It's Christmas day, and I'm in a large house with lots of open space. I don't know whose house it is. I'm with Yu Lee, the kids, Ai Seng, Zen, and Joanna, but their kids are not there. We talk about how we're going to meet everyone again the next day, and Joanna's kids will be there this time.

I'm laying on the floor in this large living room, and one of the kids is sitting on top of me. Note that although "the kids" are present in the dream, I only remember Link and Rain - I have never dreamt about Yuna.

Yu Lee is dishing out the presents for everyone. There are loads of boxes, and she's giving them to each of the kids. I realise that there's nothing for me and I kind of joke, "Oh, where's my present?" Yu Lee says, "Actually, I have got something for you, but don't get too excited." She passes me a big box, and inside, there's a large, very flexible plastic tube with some kind of liquid inside - it's some kind of sweet drink. I feel really disappointed that I didn't get anything and think that Christmas is kind of crap these days.

At some point, the adults are talking about how there are some kind of Christmas tours, and people will be coming around and we'll all go out for a big walk. There are three different tours that are going to be happening that day. A load of people walk past the window of the house, and everyone gets up, saying, "Oh look, we're going to miss the tours." Apparently, this is a small tour, and we're just going to see the end of it, so it's only going to be a couple of minutes.

We get up and go outside. Suddenly, I'm not with Yu Lee, the kids anymore. I'm just with my dad and Sue, and we're actually in Spain. I'm really aware at this point that Yu Lee is not with us. We're looking around, and all the buildings and streets don't look like England anymore. There's a blue sky and beaches nearby. It's starting to get dark; the sun is just starting to go down, and the sky is just starting to get a little bit darker and is a dark blue with a bit of red in it towards the horizon.

I ask Sue if I could have a picture because I want to send a picture back to Yu Lee of me with the blue sky and in just a t-shirt to make her jealous of how warm and comfortable it is. I look towards the beach, but there is a large area with some kind of rubble between us and the beach. I think about how great the view would be, but we'd have to walk for ages to get past all of the rubble.

I'm still walking and I look back around towards Dad and Sue, to see where they are. My dad is walking forwards, adjusting his underwear. He's pulled his pants down and they are around his knees, and I can see inside. His penis is very small and deformed, like it's died and wasted away. He has a big red stain in his pants like he's been bleeding. He just says, "I wouldn't look if I were you Steve, just turn back around." I turn around and carry on walking.

I remember thinking it was really sad how he was wasting away. We never did take the picture.

I'm building a circuit. It's a bit bigger than an Arduino in terms of size, and it has several sections with clusters of components. One of the sections has a really dense cluster of surface mount components - little tiny resistors and capacitors.

I spend ages building it, and when I finally finish, I power it up, but nothing happens. I mess around with it for ages, probing different places and measuring the voltage. Eventually, the LED lights come on, and it powers up, but I notice it's getting hot.

By this point, I've asked Yu Lee to come and help me, and she's holding it while I'm trying to power it on and measure the temperature. Eventually, I figure out that the cluster of components I mentioned earlier is over 100 degrees Celsius, and I realize that must be where the problem is.

A while later, Atta comes to my house, and I'm sitting with him in my garden. I ask him if he's hungry and get some snacks. I have two small bowls, one with a normal kind of snack in it and the other with mini Weetabix.

We chat for a while, and eventually, I ask him if he wants to come inside. We sit at the dining table, and I get more Weetabix and put a little bit of milk on them. I remember talking to him and eating the now slightly soggy Weetabix. It's dinner time soon, but I'm already feeling full from all of the cereal I've eaten.

The first thing I remember in my dream is very vague. I am talking to Ally about something related to a UI on some project that we are working on. The UI is something we built to set some kind of settings and she doesn't like how it works. The UI is very much like the Espers UI from Final Fantasy VI, where you have to "equip" a couple of different things. She says that there is some kind of issue because you have to equip two specific items at once, and one of them finishes before the other. I have no idea what it was supposed to acheive.

She complains about it, and then I go an test it, but for me it works just fine. Decide that it's not important and decide to ignore it.

The next part of my dream is very strange. We are in our front drive, but the road is all gone and instead replaced with farmer's fields. We are having some kind of party or an event here, and lots of people are parked on our drive. The first few people turn up and they park very neatly right over at the edge of our concrete drive. Next someone else turns up and parks in a place Yu Lee is really not happy with. She is complaining, "Why do they always park like that? They're always blocking someone in!"

I look around the drive, and it is quite a bit bigger than in real life, and it is completely surrounded by fields. The fields seem to be newly planted, with lots of exposed soil and neat rows of tiny plants.

There must have been four cars on the drive, and one parked just in front of it. I make a hand gesture, moving my hand around the perimeter of the drive and looking around the field and say, "Well, at least we've got plenty of overflow parking if they can't all fit on the drive."

I am in a large building in the middle of nowhere. It's some kind of business, like a warehouse or a place where you'd sell cars.

A man comes to visit us; he is going to buy something from us. He seems really dodgy: he is scruffy and seems like a criminal. He talks to me, and I get this idea that he is going to try and scam me or steal something. He does take something—I can't remember what—and he goes to get back in his car and drive off.

Yu Lee has taken a fuse out of his car, so it doesn't start. The man gets angry and is very annoyed that I have stopped him from getting away when he was trying to steal from me. I look in his car, and he has this set of clothes and some shoes all covered in mud, and I don't know why but it looks really suspicious. I somehow draw the conclusion that something awful has happened.

I can't remember how I found out, and it doesn't make perfect sense, but it turns out that he was going to wear these clothes when he tried to kill his wife by running over her.

The last scene of the dream goes really weird. It's like suddenly we're not there anymore, and it's kind of zoomed out with loud music playing, like it's part of a movie. The guy is on the floor, and his head is pinned between some rocks. A car drives over him with the wheels going directly over his head.

I am in the garden with one of the boys (I don't remember if it was Link or Rain). He is sitting on the edge of the deck, and suddenly a pheasant comes into the garden and lands behind him. Me and Yu Lee say "look" and try to get him to look without frightening it away.

He looks around and the pheasant walks past him and stands right in front of him, and then obviously he sees it. After that a couple more pheasants land in the garden.

A while later, some other things happen, but I do not remember what they are now. Later I find myself talking to Link (or Rain), saying, "These are the reasons that I know we were dreaming." One of the reasons is the pheasants. There were two other things that I pointed out to him too, but they have completely gone from my memory now.

The first part of the dream:

I have some kind of a weird computer. It's a new build computer but with a weird retro aesthetic. We actually had two of them in our house and we had Mum, Richard and Bob over and we were showing them.

One of the weird things about the computers is the keyboard: some of the keys had this kind of weird split key where one part of the key did "key down" and the other part of the key did "key up," so you had to kind of slide your finger across to make the key go back up. Also, some of these keys stood quite tall off of the keyboard, so while there were normal keys in the rest of the keyboard, these stood about 5 cm tall, or maybe bigger, and were also a blue colour where the rest of the keys were light grey. I have no idea how you would actually use this thing.

One of the pieces of software that we were showing them was a rogue-like with text mode graphics, like Nethack. We showed them for a while and while, I was doing this Link was messing around and pressing the cursor keys, and it was really annoying me and I had to tell him off.

A little while later, we switched to a new scene, and this time we're at our house and we're going to have some kind of party for the kids or maybe a playdate. There were a couple of kids coming from the same family. After a little while, they start to show up. First, this little kid shows up, and we're just talking to them. Then, a little while later, her big sister shows up who's about 18 years old.​

When they came, they brought a little tray of snacks. It had like four miniature breadsticks dipped in chocolate, and I put it on the table and jokingly said, "Dinner is served."

We're chatting to them, and it turns out that this is their normal family structure. The big sister says "my mum goes and looks after other people's kids and we barely see her, and I look after our kids".

I dreamt that me and Yu Lee went to Spain to visit Dad and Sue. We were only there for 1 night and had planned to go out for dinner. In the dream, Dad was still ill but at home.

When we got there Dad had a visitor, a man I'd never seen before, and they were sitting together discussing something. It was time to go to the restaurant to eat and we were going to be late for our reservation, so Dad said we should go right away and he would meet us there soon.

We got to the restaurant and had a drink while we were waiting. We were just sitting and chatting when Sue's phone rang and it was Dad. He told her that he wasn't feeling up to going out and was going to bed.

I felt really disappointed because we'd come all of this way and wouldn't get to see him.

I dreamt me and Yu Lee were living at my childhood home in Slough, and Mum and Richard were visiting us. For some reason we were all in the shed at the bottom of the garden.

It was time to go back to the house so we made our way up the garden path, but Richard said he wanted to stay behind and to go on without him, presumably so that he could have a cigarette.

A little while later Yu Lee and Mum were in the living room talking and I was in the kitchen. I was thinking that Richard had been a while and I looked out of the window, into the shed window. I suddenly realised I could see Richard's legs dangling in front of the window and that had hung himself!

I shouted to the others to come quickly and ran up the garden to the shed. I went inside I grabbed hold of his legs to try to relieve the tension on his neck. That was the last thing I remember before waking up.

In my dream Nan and Pops were both still alive.

One day I received a weird email from my Pops. I don't remember the exact content of the email but it sounded very much like he was trying to say something without directly saying it, and in the end the email was mostly meaningless. He signed off with the following:

This is my attempt at a throwaway.

Pops

I looked at the email address the the message was from and it was an address with lots of random letters in it so I thought the last sentence made sense.

A little while later me and Yu Lee decided to go out for a walk and we thought we might as well walk to their house and see if they were about. When we got to their road they were walking with a (surprisingly large) group of other old people. We all went back to their house and they were having some kind of gathering.

I chatted to my Pops and he told me that a lot of his friends were having problems with their internet. He said the internet companies were targeting old people and charging them extra for expensive services while at the same time giving them a service that was a lot cheaper to run and was a lot slower. He didn't want his internet speed to be throttled back so he sent me the email in code because he thought they might intercept his email and realise that he was an old man and try to scam him.

This was a very vivid dream.

Pizza Express

The first thing I remember is arriving at Pizza Express, although it was a different Pizza Express to the one we normally go to. Link wasn't with us, and I remember thinking that he was sleeping at home, but it was ok because we'd brought the baby monitor with us!

We ordered our food, and mine arrived, but Yu Lee received the wrong pizza. She sent hers back and I ate mine.

After quite a long wait Yu Lee still hadn't received her food, so she got the waitress' attention and asked where her food was. The waitress apologised and disappeared back into the kitchen.

A few minutes later a lesbian looking woman with short hair arrived at our table with a plate of food. She was not dressed like the other waitresses, and explained that she works in the kitchen, and that the waitress hadn't written her order down on the right slip of paper and so it had been forgotten. She was very apologetic and spoke a lot less eloquently than the serving staff, and had a very working class way about her speech.

The lady put the plate down in front of Yu Lee, and it had a large flatbread pocket filled with pizza topping on it. Yu Lee started to explain that this also wasn't quite right, and the lady's face expression changed as if to say "what's wrong now?" Yu Lee explained that she'd ordered the ham and cheese pizza (it had a funny Italian name that I don't remember), but this is not a pizza. The lady told her that the waitress didn't specify whether it was the normal pizza or the wrap so she just guessed. The lady went back into the kitchen with the plate of food.

After the lady left again I studied the menu and there was no flatbread option for the cheese and ham pizza.

After waiting again for a while, another plate of food turned up. This time it had 2 large slices of pizza on it, but had very little toppings and no cheese. Yu Lee was getting very fed up now and when she complained that this still wasn't right the waiting staff were expecting it and took it straight away again without any kind of argument.

Eventually another lady came out who turned out to be some kind of manager. She apologised and gave Yu Lee a cheque for the price of her half of the order. It was becoming clear to us that they were not capable of producing the correct dish for Yu Lee and so we accepted the refund and left.

The Café

We were outside now and it was dark. I had taken my shoes off in the restaurant, and was now taking shoes out of my bag and struggling to put them on in the dark, while we talked about where we could go to get Yu Lee some food. I was very aware that Link had been at home on his own for a while, so I suggested that we needed to go somewhere that was going to be quick. Yu Lee said she knew a cafe so we decided to head over there.

By this point I'd managed to get my left shoe on and was fumbling in my bag, trying to find the other one. I pull out another left shoe, and continued my search, and finally found another shoe and took a long time clumsily putting it on. A short while later, under a streetlight, I realised I had two left shoes on, but we decided to head to the cafe and try to rectify it there where there was more light.

When we got to the cafe, it was a weird place which only had outdoor seating. It was dark outside, but the cafe was adequately lit so we decided to stay.

Yu Lee went up to the man at the till and asked about ordering food and he assured her that the kitchen was still open. He also said we should talk to his wife about the menu, and then he called her over.

We were sitting at a table now, and the man's wife was talking to us. The menu was really complicated, and as she was explaining it to us she kept getting sidetracked. She asked where we were from and I said that originally my wife was from London, and she said "right, so after living in London you moved to Australia or Canada?"

The conversation was getting weird and the lady had a very uncomfortable, rambly way of talking where she would excitedly go of on tangents and never get to the point she'd set out to make.

Yu Lee said something about how her mum was from Malaysia and the woman got really excited and started going on about how in Malaysia they were really good with needles. She then pulled what looked like a small knitting needle out of her pocket and stuck it through her wrist and started to wiggle it about!

Yu Lee was speechless, and we ended the conversation as quickly as possible and left without ever ordering any food.

The Pub

After we left the cafe we decided to go to a nearby pub. Neither of us had every been there before, and when we got inside it was very noisy and smokey, and lots of people were smoking. The place stunk of old spilled beer.

We made our way to the bar and Yu Lee told me she didn't know what to order. I told her to just ask if they are still doing food and then order a burger. When the lady at the bar asked what we wanted Yu Lee said "Can I have a burger a chips please?"

I added that we wanted take-away and the lady took our money and moved on to the next customer. A person standing on our side of the bar handed Yu Lee a brown paper bag and said it was to put her food in.

We waiting for a little while. Although it was loud and smelly, the people the pub were entertaining to watch and it was actually quite fun. At one point someone started talking to us and asking about Link, and I got confused about whether he was 24 years or 24 months old (in real life he is 15 months old),

After a short wait, Yu Lee's food came out. She opened up the burger and there was no cheese inside, so she got the barmaid's attention and asked her more cheese. Yu Lee was obviously getting fed up by this point and she was quite rude about it. I remember thinking that she should be careful otherwise they may spit in her food!

The burger had initially come out of the kitchen quite quickly, but now that we were waiting for the cheese it was taking a long time. Whilst we were waiting my alarm went off and the dream ended without Yu Lee ever getting anything to eat!