I dreamt that me an Yu Lee went to a restaurant. We were looking at the menu, and the only main course they seemed to have was a black pudding dish.

When the waitress came to take our order, Yu Lee asked if they did white pudding and the lady said that she could have one slice of black pudding and once slice of white pudding if she wanted.

After we ordered our mains we each ordered a side dish of some kind of potatoes and the waitress seemed to think it would be too much, so in the end we ordered one side dish between us.

Me and Yu Lee are in a really big park somewhere, having a barbecue. We've cooked most of the food we'd brought with us and all we have left are two beef burgers, and I say to her that I really wanted to try cooking burgers over a wood fire, so Yu Lee says we should go and find a wood fire!

I look on a map of the park, and there is a camp fire symbol on it, so we head off looking for it. After quite a long walk we get close to the spot where the fire is supposed to be and I say "It should be just up ahead".

As we approach the spot, I can hear people, and then I catch sight of them in the exact spot on the map where the camp fire symbol is. There is a large circular structure, like a grey metal frame on legs, that comes up to about waist height, and there are about six to eight people inside it. As we get closer I realise that it is a giant barbecue with all of the grills going round in a circle, with the people cooking the food in the middle.

I approach one of the people cooking the food, and I ask them if he can cook our burgers for us, because he is cooking over wood and we want to taste wood-cooked burgers, and he says ok, so we put our burgers on the grill. A few moments later everyone moves the grill grates around (with the food on them), so that the grill with our burger moves onto the next person in the circle. I realise that the different people have different jobs, and we'd given ours to the guy who starts things off, and the next person is the one who will finish the cooking.

I step around to watch our burgers being cooked, and tell the man that we made the burgers ourselves out of proper steak, and that we would like them cooked medium rare. The man pulls out a large metal wok and puts it on the grill, and transfers our burgers to it to finish them off. "So much for cooking them over the open fire," I think to myself, but then I think "at least he started them over the wood."

After a couple of minutes the burgers are done and the man hands them to us. He cuts my one in half and shows it to me, saying that the meat is not cooked all of the way through, like I'd asked for it. I look at the burger and it is black all of the way through, but it seems to have the texture of raw meat.

This is the last thing I remember.

I dreamt that I was in a communal kitchen at lunch time, and I wanted to make some toast. I looked in the bag of bread but Yu Lee had finished the rest of the loaf apart from one of the end pieces.

When I pulled the end piece out of the bag it was extremely thick and doughy. I tried to cut it into two thinner slices and put it in the toaster to make some toast, but for some reason Yu Lee was having a go at me, saying that I was being selfish holding everyone up at lunch time.

Yu Lee is going to cook something, and the recipe asks for butter cream. Unfortunately we don't have any, so I do a quick Google search and find out that instead of using butter cream, you can make something very similar by mixing butter and mild cheddar.

I go into the kitchen and melt some butter, then I cut some mild cheddar into cubes and mix it into the butter. For some reason the mixture goes a light brown colour and solidifies, and doesn't look like butter cream at all.

Yu Lee gets frustrated, and we decide to go out instead and head into town.

We arrive in Cambridge city centre and I'm carrying a small baking tray with the 'butter cream' that I've made. We walk around a bit looking for a restaurant, and then Yu Lee suggests that we head out of the city centre and explore some new places that we've never been to before.

We walk past a restaurant with a man standing outside (I think he worked there and was trying to get customers to come in) so I approach him and say "Would you like some butter cream?" The man reaches out and breaks off half of the mixture in my baking tray and puts it on the stone windowsill of the restaurant. Then he picks it up and it has dirt on it and starts to brush it off. For some reason this makes Yu Lee angry and she asks me why he's making such a big deal of brushing off the dirt.

We carry on walking, and end up in a new part of town which I've never seen before. We walk down a little side alley which leads down hill, and at the bottom is a hotel which is in a very old building. I think I see somewhere that we can cut through onto the next street, but the gap between the buildings is actually only a couple of centimetres wide.

I notice the bins outside the hotel, and decide it is time to throw my 'butter cream' away. Before I do it I break a piece off and try it, and it tastes like a rich, half cooked pastry. I think I must have put too much flour in it, and then dump it in the bin.

Yu Lee goes inside the hotel and I follow, and when I get inside I see her disappear upstairs. I get to the top of the stairs and can't see where she's gone, but then I notice the toilets are there and think that she must have gone into the toilets.

While I wait for her I look around. The building is very old, and is the kind of building where all of the floors are angled and everything is wonky. At the top of the stairs there is a round table with four chairs under a low, slanted roof with a window, and to the left is a landing with doors to the toilets and some of the rooms. I remember thinking that this must have been built as a very nice house, but now it is a hotel. I wondered how the floors could have sloped so much without the building just falling to pieces.

Yu Lee comes out of the toilets and we head outside and continue walking. We come to a park and walk through it, and two homeless people approach Yu Lee. One of them starts asking her for money, and while she is distracted, the other one puts his hand on the small of her back and starts walking, pushing her with him towards some bushes.

Yu Lee is starting to look scared and I'm trying to figure out what's going on. I quicken my pace to try and keep up with the guy that's marching her away. "What are you doing?" I ask him.

"Fixing her," he replies.

"You'll have to fix me first!" I say to him as I start to get an adrenaline rush.

This is the last thing that happens before I wake up with my heart pounding.

Recorder Lesson

The first thing I remember was being in a recorder lesson. There were four of us taking group lessons together, and in this lesson we were put into pairs. I was working with a young boy, and we'd been working together through the lesson on something, and the plan was that later on in the evening the group would meet up again and we would perform a duet with our partners.

The lesson ended and I went home. The layout of the house was not like any house I've ever lived in, and we were getting ready for the wedding. It was early afternoon and we still had a few things to finalise, and the wedding was due to be later that evening. We were cutting it a little bit fine as we had quite a long drive to the wedding.

The weird thing was that my mum was here, and she was with Ces (her ex-husband). We were talking about how much stuff was left to do and she said that I should call my recorder partner and tell him I'm not going to be coming back this evening!

Mum had had an argument with Ces and was upset. She told me that she didn't want to go to the wedding with him, and so I suggested that she could come in the car with my and Yu Lee. She was delighted at this idea!

Mum was nervous about telling Ces that she wouldn't be going with him as she thought it would probably make him angry. I remember thinking "Why are they still together? Does she even want to be with him any more?" Then I remembered that they weren't really together any more (in real life they've been divorced for years).

We went to tell Ces, but when we got to him, the first thing he said was that maybe mum should come in the car with us. Mum looked relieved.

Blocked Tenor

We said we should make a move, but I wanted to show Mum my recorders. Yu Lee said that we shouldn't mess around, but I said that one minute wasn't going to make a lot of difference.

I took Yu Lee's soprano recorder (the type children are give in school) out of its bag, and said that it was easy to play, but I didn't really like it because it was too shrill. I blew a few notes on it and put it back.

Next I took out my alto recorder (quite a bit bigger than the soprano) and put it together and showed it to Mum. I played a few notes, and told her that this one was quite easy to play, but not quite as shrill as the soprano.

Finally I took out the tenor and assembled it. When I lifted it up, what looked like clouds of cobwebs seemed to be sitting in front of each of the holes in the recorder, that looked like bright lights shining out of the holes through a large volume of transparent cotton wool.

Mum was surprised by how big it was, and I asked her what she thought it would sound like. She said "lower". I put the recorder up to my lips, covering all of the holes to let out a deep note, but when I blew into it, a very muffled sound came out of the recorder as if was blocked by something. I thought it was odd that the recorder would be full of condensation already, but I blew through the sound hole to try to blow the moisture out, but nothing came out. I put it up to my lips again, and the sound was still muffled.

I was determined to show her what it sounded like, and Yu Lee was putting the pressure on me to hurry up. I took my fingers off of some of the holes to play a higher note, and this time blew through it long and hard. At first my breath had considerable resistance, and barely a sound came out of it, but then all of a sudden the blockage cleared and clouds of fine, white dust erupted from each of the holes like a fountain, creating a large white cloud that hung in the air and then started to drift slowly down towards the ground. As the blockage cleared, the recorder started to make a beautiful, deep tone, unlike anything I'd ever heard before.

A Mad Panic

"Come on Stephen, we're going to be late!"

Yu Lee was getting really anxious now so I put the recorders away and started to get my things together to go to the wedding. Yu Lee asked me to call the registry office and confirm what time the ceremony was, so I did that. It turned out that we only had a couple of hours to get there, and it would pretty much take the whole time we had left to drive there.

At this point I was starting to panic too. There were still a lot of things to do, but we just had to leave, so I was frantically grabbing my suit, the rings, all of the things we needed and trying to get them into the car so that we could leave.

This is where a really common dream-sign happened for me: I was repeatedly walking back from the house to the car, picking things up, but every time I got to the car I realised I'd forgotten something else. I was feeling anxious and frustrated at my own incompetence.

As I was grabbing stuff and getting ready, I was listing the things we hadn't done. "We didn't make the CD with the music; we didn't do the seating plan..."

Eventually we got everything together and headed outside. "Yu Lee's driving," I said, "because she can drive much quicker than I can and I don't want to be late." We started to get into the car, and then I woke up.

I dreamt that Stefan and Christina were going to visit us, and we were trying to organise it for ages. Stefan finally told me that he could definitely come, and when I asked him what time he would get here he said 2:00am!

I told him that me and Yu Lee normally go to sleep at 11:00pm and that we didn't want to wait up to see him at 2:00am.

In my dream, me, Yu Lee and Yu Lee's mum are in Whittard of Chelsea (a tea shop) doing some shopping. I go up to the counter with loads of beer (remember this is just a tea shop) and put it on the counter and start paying. Moments later, Yu Lee and her mum come up to the checkout with a massive trolley full of stuff and join me.

I look away from the counter while the girl puts my beers through the till and start talking to the others. After a few minutes I look back to the girl on the till and see that she's just put my things through, and has been waiting for me to finish my conversation. I tell her we are all together, and she cancels the shopping off of the till and puts it all in together.

She starts off putting my things through, and for some reason she is adding the numbers up in her head. She looks at the old receipt (that she cancelled) and starts copying the numbers off of it so that she doesn't have to work them out again, but then she realises that she added them up wrong the first time. I help her with the adding up, and she tells me that she always gets confused when she tries to work out 7 × 5. I tell her that it the easy one, and that it's harder remember 7 × 6 = 42 and 7 × 7 = 49.

I dreamt that I was still with Yu Lee, but I was also falling in love with someone else. I didn't love Yu Lee any less in my dream, and was finding the situation difficult. Let's call this other person X.

Yu Lee is out tonight, so and I'm due to go with X to a party. I'm pretty sure the party is something to do with WorlPay (my old work) and is going to be similar to the usual Christmas parties: there will be something to eat, and then most of the night will be spent with a dance floor and music.

I want to use this time as an opportunity to spend some time with X, but I really don't want to go to this party. I don't think X knows how I feel in the dream, and from her point of view we are just friends.

I try to convince her not to go to the party, and tell her that I really don't like this kind of thing. I tell her I don't like dancing, and that I usually just spend the whole time waiting for it to be over, whilst not being able to talk to anyone because the music is too loud, and that I always end up drinking more than I intend to.

I can't remember if we went to the party or not.

The only other thing I remember is that at some later point in the dream, someone appeared who I felt had some kind of powers, and that could give me advice that would definitely be worth following. They hinted that I should leave Yu Lee.

I didn't really know what to do and had no desire to leave either one of them.

I don't remember the full narrative of this dream, but I remember some parts of it vividly.

We are in Cambridge. I'm with Yu Lee and quite a few other members of her family. We decide to eat in a restaurant that we have never tried before, and we enter into an entrance hall where an Indian looking man is sitting on a chair by himself. A member of staff leads us through from the hallway into a kind of waiting room, where we sit on chairs and wait to be allowed into the main part of the restaurant.

In the waiting room is another guy who seems to be sleeping on a chair. As we enter the room some existing guests are told to "come through into the dining room."

I don't remember everything that happened while we were waiting, but I remember at some point Yu Lee's dad had some food, and he was trying to be funny, eating it in a disgusting and exaggerated way, shovelling it into his mouth and sucking the food off of his fingers afterwards. I looked at Yu Lee's brother and he was horrified and embarrassed of his dad's showing off.

At some point, the member of staff who showed us in says "Sir, would you like to come through to the dining room," to the man who was asleep on the chair. He got up and so did the Indian guy from the hallway and they went to their table. I remember thinking "Ah, so they were together." I also remember thinking that maybe only one set of people are ever eating at a time, and that is why we are waiting so long.

I also remember eating a big bag of sweets. I knew I would have to eat soon, but they were so juicy and tasty and I was so hungry, and as I was eating them I could feel my mouth filling up with saliva and sugary fruit flavour.

The next part was really just my mind wandering. I was thinking about the restaurant, and the guy that owned it. I was wondering if he was as pompous as the waiting staff, and if he wore a suit. Then I heard music and could see it being performed, and then I was wondering who wrote the music, and it came to my mind that I thought it was the same guy that owned the restaurant, and was half surprised when I found out that it was.

As I said, my mind was just wandering over a series of related thoughts and images.

At that point I faded back into my waking body, and the first thing I remember doing was having to drink the mouthful of saliva that had accumulated in my mouth! Yum!