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My dream appeal continues - if you haven't heard about it yet, here's my plan:

Over the next couple of weeks I am collecting the dreams you have at night.

My aim is to gather together a stream of "news" from peoples' minds to make a "Nightly newspaper". As I said in my original post:

All newspapers, in all corners of the world are preoccupied with the daily events of their community, city, country - interest sometimes extends to the world beyond.

But I always dreamt about a paper which pays attention to the world at night, during sleep, containing people's dreams.

It is not just for poets that dreams are more important than daily reality. If we put together all our dreams, we have to have once in a while an issue of The Nightly Express.

I once had a dream...

The great Russian poet Osip Mandelstam had just returned from his trip to Armenia, and told me something.

I can see Moscow of the 1930s in the door frame behind him: marching military people, the growing anxiety of steps under their boots...

"You know, Hamid, whom I've seen out there?"

"Egishe Charents?" - I ask, meaning one of the best ever Armenian poets with the same tragic destiny as Mandelshtam himself.

"Yes, Charents. And you know, he named the most beautiful poet of all time for me. Apparently his name is Nadym ..."

Then Mandelshtam started to read lines of the poet unknown to me, and I woke up not being able to bear their impossible beauty.

The same day I found out from a Turkologist friend, that indeed there was such a great Turkish poet in the18th century, a poet of the Ottoman Tulip era, when Istanbul once again decided to go along hand in hand with Europe.

So alI I ask you is to send me the dreams you have at night over the next couple of weeks. Let me know where you are from so that our "newspaper" can cover all corners of the world. I want to collect enough for at least one broadsheet, so please don't be hold back: dream, dream, dream...

I've already had a fantastic response - you can read through the dreams that people have sent in so far - and then you can post yours below.

I came to Pendle, Lancashire on the day that Lord Young (Prime Minister David Cameron's enterprise adviser) resigned after he famously (or infamously) said that most British people have "never had it so good".

I went there on a new assignment as the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ World Service Writer in Residence, to see how the budget cuts - introduced by the British coalition government - affect ordinary people deep in the countryside.

Driving through the misty fog of the Pendle hills and the early evening darkness, I remembered that I'm not the first in this role. My great predecessor George Orwell wrote a book called The Road to Wigan Pier which investigate the social conditions in economically-depressed Northern England before World War II.

One of his observations in his book, which I read before going to Pendle, stuck in my mind: "It is a kind of duty to see and smell such places now and again, especially smell them, lest you should forget that they exist; though perhaps it is better not to stay there too long".

No, I wasn't coming for a long stay, just for so called "reccy", to gather some initial impressions and to apply the mental map I have of the place to the reality (I have read about Pendle, including its historically-famous witches and its traditional cotton industry).

When I stopped at the local pub at the outskirts of Colne, the radio in the car was still discussing whether we never had it so good or so bad.

When I got to the bar and was ordering my cup of tea, my fellow drinkers were discussing the same thing. Words such as "ridiculous" and "get real" were flying around without any agitation or sting. What was interesting was that the pub wasn't overcrowded at all, as one would expect on Friday night.

The next day I saw many more people at the local museum's cafeteria in Barrowford, where a hot meal costs something between £4 and £5. As some of the elderly customers said to me this was quite cheap. I hadn't seen many children around at all - but there was a family with two kids, who came to dine in the cafe for the same reasonl.

As if confirming the thoughts running through my head, my hostess from Colne's Bed and Breakfast said later that her 21-year-old son had decided to move to the big city, "like many young people do these days".

Farming didn't work for their family, she said. They used to milk cows, but not any more. They just rent their fields to other farmers. "You have to juggle in order to survive and keep your eggs in different baskets. We do Bed and Breakfast, look after other's cattle. Our daughter is a hairdresser, but the biggest bulk of money comes from our storage facilities: we keep people's vintage cars, household stuff, anything really..." And she added: "Since the North is about food, food and once again food, we do lots of food..."

Here I remembered once again George Orwell, who said: "A human being is primarily a bag for putting food into". I asked her what had become the question of the day: "Have we never had it so good or so bad?" to which she replied: "Come on, get real! We are just getting on with it!"

Driving back to London after my short reccy and thinking about plans for my Pendle Chronicles, my thoughts drifted to Orwell's metaphor from his Wigan book: "Coming back is worse than going, not only because you are already tired out but because the journey back to the shaft is slightly uphill".

That was true for me too; the plans I felt overwhelmed by all that I had still yet to see. However Orwell suggests some consolation: "At least I could go among these people, see what their lives were like and feel myself temporarily part of their world. Once I had been among them and accepted by them... and" - this is what I felt: I was aware even then that it was irrational - "part of my guilt would drop from me".

The first time I went abroad was in November 1982. My first foreign country was East Germany.

As a part of our tour we were taken on the same day to Weimar - the house of Goethe and Buchenwald - the former Nazi camp. I saw the trip as a day's journey from the summit of German spirit to the lowest point of it.

That day I thought to myself: if Goethe lived through the 20th century what would his drama Faust look like? It shouldn't be a colourful book, but rather black and white, like a newspaper.

Why a newspaper? Because for me a newspaper represents all human consciousness of the 20th century - it is a patchy, fragmented, haphazard collection of events, words and reality with a lifespan of a day.

So recently the "consciousness" of the UK has been a mixture of the historic release of Aung San Suu Kui and the Haye-Harrison boxing match; the X-factor eviction and the student protests at Westminster; not forgetting the approaching cold weather front

If you read Goethe's Faust you may remember that Faust's life develops as a book does: with its plot-trigger, intrigue, climax and recapitulation. His psyche is a psyche of a book.

As I came back from Germany, I decided to write a modern Faust for the 20th century. It took me a couple of years to write my "post-Faustum" both in Uzbek and Russian, but much longer to publish. Three hundred and sixty-five copies were published in Moscow in 1991. .

As you can see if you zoom in, it represents the Soviet newspaper Pravda (Pravda means "truth". I kept all the headlines intact, but all the content is mine.

I could go on and on about the philosophy, aesthetics and literary inventions behind it, but tough! All I would like to say is that the concept of a newspaper is important for me. And here we come to our next project.

All newspapers, in all corners of the world are preoccupied with the daily events of their community, city, country - interest sometimes extends to the world beyond.

But I always dreamt about a paper which pays attention to the world at night, during sleep, containing people's dreams.

It is not just for poets that dreams are more important than daily reality. If we have all those "dailies", we have to have once in a while an issue of The Nightly Express.

Let's have some fun. All I ask you is to send me the dreams you have at night over the next couple of weeks. Let me know where you are from so that our "newspaper" can cover all corners of the world. I want to collect enough for at least one broadsheet, so please don't be hold back: dream, dream, dream...

My sadness is the measure of your beauty,
but there is no such beauty in my sadness...

Having written this I was sitting in a chair,
and when she herself came in I wanted to stand up quickly,
but somehow I had grown a bit old,
somehow I had become lazy, thinking of the finale,
and I stayed put, a novel in my lap
and a kitchen knife on top of it.
The corn on the cob was boiling in the basement kitchen.
All this, without stirring, not refusing
this old game entirely, nor praising to the skies,
but hurting a little inside:
this had vanished, as though I shall return to reality
without all this, or in exchange I must strike this out.

My sadness is the measure of your beauty,
but there is none of this beauty in my sadness...

This poem was written in Beaumont House, ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ World Service's hostel - my first home in London, when I came to join the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ in May, 1994.

On 5 November this year Beaumont House was closed down, since the lease has expired.

A statement about the closure says: "To many World Service overseas recruits, it will have been their initial 'home' in the UK and one of their first tastes of British, not to mention the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳, culture" and it's fully true.

I still remember kind English ladies Carol and Wendy, who met and welcomed me just as I expected. They reminded me of the books of Dickens and Galsworthy.

There was a strict and gentlemanly receptionist in a uniform - I bet he was a former officer with a rich and adventurous overseas past.

A Caribbean ma'am in the canteen used to ask each of us: 'How are things with you, da'lin?' Once one of us answered her: 'Could've been better', to which she immediately replied with a gracious wisdom: 'But mind you, it could've been worse, too'.

While I was watching ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ television - I once hears someone say "I never thought that the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ broadcast to Britain too!" - in Beaumont House at Princess Square, Bayswater, I met a tall man with sad eyes and long hippyish hair.

"Are you a poet of of the beat generation? Something like Kerouac or Ginsberg?" I asked him.

"No, rather gin and tonic" he replied and introduced himself: "Nodar Jinn, ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Russian of Georgian appellation".

Later he became an iconic Russian writer, who published one of the best novels about Stalin and then died of heart attack when he ws at the top of his career.

One day I'll write about him. He was one of many in the chain of World Service writers (Naipaul might've seen Orwell, Markov might've seen Naipaul, Jinn might've seen Markov). Of all of them, he was the one whom I met and became friends with.

I have sweet and sour memories of Beaumont... Indeed my sadness is the only measure to beauty of it, but as I said once inside of it: there is none of this beauty in my sadness.

Farewell, Beaumont House.

I'm from a part of the world where nearly everyone speaks several languages.

Not because they are clever, but because it is a necessity.

They call Central Asia a "crossroad of civilisations". This is no more apparent than in the bazaars of Samarkand or Bukhara or Istanbul where stall holders will try and make you buy something - be it suzane embroidery or traditional naan bread - in any language from English to Japanese.

There's another type of necessity. When we were forced out of our own country my wife spoke Russian actively and Uzbek passively. Since then we have lived in France, Germany and Britain.

She has mastered all those languages and also become fluent in her mother-tongue Uzbek, since it has been in a great demand. She is learning Arabic and Persian as a requirement to her widening academic horizons. So on all these counts I think that necessity is the best university.

There's a saying in Uzbek that goes "You speak so many languages, you live so many different lives".

There are some hindrances in speaking many languages. For instance I know that my IQ and EQ are much-much higher in Uzbek or in Russian than in English.

I have a theory in this regard: like an artist who has got at his disposal a palette of colours, so we master our languages. Some people have got 64 colours in his palette, another person - just 32. When I read - for instance (or 'by the by' as he would say) - Laurence Stern's Tristam Shandy I understand how poor and plain my English is.

But in my case I don't see it as a tragedy.

However I once knew a couple. He was an Uzbek former-Soviet chap and she was an English girl.

He spoke hardly any English. She was extremely well-educated, sophisticated and aristocratic.

I alway wondered what kept them together, because they were so different in their upbringing, education and conversation. Then I found an explanation.

They met each other in Central Asia and since he didn't speak any English, they communicated in Russian, a language that she was studying there.

Imagine my compatriot had, say, 10 Russian colours in his palette - not too much, whereas she had all 50 colours in her English palette. However she had only nine colours in Russian and that made the difference! Her nine colours against his 10 meant she had to accept him as superior... I've heard that they divorced after she finished her Russian studies.

So the question is: what are the benefits and disadvantages of learning another language?