I had a dream about an ancient Greek giant called Pyttheus (I know it can't be spelled like that, but it was in the dream). He was a towering bronze statue, as tall as two houses, with an Alexander the Great-like helmet and a pair of shields fused to his hands that were turned curiously inwards so that he could clap them together like cymbals.

He walked among the normal people on the streets (a location unknown to me, but clearly in the modern era) with the normal-sized humans occasionally acknowledging him with a wave or a nod, but otherwise it was clear that his presence was unremarkable to them. The indifference to his presence became even more surprising to me when he stooped down to look at one of the humans and lined his huge shields up on either side of him as he turned to face the giant... with a quick movement, Pyttheus crushed his head between the shields - with no noise and no mess, just the headless body dropping to the ground underneath.

He got up and did the same thing to several other apparently randomly chosen people who were walking around, and two who were stopped on the side of the road having a conversation - who all reacted without alarm but what I would actually, bizarrely describe as pleasant surprise as he prepared to close his shields around their heads. Even though I didn't speak to anyone in this dream, somehow I then gained the knowledge that being selected by Pyttheus was an honour, and something that was a guaranteed ticket to a good afterlife.

For some reason I chose to have it done to me - the ancient statue apparently being available by arrangement as well as on his own whims - and the event was arranged at a small pub in the middle of a monastery. It was set up like a celebration - I was lined up in front of the bar along with an unidentified friend and a girl from the bar who had decided to join in as well on the spur of the moment, being cheered on by the rest of the pub's occupants like we were about to perform a particularly popular karaoke song rather than be killed.

Out of nowhere, that large Korean man that sings Gangnam Style arrived in a bright yellow suit and proceeded to bounce around as the night's entertainment as the festivities began, and being first in the line, I heard Pyttheus kneel down behind me and then felt the shields press gently but firmly against the sides of my face as he prepared to clap them together. Then, suddenly, despite having shown no fear at all up until that moment, I ran - and the rest of the dream was a blur of leaping over walls and obstacles until I reached my parents' house, where I realized that nobody was giving chase. Then I remembered that I had had the plan all along to create a scenario where I could make a thrilling escape from the monestary without severe consequences if I was caught, so that I could recreate Rise of the Triad.

That dream sort of ended with an anticlimax - so I also had another dream where I was a passenger with the Top Gear team as they prepared to send a car into the lower reaches of space with a Zeppelin-style balloon attached to the top. The test flight around a harbour and through a carefully-arranged stack of shipping crates went very well, but after being off the ground with them once, I refused to take part in the final flight. Knowing how well their grand projects usually turn out, I still consider this a wise decision even outside the bounds of dream logic.

Another dream! This one was about an EGA horror adventure game, a bit like Hugo's House of Horrors with the player character wandering around a large and quite blank mansion - the sprites were all black on top of backgrounds that changed colour depending on the room.

I remember very little about what was in it, apart from that I had to switch to my other computer and download a new version there - and that in the new third version, sometimes when you saved the game, the "Save Reaper" would randomly appear - a black cloaked sprite that would float in from the side of the screen and chase you or just materialize right in front of your character, and would split him in half with his scythe unless you moved at the right time. I was looking at a forum for the game and reading complaints about how frightening this had been when it was added in the second version, with other people saying how great it was because it took the safety out of saving all the time...

I can make a reasonable guess that this dream came about because of rediscovering a couple of DOS games the previous day. One of them was Rimtrix, a completely insurmountable puzzle game by regular PC Plus contributor Richard L. Wright - I remembered about it because of ranting to ravenworks about how impossible it was to slide the puzzle around to create paths through the maze for the coloured balls, guiding them from their randomly-chosen start point on the left hand side of the screen to the corresponding buckets on the other side. It's a task much like in Wallace and Gromit, laying a model railway frantically in front of a train while it's at full steam.

Then I accidentally went into the Redefine Keys screen and found out that it had a Rotate button. That would have been useful to know 23 years ago.

I've now seen level 2, and it is cyan.

After an unusually sane Friday night, I had a dream this morning about a Mister Man called Mr Leap, who was in the shape of a forward triangle like Mr Rush. His story was a Dr. Seuss-like poem about successfully making a litiguous business out of the safety record of various bridges and the experience of jumping from them, and it ended with some sort of wonderful punchline - sadly, even though I had it right in front of me at the end of the dream and I'm sure it was all composed of real words and made perfect sense, the moment I woke up I found I'd forgotten the entire thing and could no longer write it down to preserve it.

That, together with the appearance of the world's largest scone in the kitchen, means the weekend has been sufficiently strange already.


However, I can say that Running Free now has a free version on the App Store - it's got fifteen levels that are unique to it, so even if you're one of the, er, unspecified amount of people who already have the full version there's something new there. The Flash version is doing very well in China, but unfortunately nobody seems to buy iOS games there...

I had a nightmare last night about being captured to be a meal for a robotic bird.

The dream started in a collapsed building that I knew as a 'school', where the first two floors were intact but the top two had crumbled, making the stairs no longer make sense or take you to the floors where it looked like they were pointing. After walking around them for a while I realized that I had found my 'starting point' (having apparently taken control of the dream at some point after the action began), and was then able to follow a logical guided path out of the maze.

The next setting was an open space at the front of a meat factory, with vague rusted machinery piled up on the floor. There were others with me, but I can't remember who they were or what they looked like - quietly, we climbed one of the piles and peeked over the top to check that the path was clear to the building's entrance.

Instead of the escape route we were hoping for, we saw the thing that had captured us talking to one of its henchmen next to the huge closed front door - our captor was a man-sized mechanical bird, mostly black but with parallel silver pipes like those on an engine crossing its underbelly, and black orbs for eyes. He had welded the entrance shut to prevent us escaping, and without knowing any other way out of the building, I knew that we were going to have to find somewhere to hide and just hope we hadn't been discovered by the time he left.

I wonder what could have caused all that.

It occurs to me that living in America is like being put into another dimension where human progress happened in a slightly different order. They can, for example, conjure those perfectly believable blue and orange lines on to the pitch out of nowhere during a televised game of what here got called 'football', but they still haven't quite let go of the Biblical creation myth or seen its irrelevance to politics. On a more mundane level, Crunchy Nut cereal has only just lost its "New!" banner on the top of the packet here, despite it having been invented quite some time ago in the time stream I used to inhabit.

I had a dream last night in which I was clearing out a pantry cupboard, and I found an old box of them at the back of a top shelf. I opened the packet and found that instead of the normal contents you would expect, the airtight bag instead contained five or six enormous sheets of completely flat cornflake material. In real life, the thought of it sounds quite uncanny and slightly revolting, but in the dream I started enthusing that this was a packet from the time before they were cut to the right shape for you, and you had to break off a large piece and then crumble it into cornflakes yourself.

I think that the dream came from a conversation that happened a few days ago, about why plain British crisps are still called "Ready Salted" flavour - because it's an archaic term that was once used to distinguish them from the crisps where the salt came in a little blue sachet, and you had to hunt through the bag for it, tear it open and then shake it into the crisps manually.

I had a dream that I was staying somewhere near the middle of America, or some other place where you would normally expect to find absolutely vicious small creatures (like Australia somewhere). The owner of the house opened the fridge, took out a tub of Land-O-Lakes spreadable, opened it and said "Oh, it looks like we've got butter-lions".

He pointed down to a black speck visible through a small hole in the surface of the butter, and scraped it gradually away to reveal a monstrous prawn-like insect, long, dark and segmented. Apparently, they sometimes got into tubs of butter and hid there inert until they were woken up by someone opening the lid - holding the first one, he scraped down further and pulled another one out.

I was particularly unimpressed when somebody tried to demonstrate they weren't harmful by putting one down the back of my shirt.

Why can't I dream of something nice? But then, when my real life this week has involved sitting in a car with a gryphon in the passenger seat, waiting at the lights for a purple dog playing the saxophone to walk across the road, weird dreams hardly seem necessary.

I had two dreams over the last week... the first one opened with me greeting Whitney's younger brother as we guided his yellow helicopter down to land. From there, we went on to meet with some people from university that I haven't talked to in years, and sat down at a long table for eight people in an Indian restaurant. I looked out the window to see my dad walking across the car park with Girard, one of the characters from kjorteo's in-progress novel. After joining us at the table, my dad spent ages looking through the menu trying to find korma (because "that's what you couldn't get outside Britain"), and some sort of near alternative that began with a J that I don't think was actually a real word. All this time, I was aware that I had to quickly drive back and get my badge from the wall of the basement office before we moved on to our next place we were going to visit that evening, and I resolved to do it in the gap between when we ordered and when the food arrived - but the restaurant staff said that they were already staying open late on our behalf anyway (at seven in the evening!) Anyway, I've no idea.

The other ( is worse )

The next day at work, someone came up to me and asked me if I had lived anywhere near Dunblane, because he had seen a documentary on it the previous night - so we spent a lunchtime talking about someone going into a primary school and shooting children.

Still, you've got to laugh, haven't you.

I woke up at half past six from a dream about a monstrously giant spider. I remember being in a bedroom, watching a fly buzzing around and then being caught by a larger insect which held it between its pincers... and after waltzing around the air for a while like that, they were both ensnared on a hairy tentacle-like thing, which drew them into a black lump on the ceiling.

After devouring them in a way that wasn't clear to me, the lump unfolded its eight legs and scuttled across the ceiling. It looked at this point like a tarantula, but it slowly grew even bigger as it came down the wall, and by the time it reached the floor, it was a hulking mega-spider, the size of a small dog with eight legs, black with two rows of white spots going down its back. At this point I remember I thought about the usual spider removal method of a glass and piece of card, but you wouldn't have been able to do the same to this thing without at least a cleaning bucket and a broadsheet newspaper.

I backed away from it and realized that it was following me - not in a threatening way, just as if it wanted to encourage me in the direction I was going. So I led it down the stairs (the location having transformed into a half-correct mis-memory of my parents' house), aware even in the dream that this was unusual behaviour for a spider. As we got near the back door it got much faster, and I opened it to let it outside, but in its enthusiasm it missed the gap and ran right into the door. Its disguise fell off from the impact, and revealed that it was actually Chekhov, our ex-cat, who had dressed himself up because he didn't think that he was getting enough attention.

When I got out of bed in the real world, I opened the door to the landing and saw a small spider crawling across the ceiling. It remained its normal size.

It's been a while, but I had another dream last night. This one's difficult to explain, in that it seemed to form a coherent story at the time even though the parts of it made very little sense together.

I was with a few people from my year at university, going around a campus that we had never seen before and visiting the buildings. We were going to go on to somewhere else, but when we reached the top of a wide set of steps going down to a paved square, my friends said that they had to leave because they were studying for an exam.

I offered to walk them there, and we headed to a large hall-like building across the square - we walked over a large blue mosaic, but I can't remember what it showed. Joining a large group of people outside, we were organized into rows to have a photograph taken of us just before we went in. After it was taken and the group dispersed, I went to the front to pick up one of the photographs - already printed and framed - and saw that it looked normal, but the date in the bottom right corner was prefixed by "DATE OF DEATH:". I don't remember anyone else getting one, and I still went inside to rejoin the group.

Inside was a room that looked like a church - the people formed a large ring around the room and raised their joined hands. I was reassured at this point that it wasn't any kind of cult, which it obviously was - somehow we were shown some sort of projection of a train full of passengers, and I knew that we were supposed to assassinate certain people on it somehow.

Feeling uncomfortable, I made to leave, but I found myself in a long corridor-like room split in the middle by a long sheet of glass - a room that has featured before in my dreams. There was a long bench against the wall on my side, and rows of seats arranged back to back on the other. I saw the train again, slowly filling with light, which then vanished, not a trace of anyone who was in it left behind.

People started coming into the room - the ones that I had been with on the same side I was on, and the passengers of the train appearing seemingly out of nowhere on the other side, talking enthusiastically among themselves. As the people from the church recognized faces in the crowd, there was a rush for the glass, banging on it to get the passengers' attention - the mood wasn't of desperation but of joy at seeing them again. I realized that the room on the other side of the glass showed a limbo between life and death, and slowly, the passengers faded away.

I pushed my way out of the room, still holding the "Date of death" photograph and looking at it again, thinking that it showed the wrong people. I wrapped it in paper and left without anyone seeing me.

This morning, I read in the quotations book we keep in the bathroom that people find it easier to name ten artists from any period than ten politicians. "That's easy," I thought. "Tony Blair, William Hague, Iain Duncan-Smith, John Prescott, Robin Cook, Boris Johnson, Anne WiddecombAAAAAGH"

Because it suddenly snapped into my brain that I had had a ghastly nightmare about my parents breaking the news to me (on my brother's birthday) that I was actually Anne Widdecombe's son. I asked who the mother father was, and was told that, to made matters worse, she was actually both my parents, because it had all been the result of some horrific genetic engineering experiment. I've never been so glad to wake up.

Over here in real life, however, the mid-term elections were yesterday - there has been virtually nothing but constant attack adverts on the television for a few months (I've never seen this allowed in Britain - I honestly don't know how the people who live here have all managed to cope with American television all their lives). There are three branches of government and the population never allows one party to stay completely in power for long, and it had been known for some time that the Republicans were gearing up to turn the country red (GBR: blue) in November, but in a very unusual situation last night, the House changed majorities but not the Senate.

The new House seats include a surprising number of crazy people - the semi-organized Tea Party here has sprung up over the last two years as something approaching the BNP Extreme, though they don't appear to distinguish themselves from the main party on the results. Ian Hislop explains the difference rather well. In Britain we laugh at people like this, but here, they stand a chance of getting elected (that woman in the subsequent clip didn't, though).

The hope for splitting the power again is that the two parties will be forced to work together to improve the country, but what will actually happen is that they will never agree on anything and the country is shafted in terms of doing anything at all for at least the next two years - it's known that the world tends towards being more liberal as time goes on, but America lags behind somewhat and this won't exactly help.

As the party who isn't awful seems to have demonstrated over the last while that it's just useless and unwilling to work with its advantages, if I had a vote I would probably have used it to suggest returning to British rule. Perhaps David Cameron would allow Nick Clegg to have the country as some sort of runner-up prize.