It's Only a Dream... or is it?

 

How popular culture gets you while you’re sleeping…

As if I didn’t devote enough of my waking hours as a child to obsessing over Gerry Anderson’s TV series, reading books and comics about them, and collecting the myriad toys, I occasionally found them invading my dreams: albeit in a totally unfamiliar form.

I’ve heard comic and book collectors talk about dreams in which they discover previously unknown or unusual versions of series that they collect in real life, and I’ve had plenty of similar examples myself, to the point at which I consider them to be a trope of the unconscious mind. The dream typically involves finding, in a shop or at a jumble sale, a pile of previously unseen editions of a series such as Hergé’s Adventures of Tintin, or the annual collections of Carl Giles. Sometimes I get to leaf through the pages, which resemble the originals but have been changed in various ways: the dream Giles annuals often contain colour pages where the originals were always black and white, and bear dates going back to the 1920s whereas the series didn’t begin until 1945. In the Gerry Anderson universe, the most frequently occurring example is that of Fireball XL5. It’s always one of the annuals that I discover in the dream, usually a rare pre-publication ‘demo’ edition with an unusual cover and contents that don’t match any of the real world examples. I can trace this particular dream back as far as the late 60s or early 70s, and it was often so vivid that, on waking, I was spurred on to try and create my own versions of what I’d imagined.

Sometimes, though, it wasn’t just a book that I saw in the dream, but a televised episode. And rather than being an episode of one of Gerry Anderson’s actual TV series, it was always, without exception, something that didn’t exist. The earliest version of this dream came to me around 1970 and was almost certainly influenced by the ongoing repeats of Thunderbirds that were being broacast around this time. We were still watching in black and white, but the dream was in vivid colour – it was all centered around an oil refinery or similar industrial complex, which I saw rendered in fine detail, silver towers and pipe networks standing out against a bright blue sky. The hero of the piece was a security guy who had to protect the plant from attack by enemy craft which resembled the Shuttlecraft in Star Trek. The characters were all puppets, and they wore the kind of uniforms one saw in all the Supermarionation series, with peaked caps and tunics with exaggerated shoulders. It all came over as quite exciting in the dream and I looked forward to watching it again. Except, of course, that I couldn’t. The show didn’t exist. My mind had conflated aspects of Thunderbirds (the industrial plant was an almost direct lift from episodes like The Mighty Atom) and Captain Scarlet (the uniforms, the quest to defeat an enemy agency). It was all so clear that I started at once to draw the characters and settings (sadly, those drawings no longer exist).

I never dreamed about the same series again, but I had another variation on the ‘Anderson mash-up’ a little later, maybe even the same year. This time, rather than a completely new idea, I was shown a sequel to Captain Scarlet. It was set on the moon, and the characters travelled around on high-speed moon motorcycles, which featured prominently in the opening credits. These were typically Andersonesque, with a strident theme song and the title zooming up onto the screen: ‘Black Means Death’. I can still picture it now. I imagine the title referred to Captain Black, the nemesis of the Spectrum organisation, but I didn’t see enough of it to find out. This again, was most likely a conflation of ideas: the moon-based episodes of the real Captain Scarlet series, and the lunar aspects of Gerry Anderson’s UFO, which had started broadcasting around the same time as the ‘dream episode’ came to me – the characters accessed their ‘moon motorbikes’ in a similar manner to the pilots of the SHADO Interceptors. I knew by this time that Gerry Anderson had given up on puppets, and the dream came like a false dawn, suggesting that he might return to producing the kind of films that had made his reputation. He would, of course, but not for another fifteen years.

The most unusual example of this phenomenon happened over twenty years later, and is logged in my diary for 1996. Once again, I was watching an episode of an unknown puppet series, and this time it had been discovered by a collector. The untitled series involved a moustached character (bearing a vague resemblence to Super Mario), who acted as a kind of cleaning man and flew around in an aircraft that slightly resembled Sky One from UFO, but with a yellow nose cone. He had a sidekick along with him. The guy’s name was, bizarrely, ‘Mr. Pennywhacket’ which sounds rather more like a character from Trumpton than anything by Gerry Anderson, but the whole thing was intriguing and had an unusual aesthetic, not far removed from the look of Thunderbirds. Again, it was in colour.

None of this would be worthy of comment were it not for the fact that, within eighteen months of having this dream, I found myself watching the rediscovered pilot episode of Roberta Leigh’s Paul Starr, which had been unearthed by Tim Beddows, and had never been seen outside of a handful of television executives. Paul Starr didn’t have a moustache, but he did have a sidekick, and he travelled in an aircraft that strongly resembled the machine in my dream, but for the minor detail of its red nosecone (illustrated above). The interior of the ship was exactly as I’d seen it in the dream.

Almost exactly as I dreamed it... the interior of Paul Starr's plane/sub/spaceship/whatever...

I’d had no knowledge whatsoever of Paul Starr back in 1996, and had assumed that Roberta Leigh’s forays into ersatz Supermarionation had ended with Space Patrol: but the unbroadcast pilot film had been amongst the film cans stored in her lock-up garage when Tim finally persuaded her to let him release Space Patrol. We couldn’t quite believe it when we projected the film for the first time. It had a dream-like quality of its own, with its knock-off Daleks and ideas appropriated from the worlds of Gerry Anderson.

Thinking about it (perhaps in a little too much depth), did the dream perhaps include more of the contents of Paul Starr than were at first apparent? The character in the dream may have looked like Super Mario, but ‘super mario’ is more than half of ‘supermarionation’ is it not? The name Paul Starr was, of course, a synthesis of two Beatles: but couldn’t my character’s name be decoded as referring, obliquely, to the Beatles? Penny, as in Penny Lane (a Paul McCartney composition), and ‘whacket’ suggesting scousers? Either way, the fact remains that I’d dreamed of an unknown ‘supermarionation’ styled series, filmed in colour, nearly two years before being present at the rediscovery of just such an artefact.

What, if anything, do these kind of dreams tell us? Most obviously, they’re illustrative of the nature of dreams themselves, as the unconscious mind cherry picks imagery and ideas familar to the dreamer, and reassembles them in often surprising ways – but to what end? Is there a kind of wish fulfilment involved? In the case of Paul Starr, there’s also a paranormal aspect, one which I’ve experienced in other ways, that of a dream appearing to foreshadow actual events. 

It still happens: only last night, I dreamed I’d heard an announcer on Radio 4 Extra telling listeners about a lost old radio comedy from 1969 that would be returning to the airwaves next week. It revolved around Kenneth Horne and Kenneth Williams running a hotel together, Williams playing his part as a ‘mad Welshman’. Kenneth Horne, of course, died in 1969, so that’s one that’s definitely not going to surface any time… more’s the pity, as I was quite looking forward to hearing it. Unrelated it may be, but on waking, I learned that the BBC had just announced the discovery of two lost episodes… of Dr. Who.