Last night I dreamt I was taking Mikhail Gorbachev around the arts precinct of a city, which had a European flavour, to show him examples of a particular kind of large painting for some official reason that might have been tied in with national security. We were with some friends of mine and Gorbachev didn’t appreciate their antics, so he wandered off to look for the paintings by himself. I went into a gallery looking for examples of the right sort of painting, but there was only an installation - a grainy, purple-tinted film of a strange, doughy-looking white horse pulling a cart down a country road, which I didn’t stay to watch. I went out into the gallery gift shop, where the man behind the counter, an African, flicked a spitwad at me. It hit the saide of my neck, I said “What the fuck was that for?”, he got belligerent and started chewing me out for saying “fuck” in the shop. He enlisted the support of another African man who was just coming in the door. This guy was very aggressive and threatening. He started pushing and shoving me. With a sense of mischief I told him to keep going. He tried to break and crush my ribs, but they were hard like metal. When he finally gave up and pulled away he looked all freaked out and teary-eyed; he also had an erection. Gorbachev then came in, but he had turned into Sigmund Freud (without really looking like Freud, but he hadn’t looked all that much like Gorbachev, either). I can’t recall what happened after that.

In the next part I remember, I was looking at a funny little black and white sketchy manga about Ashuram, the rather attractive black knight from the Record of Lodoss Wars anime. He was on a train, sleeping. His chibified astral self had left his body and was going through various transformations - into a rabbit, then a baby, then something else. There was a storyline but I can’t remember it. Then the manga turned into a fancier, coloured comic, apparently by Neil Gaiman. In the dream I could only look at it with a computer interface, which let me point, click and magnify areas, but rather than zooming inor out it was just as likely to send me to another area. The engine of the train was sculpted to resemble a beast with tusks like an elephant - in fact, it was probably at least semi-organic, as it was eating through a mountain. The artwork was very detailed. The comic then turned into full realism, though the sense of it being a comic lingered for a while. Ashuram had disappeared and my viewpoint was just travelling through successions of scenes, almost like a 3D slide show, of very detailed, unfamiliar environments, all on the banks of a large straight river (I might have been on a boat). The landscapes were all large and towering - mountains and the like, and the time of day and the weather changed in each scene. Eventually the scenery turned into a city - immense buildings, covered with green moss, still on the banks of the river, rising out of the water. I thought with a pang that this was Ashamoil, though it looked a bit too prosperous and European, really. “I” (I was really just a camera in space) drifted away from the river and into the city, which had Melbourne’s somewhat jarring mixture of Victorian and modern architecture. I felt rather disappointed, having expected something more exotic, and then I woke up.