Where there's a Willesden there's a way

Sunday, November 09, 2003

I have a dream. I don't know what it is.

Angela made me a dreamcatcher last solstice, and it's been fairly active lately. I'm beginning to think I should record some of these.

Perhaps the strangest one was set in Rickmansworth, where I was eating lunch, as I did everyday with my social workers (this is in the dream, in reality I ate alone). In the dream we were sitting around a quiet road at the brow of a hill, benches around the road. But that day something made me climb the hill, and at the top the road opened out into a broad court, framed on two sides by a large round building. In the centre were fountains, and around them a series of orange trees bearing fruit. Somehow they'd been grown into the shape of galloping horses, and in the branches were green parrots and butterflies with huge wingspans.

It was a hot day, and I felt calmed and cooled, but a giant butterfly flew past, and it creeped me out for a minute.

The other bizarre one (and there's been a few slightly less bizarre ones) concerned Angela holding a party in Berlin (although she held one in London today). I remembered she was staying at 26 Potsdamer Place, where she had a really nice flat. I'd been there a few weeks before hand, experiencing Berlin's innovative transport network. There were tramlines overground, with chairs that travelled along them which would carry you to your destination. Underground, there was a kind of mini-metro system just for tourists, in which you got into a box (about coffin sized, but twice as wide) with a creaky lid that didn't quite close, and you'd be carried away to your hotel, tourist site or other destination. At one point though, you travelled along the mainstream network, and had the surreal image of a station full of commuters shooting past through the gap in the lid.

On the way to Angela's party, everyone was travelling in a tram. No-one really cared where it was going to except me and one other guy, and we were struggling to get to grips with an arcane punched card system (I used an attached sharp bit to punch in 26 Potsdammer Place, but it didn't work). The bus had come to a halt, the lights were off, the party started at 7:30, and no-one seemed to care, still enjoying themselves.

Eventually, at this other guy's suggestion, I picked up the radio and boomed in my best Englishman Abroad voice the tram number (again, 26), and a real cockney voice answered with 'Where d'ya wanna go gov?'. I told him the address, and instantly the lights came on and we continued moving, getting to Potsdammer Place for 19:27.

So I'm throwing my dreams open to you all. Answers on a postcard please.

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