We are all sleeping over at someone's house, and everyone is sitting about in the front room. Someone has a card game that I've never played before.

The game seems to be similar to Uno, where you have to keep laying cards down on top of the pile that match the previous card in some way. The rules state something about how you have to kiss the other person if you can't go. I want to play the game with a female dream character that doesn't exist in real life, but I think in the dream is related to me in some way, like a cousin. Either way she is attractive.

Before we start playing I go upstairs to get more cards. I ask everyone if they mind if I turn the thermostat down, and they tell me that they are cold and don't want me to make it colder. I tell them "there are two options: either you can put some more clothes on, or I'm taking my clothes off, and I don't think anyone wants that, do they?" They agree, begrudgingly.

I head upstairs, and the thermostat is in a cupboard. The cupboard is built into the wall, and has a large wooden door that starts about waist height and goes up to the ceiling, like an airing cupboard. The house has a feel like an old cottage, and when I open the cupboard, the thermostat is the only thing inside, in the middle of the cupboard on the bottom.

The thermostat looks really weird. It looks like it must be about a hundred years old, and is made of wood and metal. It has a lever on top that you can push in either direction in increments of five degrees. I think to myself that I only wanted to turn it down by one or two degrees, but I'll have to turn it down quite a bit instead. I change the temperature from 25°C to 20°C (notice how it's still in Celsius instead of Fahrenheit despite being antique). I instantly notice the heating turning off.

I head back downstairs and we play the card game. We obviously don't play it right because we pretty much just play random cards on top of each other until we have none left. No one has a turn when they can't go, and more importantly no one has to do the forfeit and kiss the other person.

Afterwards we talk about how we played it wrong and try to work out the rules from the instructions.

This dream has some pretty vague bits in it, and I think there was a fair bit of dream logic going on here.

We are at our house, and my mum and step-dad are here. I think there were a load of other people here too, because me and Yu Lee had just gotten married, but the wedding wasn't actually in the dream. The point where my recollection of the dream starts is just after the wedding.

I'm talking to Mum, and she tells me that she has to dash off because they have to move out of their house in a couple of days. She explains that their neighbour has decided to sell it, so they have to move out. It's not clear in the dream whether her neighbour actually owns the house and is renting to them, or if something else is happening. This is the dream logic I was talking about.

I'm talking very passionately to Mum, saying she should do this and that so that she doesn't have to move. I'm pretty sure I was telling her to call them up and make threats to trash the place. "Tell him if he still wants a house to sell he needs to give you more time."

My mum goes off and I'm left all alone in the house (it seems Yu Lee went somewhere too). The house is a totally different house to any house I remember from real life, but looking out the back it has the same garden as my childhood home in Slough. I can see the large brick-built workshop at the bottom of the garden, and the double doors are right open. You can see all of our stuff inside (which looks like stuff you would normally have in the house) just sitting there in the middle of the workshop.

I walk outside to go and lock up, and think to myself that it was really stupid to leave all of that stuff there with the doors wide open. As I arrive at the bottom of the garden I see my wallet laying on the floor. I remember the image of my wallet very vividly: the clasp that holds it shut was open, but the wallet was still closed, and there was a streak of sand on it and it looked very dirty. It was laying on the middle step leading down from the path to the sunken area of the garden where the workshop was.

When I see my wallet, my first instinct is to put my hand in my pocket and feel for my keys and phone, but they are not in my trousers either. I start locking up and gather my phone, keys etc. and put them in my pocket.

Just as I finish locking up I notice some people coming down the path. They are a couple, and I was really focussing on the man who was about my mum's age and dressed in trousers and a thin sweater with a shirt underneath, and looked a little bit posh. When he opened his mouth to talk to me he sounded extremely pompous and not very likeable, speaking a bit like Douglas Reynholm from the IT Crowd. I realised that he was my mum's neighbour, and although we'd never met before he acted a lot like he knew me.

I was half talking to him and half finishing locking up, but the bit that caught my attention was when he started talking about the house sale.

"I'm selling one of my houses, Steve. It's been a really quick sale, and we haven't spent any money to sell it. Have you ever sold a house quickly with no money, Steve?"

He seemed to be boasting about it and I thought he seemed like an arrogant prick.

They left, and I was on my own again, so I walked back up the side of the house and in through the front door, and then I realised he was in my house. Yu Lee was also in the house now (maybe she was there all along). My mum's neighbour was looking at the plastering around the front door.

"Tell me about this plastering Steve. It looks good, but I know it wasn't done by a professional plasterer."

I told him that my dad did it, and it was very thermally efficient. He asked me how the house was heated and I told him that the radiator was in the front room and pointed towards it.

At that point Yu Lee started to explain the plastering. "When he plastered it, he opened up the plaster and poured in a load of hot potatoes at the end. That's why it keeps the heat in so well."

My mum's neighbour seemed satisfied by this explanation and actually seemed quite impressed. He left through the front door and I woke up.

When I initially woke up I think I could remember a bit more of this, but then I fell back to sleep trying to remember it. I remember some sections of the dream vividly but some of the narrative is lost in my head.

The interesting stuff happens in the second half of the dream.

Data Visualisation

The first thing I remember from the dream is being at WorldPay, and we were working with some software that someone in the office had built to visualise data. It drew interesting pictures from financial data and was used to visualise the amount of money in the system.

I had to use this software for something, and to do so I had to modify it. I complained that because it had been written by one person, no one else understood how it worked or how to modify the software, or even how to interpret the graphs.

Later on after using this software for a while I realised it was really slow to run. We were all talking, and I was saying how in Jagex we used to have competitions amongst the developers to try and optimise our code, and that we should do the same at WorldPay so that the software would run faster. (This is just made up in the dream and bares no resemblance to reality.)

School

In the second part of the dream took place in a school.

For some reason we all had to go back to school, maybe to do a course or something. We were staying away from home and I think we were pretty far away, but still in England.

The school itself was an old building with wooden floorboards and old wooden furniture everywhere. The teachers were very old fashioned and dressed like someone from a hundred years ago.

We all came in in the morning and found somewhere to sit. The first thing I remember in the morning was talking to the teacher about breakfast.

"What do you normally eat around here for breakfast?" I asked her.

"Well, what do you normally have?" she asked me in reply.

"Toast, bacon, sausage, black pudding, mushroom and either an egg or beans" I replied to her, grinning slightly and knowing that this wasn't likely to be an option here.

"I'd suggest you bring in a big bread roll for lunch, and simply eat some of the dough in the morning."

Night Time

I'm sure a lot more stuff happened during the day, but the next thing I remember was the evening. A group of us were staying at someone's house, and I don't think any other adults were there but there were two children. We tried to get them to go to bed so that we could go out, but it ended up being tricky. After negotiating with the little kids for a while we managed to convince them to go to bed and snuck out of the house.

For some reason we went back to the school, and it was pretty creepy at night time. When we entered the first classroom, there was music playing pretty loudly, it sounded like a music box. We looked around and made sure we were alone before moving on to the next classroom, hoping to get away from the music because it was freaking us out.

In the next room the same music was playing again. We looked around, and this time I found a metal panel with some white plastic sliders on it that looked really out of place amongst the antique furniture in the classroom. I pushed the sliders and the volume of the music decreased, but even with the sliders all of the way down it was still playing pretty loudly.

I opened the panel up to look inside, and what I found inside surprised me. Behind the panel was a wooden box, split into two sections, with a large section on the left and a small, narrow section on the right. The box had a selection of small, metal antique dolls in it.

The dolls were not very realistic, and kind of resembled large Lego men. The left hand section had a family in it, with a couple of children, their parents and two of their grandparents. The right hand section had an ugly doll in it all by himself with strange clothes and green skin.

As I was looking at it, I must have knocked one of the dolls over and it landed on the floor. I picked it up and put it on the right, next to the ugly green doll. As I moved my hand away, it covered the dolls from view for a second, and once I'd moved my hand out of the way again I noticed that all of the dolls had shifted by themselves, and noticeably the green once had moved closer to the other doll I'd placed in with him.

I was pretty confused as to how this could happen, so as a test I held out my thumb in front of me, obscuring the whole of the smaller compartment from view. When I moved my thumb back out of the way the ugly green doll was bent over the remains of the other doll and had clearly eaten him. I felt horrified.

We are at a fair. It's the type of thing in a large marquee with lots of stalls and rides inside it. I'm with Yu Lee, and possibly some other people.

We walk up to a stall that has a series of small food stalls, with each one being from different countries. I remember that the English one was really boring, being something like ham sandwiches, but some of the other stalls were a bit better. When I'd just woken up I could remember the different foods in detail but the details have already faded.

Throughout the marquee are a series of rides that look like small roller coasters, but that are all on ground level. They have carts that go round a track, but the tracks are flat against the ground.

We walk up to another stand and ask what it is, and they say some funny name. I ask what that is and they say it is one of the rides, and we are thinking of going on it, but when we ask what it's like it doesn't sound very fun so we change our mind. The lady behind the counter said that it basically moves round the track and has lot of stops and starts and bits that spin you round.

The next lot of people get on the ride and we decide to watch it for a while, and are instantly glad that we didn't get on it. It literally seems to have been designed to be as unpleasant as possible! The cart moves back and forth, spinning and tilting and changing direction suddenly causing the people inside to constantly be rocking back and forwards.

The next thing I notice is that people are being sick on the ride. Each time it happens it is when the cart gets to a sharp bend in the track, and one of the people leans over the edge and pukes on the floor. The vomit splats (that look like lumpy brown porridge) are quickly cleaned up by a woman that runs around the outside of the track with paper towels and a bucket. I remember thinking that the ride is right next to the food stalls, so everyone has just eaten, and that the organisers were clearly prepared for people to be sick.

Finally I notice another woman who is also cleaning up the sick. She looks around 40 years old, has short hair, and is wearing some kind of black robe. The sleeve and leg holes of the robe are really big, and it looks like something a monk or a sorcerer would wear out of a fantasy game. She is also carrying blue paper towels to clean up the vomit.

Some bits of this dream are quite vague and hazy. I can remember bits and pieces from the dream, but there are a lot of things that I no longer remember and I'm unsure of the order.

Toilets

I'm on holiday somewhere with a group of people. There is something weird going on with the toilets, and I think there is no toilet paper anywhere and we have to use our socks instead! I ran out of socks to use, but one of my friends told me that he didn't need his and that I could have them.

We go to the toilets, and the lights are out and it is dark inside. The toilets are massive, and there are a lot of stalls. I go into one, and try to go in the dark, but the toilet is filthy and without being able to see what I'm doing I keep thinking I'm going to touch something horrible.

I come back out of the cubicle and my friend arrives in the toilet block. I explain to him how the lights don't work, and I demonstrate but flicking the switch back and forth a few times, showing that they don't come on. He plays with the switch and says "Look, they do work. You just need to leave them for a few seconds." He flicks the switch, and sure enough, after a couple of seconds the lights flicker and turn on.

I do what I need to do and leave the toilet block.

Walking Outside in the Sun

The next part I remember is walking outside in the sunshine. We are in a grassy area and the weather is stunning.

We are hanging around for a while, when a woman approaches us and starts talking to a female member of the group. I don't catch the whole conversation, but it sounds like she is asking for directions, and my friend takes quite a while to explain it to her.

Once they are done talking we move on to another area, and bump into the same woman again. She approaches my friend again, saying something like "I need a green ???" and I remember thinking that her attitude seems very rude and demanding. They seem to have the same conversation again, and after a few minutes we move on. My friend seems to be annoyed at having to speak to this woman again.

We are in another area, in some kind of structure, that resembles a hut or a climbing frame. We see the same woman walking towards us again. My friend says something like "Oh no! Not her again" and we start joking about ways that she can avoid this awful woman. I say she should pretend to be deaf and start doing pretend sign language to my friend.

The Board Walk

The last part of the dream that I remember is at night, and we are walking along a board walk on the edge of some water. There are many pubs, clubs and restaurants off of the board walk.

As we are walking along, we walk past quite a few people that seem to be a bit dodgy. I think we may have interacted with some of them, but each time we were quite glad to get away from them.

We walk past a club or restaurant, and there are a couple of men outside trying to convince people to come in. One of the guys asks us how long we are going to be at this location, and he seems to be trying to book us to come back another day to his club. We tell him that it is our last day and we need to go home tomorrow.

He starts telling us how you can't just turn up at his club, and that you need to book in advance. He says "I don't want just anyone turning up, or people turning up unexpected. I could be having a good time if you know what I mean, and my boyfriend could turn up, and I wouldn't want that, would I?"

I remember thinking that the guy seemed like an arsehole.

We move on down the board walk, and a group of really dodgy looking people push past us in the direction we're going. When we get a bit further along, another group of dodgy people are behind us, and the same group that pushed past are heading back towards us in the other direction. It becomes clear that the two groups have some kind of dispute and are going to fight, and we try to get out of the way. "Oh no, it doesn't work like that" says one of the guys. "If we're going to have a battle you're going to be right in the middle of it too."

He raised is fist and I could tell it was all going to kick off, and then I woke up.

I don't remember much of this dream, but I do remember one fragment. For some reason, and I have no idea what the context is around this, I was with some other people and were messing around and singing. One of the other people was singing the guitar parts to heavy metal songs, and I was singing the words. I particularly remember singing one part of "Sugar" by System of a Down:

I sit,
In my desolate room,
No lights,
No music,
Just anger,
I've killed everyone,
I'm away forever,
But I'm feeling better...

We were amazed how good it sounded with us just singing the guitar part and the vocals.

Me, Bob and Yu Lee are staying at a hotel somewhere. It's the evening, and I suggest we should go out and find somewhere that we can have a drink, so we leave the hotel and walk along the main road, but there don't seem to be any pubs around.

We walk past a police station, and one of the others points at it and says "We can go to the Policeman's Ball!"

We walk up to the police station, and no one seems to be around but the doors are open. We go inside and walk down the corridor. We can hear the music inside and I'm sure the party is just around the corner. I ask Bob "Are we allowed to just walk in here and join the party?" and he says that we aren't supposed to be here because we don't work here.

I become nervous and tell the others we should leave. As we are walking out of the police station, someone sees us and approaches us, so we pretend to be prisoners that have just been released. The person we are talking to is obviously an off-duty policeman, but we somehow convince him that we are just prisoners on our way out of the station and he lets us go.

When we're back outside we decide to head back to the hotel. I tell the others that I'm hungry and they say they will cook some "nice mac 'n' cheese" when we get home. I tell them that I'm not eating that!

Sleep Chart

I remember an early fragment of my dream where I entered my sleep into my sleep chart and it was 2 hours long. The sleep chart looked different though, and the boxes were light blue instead of green and had lines through them at each hour, so the 2 hour sleep had a line half way through it.

This could have been an earlier dream.

Conversation in the Lobby

The main part of my dream that I remember was right before I woke up. I was talking to someone in a large room that felt like the lobby of a hotel, although I'm unsure of the location or why I was there.

I was talking to a guy (let's call him "the first guy") in detail about something, and at some point another man (let's call him "the second guy") approaches us. The first guy introduces him as a good friend, and as he does so holds onto his hand in a manner that seems to be romantic.

We're talking for a while, when the first guys says "He's also my number one Spanish man" and I'm surprised as the second guy didn't seem to be Spanish.

The second guy then starts to speak and clearly has an English accent. I ask him if he's Spanish, but he doesn't hear and continues talking over the top of me, so I ask him again and this time he does hear and says that he is not Spanish. He starts talking about how he used to live and work in Spain.

I realise that when the first guy said "Spanish man" he meant that he is the guy who know about all things Spanish. I'm glad I didn't make a fool of myself by trying to talk to him in Spanish!

There was a lot more to this dream than I can remember now. I remember that my mate Mike from school was in part of it, and also my ex-girlfriend's sister (as a baby). This is the only bit I remember in enough detail to write down.

We are at Yu Lee's mum's house (although it doesn't necessarily look like Yu Lee's mum's house) and Yu Lee's dad comes back from somewhere. He excited because he's got loads of medicine for a bargain price!

He opens his shopping back and starts handing out boxes of medicine to everyone. The boxes are all different and are for random things, and one of the boxes contains eye medicine. I'm not quite sure why, but he takes the eye medicine out of the box and puts a drop in each eye.

A little while later, I think the police came round, and for some reason Yu Lee's dad had to go with them. While he's gone Yu Lee's mum comes home and she keeps taking boxes of medicine out of the bags that each of us have and trying to put them all in the same bag. After a while I realise what she's doing and ask "You want the bags, don't you?" She says "no" defensively, and then after a few seconds admits that she does want the bags, so I take the medicine out of the bag and give the bag to her.

A while layer, Yu Lee's dad comes back in through the front door. We are asking him what happened while he is fiddling around with the door, and then he turns round and his face looks really weird. I realise it's because his eyes are all swollen.

I tell him his eyes are swollen and it must have been because of the eye drops he took and he starts to look concerned. Then I woke up.

I can't really remember much about this dream, but for some reason we were interviewing a disabled guy who wanted to be on a football team. He was in a wheelchair and had no use of his legs, and he used tweezers to move the ball.

It seemed to make sense at the time...