So, I Had a Dream

Life has been a little s***ty lately. I haven't been having good dreams. But then my brain decided to favour me with the best dream ever. Perhaps I can take this as a sign. The last dream I took as a sign (an impromptu flash mob in the supermarket car park where everyone ended up singing Paul McCartney's 'We All Stand Together') didn't work out well for me, but I'm sure this one will. Unfortunately I was woken by the padding of children's feet at the crucial moment, but god it was a good dream up until then. I tried to go back to sleep and carry on dreaming it, but to no avail. All I have is my memories.

So here it is. All I have to say is, if you're a relative of Peter Graves please don't read further, and I am terribly sorry that my brain intrudes on a real person's life. I am sorry. But he was made so beautiful.

I was up on a kind of Californian mountainside. I thought perhaps it was somewhere near Lake Tahoe, but then I thought I might be mistaken and it might be closer to LA. It was a place with lots of long, rather wiry grass that was yellowed with the winter. It was a ski resort, and although a lot of the snow had gone there was still snow left in the paths, which people were skiing down. Then I noticed Peter Graves sitting at a table near the top of the slopes, where there was a building and a kind of café and things. He was sitting at this table outside, and later when he got up I saw he had a hefty wooden stick (a kind of dark, rather knobbly rustic thing) and he was limping. He'd broken his left ankle and he was having a lot of trouble getting around. He was trying to walk along a concrete path by a wall and having to heave himself up the steps with this stick, moving it from hand to hand depending on which way he was going.

I went up to him and got talking to him and there was an immediate connection. A kind of sexual magnetism. We were sitting at the table talking almost as if we already knew each other, but in a way it was just because of the sexual magnetism, because I felt a little nervous and hesitant about being this stranger who'd just come up to him. He explained how frustrated he was. He'd come here to ski and almost immediately broken his ankle, and was in a lot of pain. He was a strange kind of combination of older-Peter-Graves and younger-Peter-Graves, as if he were neither or both. He wasn't very white-haired, but not enormously trim, either.

I was trying, delicately, to find out about his loyalty to his wife, because it was obvious we both wanted to do something. I mentioned F***** and how much she liked him, and that she/we were worried about the fact that he'd obviously slept with other people. (I had a weird sense that I'd come back into the past. I knew he was dead in my present, and I didn't want to mention that, but I think he knew that both F***** and I were from the future.) He seemed very guilty and ashamed and was trying to explain how hard it was as a man, how he had a strong sex drive and sometimes he was away for months at a time, filming, and he loved his wife dearly but he just needed to have sex or it drove him a little crazy. You could see how bad he felt about it. There were tears in his eyes. But he really was consumed by the urge to have sex with women.

We got to his car, or a car, and he could drive at least. We were driving along a road that was a dream-version of the R**** road, and he wanted to stop. I kept seeing places he could pull in and he'd go past them, not realising I'd meant there. I was saying how there's a lovely place where you could stop and see the river, and another layby around the corner that was really pretty, etc, but he kept missing them, partly because he couldn't step on the brake quickly with his ankle, I think. I knew it was awkward because I knew these places, knew where was boggy, where was okay to stop, etc, but he didn't. There was this strong, overwhelming knowledge that all we really wanted to do was to stop and have sex somewhere, but we didn't know where we could go.

Eventually we stopped the car in the layby on the hill on the way up to home. He got out and it was beautifully warm and sunny and he lay back on the ground while I tried to massage the knots out of his back and hip from walking with this broken ankle. He was very smooth and un-hairy, and rather pink. The massage was really helping him feel better. It was taking away a lot of the tension in his ankle. He didn't have a cast on, which seemed troubling to me. I accidentally rubbed the broken ankle and then realised and thought it must have caused him tremendous pain, but he said it had helped, because it was so tight.

We spoke about his films and I told him how much I liked Fort Defiance. He seemed a bit vague, because he'd done so much stuff, but then he remembered and said something like, 'Oh, yes, that was the one that used that colour thing. The technicolor or something.' I was a bit disappointed he didn't remember it better, but the more I talked about it the more he remembered. I was saying how it felt a bit disjointed, and it would be wonderful to redo it, to rewrite some of it and refilm it and it could be made into a really good film. I was looking up at him (we were kind of lying on the grass together while I rubbed his back – he was lying on his back but I was pushing my hand underneath him) and I could see his face from Fort Defiance but also older, all at the same time.

All this massage was getting us both to the feeling that we really needed to have sex, soon. But I didn't know where we could go. It was very difficult. We got up and started walking up the lane, he leaning heavily on me because of his ankle. It was a difficult walk and he kept needing to stop because of the pain he was in. We stopped outside a kind of dream version of G*** and W****'s, where someone else lived and there was a different house. They let him sit down outside the house and I think were bringing drinks or something. He was very charming to them. He was explaining about the broken ankle and they were very sympathetic.

There was music on the radio, Radio 1, I think, and it was some kind of dance or electronica and we were talking about how awful it was. I was worried for a minute in case the woman or her daughter there were actually listening to it because they liked it, but they seemed to agree, even if just out of politeness. We sat there for a bit and talked, and then carried on up the hill. The biggest thing in all this was the closeness, the feeling that we could talk, and were very close, physically and emotionally. He seemed to have such a huge guilt burdening him.

We carried on up the road and the hill above G*** and W****'s was a kind of strange enclosed mall. We were walking up through it and there were electronic kind of advertising boards all along the sides. I was saying how awful they were, and what a waste of electricity, but then I remembered it before it was renovated and it was all just empty units – an abandoned Woolworths and other abandoned shops – whereas now it was open shops and these advertising boards. So I supposed it was better.

In the end we got up to mum and dad's house and they were a bit surprised to see us but didn't really say anything. They didn't have any idea who he was. I took him up to my bedroom so he could lie down, and so we could give in to our urges. I was trying to lock the door, but the clothes peg wouldn't work to lock it. I was trying to lock it with wire and string. Nothing would work properly. I knew L*** was there in her bedroom next door and that mum and dad were downstairs, but I also had a kind of knowledge that they wouldn't come in. In the end I just did all that I could to secure the door. I put the radio on and I was desperately looking around for some swing CDs instead, but I couldn't find any because I'd taken most of them away. I was saying I wished I had my ipod, or a dock for it, but I didn't. And then miraculously swing came on the radio, a Christmas song, and then another non-Christmas swing song after it. It felt like destiny, and it was obvious they were going to keep playing swing, and we both smiled.

He was lying back on the bed (his head was at the wrong end – he'd just kind of collapsed down there with the pain in his ankle.) His shirt was off and his trousers were loose and pushed down, and I just started stroking his chest, and then I moved my hand down and I was stroking his penis, and he was lying there with his head back kind of quivering, trying not to get aroused, but he couldn't stop himself.

And then a child woke me up.