Re-post: The One With The Bus Full Of Matresses

There's been a lot going on at this end of things. Firstly, I won the 200m time trial at the North of England Regional Track Sprints. Which I'm pretty cheerful about. 

 

 Also, the Space thing is going well, I'm like, 58th, which means that unless something goes really wrong in the next three weeks I get to fight for a place at space camp in September. We wait and see.

 

 In other news, I'm still living with Guen and it's awesome. Living with the rabbits: Less awesome. One of them runs away from me all the time. And the other is a sneaky bugger and keeps trying to sabotage my stuff. A few days ago she dropped my phone in a pint of lychee juice. Why? Giggles. Just for the fun of it.

 

 

Ah well.

 

Anyhow, I've been dreaming a lot recently, just not writing them down. Why? Because I'm lazy. So here's an oldie

 

The One With The Bus Full Of Mattresses

Mike, Bugsy (Malone...M'Lone...M. Lone...Mudassir Lone. Why am the only person that thinks this is a good nickname?) and I had gone on holiday to eastern Europe. I think it was Romania. Possibly, somewhere more chzek. Anyway, we each had a backpack and a tent and we were just messing about really, no particular purpose or anything. It had just started gently raining while we were walking along the side of a deserted road toward some mountains. We found an old abandoned bus which people had used to discard old mattresses. It was full to the brim. Mike and Bugsy climbed in, their combined weight pushing down the top of the mattress pile so it was about 50cm lower than the ceiling of the bus. I tried to climb into this gap and join them, we could kip here tonight. Thing is, that I didn't take my pack off, and with it on my depth is more than 50cm, which meant that, try as I might, I couldn't get in. This frustrated me enough to wake me up.

Knowing that I hadn't set my alarm, I picked up my phone to have a quick look at the time and work out whether of not I should get up. It was 7:41, I had at least an hour. Time to finish this dream at least. I turned over, refolded my pillow and went back to sleep.

The guys had done good work on the bus, it had been driven to a forest clearing at the top of a huge cliff, and the mattresses had been removed during the journey. Apparently in this part of the dream my travelling companions we're being played by my brother, my father, Adil (a guy from school) and a girl (sometimes played by Jo and sometimes by someone I didn't recognise). The bus also had a driver now, and the lights worked. In fact it might have been a different bus for all I know, the windows had been repaired and it didn't smell like rust anymore. The driver was standing outside about ten metres from the bus having a cigarette and looking at the sea at the horizon over the cliff.

The light had pretty much gone and we had the internal lights on the bus going. Six of the mattresses had been retained and were laid between the chairs (see diagram) and each had been claimed by one person to sleep in.

Above - The Layout of the new bus. The letters mark where the feet of each occupant would have been. Me = Me. D = Dad. A = Adil and C = Chris. Dr = Driver and G = Girl.

Dad got up, leant his pack against one of his seat and left the bus to talk to the driver outside. The rest of us played silly buggers in our sleeping bags for a while and then settled down to tell stories before going to sleep. Adil told this one.

"In the beginning Superman could not be beaten, even by kryptonite." As soon as the narrative started up, the view changed. The viewer was watching a cartoon. In seventies style, with a low frame rate to save production time. The areas of colour were flat and block filled and the back ground was repeated when the characters moved to save effort.

The cartoon showed Superman, in rather a cool outfit (like this but without the cape: http://hallofheroes.free.fr/Images/UltimateDC/superman.jpg) and some other superheroes exploring a cave structure in a growing mass of kryptonite here on earth (Superman Returns anyone?). Where the walls are cracked the green light of kryptonite shines through, with pulsing "ray" lines like in any good seventies cartoon. Suddenly, and for no apparent reason, the cave system starts collapsing. Chunks of green rock come falling from the roof and the heroes beat a hasty retreat.

Just as they we're coming to the mouth of the cave, Wonder Woman snagged herself on a sharp rock and couldn't make it free, so Supes flew back in to save her. He managed to throw her out of the cave mouth just before it closed.

He was trapped, in the dim green darkness. He didn't know if he was ever going to see the light of day again. The glow from the kryptonite lighting his prison, flickered and went out. His heart rose into his throat and that heart began beating faster and faster.

Above ground the other four heroes surveyed the rubble, clouds of poorly animated dust settled as the dusk claimed the sunlight. Suddenly, the ground shook once again and with the scream of a trapped animal CK burst from the shattered kryptonite, straight up as if shot from a cannon. He left the shot. A couple of seconds later his body landed on the sharp green shards in front of the other heroes with a crash and he got up babbling. Eye's rolling in his head he staggered backwards trying to put as much distance between himself and the kryptonite as possible. Crying and sweating, he brushed his arms and shoulders trying to remove the thousands of fragments of green from his skin and clothing.

"Bollocks!" said Chris. The scene cut abruptly back to the campers all sitting around in their sleeping bags in a bus. "are you trying to tell us, that Superman's kryptonite thing is psychosomatic? No way!"

"No, dude, seriously, it's true!" Adil insisted.

"Really? Alright, what happened next?" Chris asked intrigued.

"So, yeah, he staggered backwards" The scene cut back to the weeping Superman. Who was ripping his outfit from his body in an attempt to rid himself of the green splinters. Paying no heed to the cliff behind him he continued going backwards, and didn't even seem to notice when he had stumbled over it and was falling towards the rapidly approaching waves.

As soon as he hit the water, the cartoon stopped and it looked much more life like. With the kryptonite washed off by the water, Clark composed himself and started to tread water. He called out to a nearby boat, which picked him up.

The long thin, motorised canoe turned out to be full of Chinese shark-fishermen on their way back to Beijing with two or three live sharks thrashing around near their legs. In return for being rescued, Superman showed the fishermen the most efficient way to kill a thresher shark and a blue shark (which are the two species they had in the boat (what? I know my sharks)), but also told them why it was a bad idea to fish for sharks in this area, due to the fragile ecology and gave them other hunting grounds.

Before arriving in Beijing they had learned how to tie various knots, how to efficiently skin and/or fillet a shark so that they didn't have to just use the fins any more and how to keep their little outboard engine running properly. Then knowing it was about time for me to wake up, I opened my eyes and looked at my phone again, it was 8:58. Perfect.