoyability: 7
Coherence: 4
Vividness: 6

Dreamer's Block

I've not posted for a while, mainly because I haven't had too many dreams that I can remember clearly enough or were vivid enough to post. I've been very busy with various other things, so Cheese Surfing has taken a bit of a back seat, but I hope to get things back on track.

Cheese: Cheshire (approx 70g)

I was in an airport with my Aunt and we were boarding a plane to fly to New York. When we arrived we were met by another Aunt - my Aunt who lives in New Jersey and is on the other side of my family. She was waiting for us in a white Cadillac, and it seemed apparent that the three of us were going to take a road trip across the US together.

Very quickly we seemed to be on a fairly desolate highway (despite starting on the Eastern sea board, which generally does not have such roads). I was driving and the three of us were chatting away. Iggy Pop's 'Passenger' was on the stereo.

We stopped at a number of Motels along the way to be greeted by varying degrees of inbred hick morons, whom we tried not to offend in fear of them chasing us with shotguns. Unfortunately in one place the said idiot hicks did get upset and we had hot foot our way out of there, jumping in the car and driving off at great speed.

The hicks got into their pick ups and started to chase us. What had started out as a pleasant road trip seemed to have turned into a cross between Thelma & Louise and The Hitcher (although Rutger Hauer was nowhere to be seen).

Looking back at the hicks in my mirror, one of them seemed to be Kiefer Sutherland, and he was shouting at us, but we couldn't tell what he was saying. One of my aunts and I started shouting back as we have links to Sutherland clan, and we thought if we could persuade him we were one of his clan he might stop wanting to kill us.

At this point, I realised that they were driving properly crap pick ups and we were in a pretty quick Cadillac. I just put my foot down and they soon disappeared from my rear view mirror. Shortly afterwards we came to a junction that sign posted Los Angeles one way and San Francisco the other. I commented how there was no way I was going to choke on smog and get shot by a crack dealer, so we headed towards San Francisco.

It wasn't long before we were heading into San Francisco and driving down the ludicrously steep streets. It did occur to me that we'd driven across America in absurdly short space of time. We parked up and there was a gay club across the road. My aunts were well up for going in for the comedy value. So we went into the gay club which happened to have John Barrowman DJing. At this point I decided there was no other course of action available to me other than to get raucously drunk. Which I did with aplomb.

Freakiness: 6
Nightmare Factor: 7
Amusement Factor: 6
Enjoyability: 6
Coherence: 5
Vividness: 7

Living in the Garage

Cheese: Manchego (approx 80g)

For some reason we were moving and we found this really unusual house, which looked really nice when we went round to look at it. It was very large and spacious but had a really unusual layout with lots of rooms coming off the garage, including the kitchen and living room.

When we moved in, it seemed that all the rooms came off the garage, so going from the bedroom to the bathroom meant going through the garage. I'm sure it hadn't been like this when looked round, but maybe when we looked round we just hadn't looked closely enough.

Not only that, but the house seemed to be underground so there were no windows, which seemed really bizarre. Again we didn't seemed to have noticed this when looking round.

As we were moving stuff in I noticed a number of wasps in the garage and manage to find an enormous wasp's nest, but not normal wasps massive scary looking wasps.

I decided to try and take it down with the aid of an insect killing aerosol, although when I did this, the wasps just seemed to mutate into even bigger freakier wasps. At this point I also noticed a load of massive spiders in the corner of the garage.

The spiders seemed to be making their way towards the wasps, and before I knew what was going on there was all out war between the wasps and the spiders. The spiders just wrapped all the wasps up in webbing, and before long, the wasps had been easily contained.

I went back into the living room and couldn't help but think 'I can't believe we sold our house to live here'. Thankfully when I woke up, we hadn't.

Freakiness: 8
Nightmare Factor: 8
Amusement Factor: 3
Enjoyability: 2
Coherence: 3
Vividness: 7

Dreaming Gate One and a bit

I almost got through Castaneda's Second Gate of Dreaming the other night, but unfortunately was unable to hold the state long enough.

Cheese: Gorgonzola (approx 80g)

I had 2 dreams back to back, in which I closed in upon Castaneda's Second Gate of Dreaming, but was unable to maintain the state long enough.

In the first one, I was on a track going through a wood. It must have been around this time of year as the trees had just come out, and the leaves were still a bright light green.

I managed to find my hands almost straight away, and looked up in front of me to see white horse about 100 metres or so up the track. I figured that was probably my scout, and tried to get there.

There was a dip in the path before the horse, and then a brow to get over again once in the dip. As I briskly walked through the dip, the horse briefly disappeared from view, as I came up the brow, the horse had turned into a cow.

Once I got to the cow, I wasn't really sure what to do, I was expecting it to lead me off somewhere, but it just stared blankly at me. I tried to talking to it, but it was just a cow, and not a magic talking cow.

At this point I was unable to maintain the state of dreaming, and briefly woke up again. I felt I had been close to the second gate, as I was almost conscious during the dream.

I started dreaming again, and this time was crossing a street and saw an old friend from school. Finding my hands was easy as I put my hand out to shake his, and watched our hands touch and shake.

He looked exactly the same as he did 15+ years ago. We briefly chatted about what we'd been up to, and I was amazed and how vividly I could see his face. Unfortunately the state did not last, and I drifted off into dreamless, non-REM deep sleep.

Freakiness: 7
Nightmare Factor: 3
Amusement Factor: 3
Enjoyability: 7
Coherence: 6
Vividness: 10

Is There Anybody Out There?

It seems that there is. While visiting some of my favourite relatives, I met some readers - Jo and Dena (I hope I've spelled that right!)

It seems my cheese fuelled scribblings of insanity are not purely for my own enjoyment, which if nothing else makes me feel a little less indulgent. Although it also did make me realise that I'm not just talking to myself, and therefore feel obliged to provide something more of an explanation of why I'm undertaking this rather bizarre project.

First of all, I'm not really one of those people who thinks that dreams have some sort of special meaning - in my view my dreams are nothing more than a combination of my feelings and experiences processed by my brain when it is in neutral. I know there are some people who think if you have a certain type of dream it means you're anxious or paranoid or whatever, I look at it from the other direction, if you're anxious it will just come out in your dreams.

OK here's the deal, we all spend roughly 25 - 35% of our lives asleep, taking average life expectancy into account, that's around 20 - 25 years. A very long time, just ask someone in prison. Obviously you don't dream the whole time, but it's entirely likely that we spend up to 4 years of our lives in a dream like state.

How many of your dreams can you actually remember? Maybe one from the last few nights, and maybe a handful of others? Given the amount of time in your life you spend dreaming, it's a lot to forget. In many ways, that's the primary personal purpose of this blog for me, to enable me to get more out of my life by recording my dreams which would otherwise be forgotten.

Another reason is that often I will see or hear something that triggers a memory from a dream - sometimes a dream from many years ago, which can be a constant reminder of all the rich experiences were merely just forget because we happened to be asleep. It is my hope that after a while, when I have that experience of remembering a dream, I'll be able to look it up on this blog.

As for the cheese, well that's to try and give the dreams a bit of edge and make them a bit more vivid so they can stand out a bit more. I have had some amazing experiences dreaming on cheese. I'm also hoping (in vain) to start a whole movement of Cheese Surfing.

I would encourage anyone reading to post their own dreams, whether it be here, or by starting their own Cheese Surfing blog. If you would like to post anything here, just let me know in the comments section, and I'll sort a post out for you.