The Pure Life of Dreams

June 24, 2025July 31, 2025

The Blue Ink Woman

We’d split off from the main group of students, myself and a scrawny woman with lanky black hair who looked like she was underfed—a thin woman with the reedy body of a bird.

The two of us had gotten separated from the others when we were searching the restaurant that we’d booked—when we’d taken a path into the medieval quarter of Paris thinking it might be there.

When the whole group had first gotten lost I’d gone into an Irish pub to ask directions and the people in the pub had told me it was the other side of town. I walked out and down the steps to join the group outside to give them the news.

It was then that I saw a bundle of notes by the side of the steps on the ground. I picked the notes up and saw that it was a bundle of 500 and 200 Euro bills.

“What shall I do with them?” I asked the others.

I wanted to hold onto the notes though part of me felt guilty. No one would know if I held onto them, surely?

“You could ask inside?” One of the students responded.

So, I went back up the stairs and circled the bar to ask the barman. The bar was a small room with dark wooden panels, and quite old fashioned, but the barman was not available so I didn’t wait. Besides I felt like I was in enemy territory, the place being Irish and all.

I came back outside and that was when the scrawny woman and I split from the rest of the group to search for the restaurant.

We wandered down some dark brick lined streets which had tall walls either side of us, and which were deserted and not a little threatening.

We could have called ahead and cancelled but for some reason we didn’t do that because we didn’t have phones or because it was before the days of cell phones.

Instead we went to the woman’s townhouse and climbed the steps to go inside.

The woman stripped naked in front of me but she wasn’t attractive given her bony frame. Her shoulders were covered in blue ink which glistened under the pale white bulb of the living room.

I wondered if she had a disease or had just covered herself in ink for the sake of it.

“How about we have a bath?’ I suggested.

We went to the bathroom where there was a white claw foot bath tub and we got in under a pile of bubbles from the soap and I lay with my head at the bottom end while she lay with her head at the top.

She held her foot up for me and for a moment I thought to suck on her toes but they too were bony and they had little hairs on them that did not make her toes attractive. Under the knuckles of each toe was more blue ink—it seemed to spread from within each toe—and it made me realise that I would need to clean her toes too if we were to sleep together.

Main photo (recurring) by Lil Artsy via Pexels.

June 17, 2025July 17, 2025

A Pale White Boy

The audience sat cross legged along one wall of the main room and watched the university students from the arts department perform their improv. I sat the other side of the audience behind the students who stood posing in the middle of the room, and from my vantage point I could see into an adjacent bare white walled bedroom which was no larger than a child’s.

June 9, 2025August 23, 2025

At the Fair with the Steed and the Tattooed Woman

At the fair Siobhan wanted to ride a massive grey green steed. She wasn’t allowed but she climbed the huge beast anyway and took its reins, and she took it for a pounding, blistering race around the track while the manager complained.

May 26, 2025June 24, 2025

Jwee is having a Baby

Jwee and I are lying naked in a white room, our limbs enfolded. There is a soft pale lighting emanating from the window. On Jwee’s right arm is a line tattoo of two overlapping crosses, one cross red and upside down next to the black one.

As we caress each other I write this sentence down using a large ivory-coloured ballpoint pen. The tip of my pen is the size of a roller ball deodorant but the words come out clearly in black ink on the page, though the sentences are written in a disconnected form, written wherever there is space on a parchment which I have placed along the arm of our chaise long.

No matter, because as a whole the sentences will paint the full picture.

Jwee looks up at me, her perfect tan round face in mine. Her beautiful smile with her trademark blue wire rim braces is more radiant than ever.

‘I will have the baby,’ she says. She is talking about Zach’s baby. This Zach is not Leif’s son as introduced in previous dreams. This new Zach is Jwee’s unfaithful and crotchety Western lover living in Bangkok.

I’d first met Jwee next to Twister’s in Nana Plaza six months ago. In that encounter Jwee told me that she wanted a second child, a sibling for her eleven year old daughter, but being already thirty six meant that her biological clock placed her on borrowed time. I tried to remain positive.

(One day, dear reader, I will publish the full story of beautiful Jwee, but for now the story will remain hidden on the other side of my parchment, waiting for the sequel to Flying with the Cormorants.)

‘You mean in England?’ I ask her.

‘Yes.’

It means that Jwee will come to England to have the baby, and Jwee and I will be able to carry on our affair after it is born. I can barely contain my joy. I hope that it means she will move from Thailand permanently, or that at least, we can spend a lot more time together while she’s in England.

We lie together in a cool jasmine shade, still and in silence, on the chaise long. Presumably the baby is Zach’s, not mine, but no matter.

Down the left side of the elongated parchment I write the next scene.

Jwee and I stand together waiting to board the airport people mover. Jwee is behind me. She’s wearing her white thigh length boots with her long wool grey dress. To my right is Zach and another bargirl who stands in front of him. To the right of them is a third couple waiting to get on.

We are waiting for the train doors to open, so that we can climb aboard. The doors are solid iron and painted a uniform beige.

Jwee takes my arm and swings my hand in hers. Her fingers feel soft and tender in mine. Zach does not seem to mind that I am pairing with Jwee, after all he has another woman for the night. He doesn’t know about Jwee and I. He doesn’t know that when Jwee comes to have the baby, Jwee and I will continue to have our affair.

I hope this dream means that Jwee is truly pregnant as she wanted.
Photo by Mark Fischer via Flickr.

May 19, 2025May 19, 2025

Paradise by Plane

We are on a huge military cargo plane going back to the UK when, through the opening in the back where the hatch opens out for the parachute soldiers to jump, I see a beautiful ocean view, with sparkling blue waters and a whale bouncing in an and out the water parallel to a coastline.

I am not usually excited by whale sightings, but this whale continues jumping in and out of the water, and even though it is far down below us, the sparkling water and the sandy coast make for a paradise.

‘Look, a whale!’ I cry out to my fellow passengers.

As the planes rumbles on it appears to descend and the view becomes clearer.

‘Maybe they are dolphins,’ I declare, and sure enough, there are schools of them bouncing in and out of the sparkling waters, swimming north up the coast line, and coming nearer into view as the plane descends,.

Our plane comes to land at an idyllic outcrop – an unexpected break point in our return flight. We file out and walk along a narrow path along a sandy road, with beachfront restaurants to our left, and shop-seller stalls to our right. The place seems foreign to what I have seen before but magical too. Maybe it is Moslem or Caribbean, I cannot tell from the coloured stripes and robes of the shopkeepers.

‘What is this place?’ I ask a tourist in a white bucket hat sitting in a restaurant to my left.

‘I don’t know,’ he says, and I think, How can you not know?! You’re here, aren’t you?

I continue on, and stop at a stall to ask the proprietor. ‘What country am I in?’ I ask.

The woman replies, ‘We’re in Africa.’ But Africa is a continent, I think.

Then I reach down to a small black girl by the woman’s side and ask again, ‘Where are we?’

The girl looks up and says to me, ‘You are in Ecuador,’ and I think how marvellous.

I must tell Siobhan that we have to go to Ecuador proper, and not just for a stopover. Never mind if Quito is high up in altitude, it will surely be good for her if we only stay for a short time.

Then the airline stewards lead us to our restaurant which is on an island off the sandy coast. We step into the water until we are up to our necks, and I pull out my iPhone so it won’t get wet. I lift the phone above my head but too late, I have to shake the water off it.

The phone will be alright, I think. I’ll take it back to the airplane and leave it there, because I don’t need it while we are here, in paradise, on this island.

Photo by Pauchok via GoodFon.com.