Ladies and gentlemen, boy and girls, I present to you …

Malcolm and Sebastian Bell’s Top
Shared Waking Dreams

This will take about a minute – I have discovered that’s about anyone’s limit on listening to other people’s dreams.

1. Kobi the Cave Boy

I’ve told you about this. It’s the one we do most, and the one that works the best, though I’m getting a bit bored with it. We live in a cave, and go hunting, but all the animals run away and we can’t catch anything so we have to steal meat from another tribe, with adventures along the way. The dream landscape is usually a cross between the pictures in the book and Tynemouth beach. Seb reckons he is friends with Kobi and his family. I suggested that we bring a car into the Stone Age dream (I’ve done that before, and I can drive really well), but Seb said no, it wouldn’t be ‘real’, and because it was his idea I kind of let him have his way, which is nice of me. He doesn’t seem to mind the fish-shaped airship that is often there. We both think it’s quite cool.

2. The Battle of the Santa Ana

The Santa Ana was a ship in the Spanish Armada, a navy that England fought against hundreds of years ago, and Seb and I were both sailors during a massive gun battle where the cannonballs were huge Christmas puddings. It was quite hard to control. The more people and things (like ships) there are in a dream, the more opportunities there are for strange dream-stuff to happen, which has to be controlled. For example, the main English ship that we were fighting was being captained by Fit Billy, but my crew started playing keepie-uppies with our Christmas-pudding cannonballs, so I had to change that or we’d have nothing to fight with.

3. Scoring the winning goal at the Champions League Final

Okay, so there’s me and Seb (sometimes – he’s usually in goal) and assorted opponents: famous people, kids at school …

That’s a minute.

See what I mean? I could go on for ages, but I won’t. I could tell you about the time I shrank to the size of a garden gnome; or when Seb and I could breathe and talk underwater; or when we were both climbing a snowy mountain dressed in beach clothes and Seb had an enormous hat …

But you see nobody’s all that interested, because everybody’s had crazy dreams.

The fact that I can choose what happens in our dreams, change them and repeat them as I like isn’t interesting to anyone because no one believes me. No one, that is, except Susan Tenzin.

I have had a couple more goes at explaining it all to Mam, but she just thinks I’m either:

a) joking

b) being brilliantly imaginative and creative and that I ‘should write some of these adventures down, Malky: you could be a famous author!’, or, more recently …

c) lying. ‘And you’re encouraging Seb as well, Malky. Tone it down, eh? People’ll think you’re nuts.’

So it’s all been more or less my and Seb’s secret-that’s-not-a secret … although I wasn’t counting on Susan Tenzin’s granny getting involved.