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 don't remember exactly how it happened, but I bumped into some WorldPay employees and they asked me to come back into the office for a cup of team. I came into the office, and the layout was weird (looking back on it) with a few rows of desks and no computers.

Someone passed me a box of tea, and I started sprinkling it into a very small cup. The cup had some big pieces of something in it, and it was hard to sprinkle the tea in without it going everywhere. The tea itself was a weird mixture of what looked like sherbet and hundreds and thousands.

As I was pouring on the boiling water Mr Goodman, my maths teacher from school, walked into the class room and approached me. I knew that non-employees weren't supposed to be in the building (it felt more like Jagex) and thought he was going to chuck me out, but he just said something like "Ah, Stephen, do you want to come this way and take a seat?"

I told him that I was just here because my friends asked me to come in and have some tea.

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.

I don't remember much of this dream, but I do remember the end in detail.

In this dream, it feels like we are celebrating something, like it's Christmas or something. I've been hanging out with my friends all day. There is a university feel to things.

The bit I remember is at the end of the dream, and I am going to meet one of my friends who has invited me round to his house in the evening. I'm pretty sure that him and his girlfriend are both poets, and they don't seem to have the greatest social skills on the planet. I remember thinking that I am going around to their house with one of my friends, and thinking that it would normally seem unlikely that someone like my friend would ever socialise with these people.

I also remember talking to his wife on the phone, and saying that we were going to come round tonight. She said something like "He said he's got the next week off and isn't doing anything. He would have told me if we were having people round."

I remember two parts at the end of the dream. First of all I remember cycling to his house, but then getting half way and seeing someone I knew in the street. I stopped to talk to them, and then I realised that I'd left my bag at home, so I had to cycle all of the way home to get it.

The second part I remember was being somewhere with my friend that was supposed to be coming with me. Mostly it seemed like we were at my house, although I'm pretty sure that there was a car park outside.

My friend said it was time to go to the poets' house, so I got up to leave. He walked out of the door ahead of me, and I put on my flip flops and stepped outside, but then I realised it was getting cold outside and decided to put on some trainers. I grabbed my trainers, but then I realised I needed some socks, so I went to my sock draw and looked for some trainer socks. When I unrolled the socks, one of them was a trainer sock, and the other one was a normal sock, so I went back to the sock draw and found another pair. This time they were both trainer socks, but when I put them on I realised they were inside out.

By this time I'd been getting my shoes on for a while, and I started to think maybe my friend would have gotten bored of waiting for me. Then I looked out the front door at the car park, and thought "Maybe he has his car and didn't tell me: then this would all be a waste of time!"

I took my socks off and turned them inside out (or rather so that they weren't inside out) and tried to put them on my feet, but now they were sweaty and stuck to my feet, and it was hard to get them on. I was beginning to feel really frustrated that something so simple was turning into something so difficult.

This is the last thing I remember.

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!

For some reason me and Yu Lee have gone to look at a house (to buy). I'm not sure why, because in my dream, just as in real life, we have only lived here for about 6 months.

We arrive at the house around 6:00pm by car and knock on the door. The man of the house opens the door and invites us in, and then he tells us that they are just dishing up dinner, and that he needs to dish up for everyone and then he will be right with us. We hang out in the living room for a while, and notice that they have at least three children living there, and also seem to have both sets of grandparents living there too.

After a short wait, the man of the house comes back and starts to show us around. We look around the living room and the kitchen, and everything seems to be pretty nice, although we quietly comment to each other that it's not as nice as our house.

Next we move through to a weird room which is attached to the living room (without a door) and seems to take up about half of the bottom floor. It's as wide as a regular room, but quite a bit longer, and there are no windows. They have no real furniture in the room although there seem to be some built in cupboards and a few boxes. I comment to the man that it seems a shame to use such a big space just for storage and he seems to be a little bit offended by my comment. He tells me that he does use it, and points to the corner of the room where I notice a small coffee table and a large wall mounted television.

At some point while we are in this room he makes a comment about how it is "connected to the next flat", and I assume he meant house instead of flat.

He tells us he has to go and do something, and asks if we can wait for a few minutes, so we tell him that's fine. He disappears for a while and we start to talk about the house. We both agree that it's not as good as our house, but that the location is really good. In my dream (as in another dream I had) Histon Road seems to be half way between our house and the city centre, which in real life is not true.

After waiting for a while the man comes back, and he seems to be busy with something. I ask him if I can use the toilet and he says that's fine, and directs us up stairs. We both go and follow his instructions, and end up in one of the children's bedrooms which has a toilet and a basin in it!

Yu Lee goes to the toilet first, and then I go. This is a little bit nasty and a bit weird: I take a dump with Yu Lee still in the room, and afterwards, I wipe and wipe and just can't get myself completely clean. After at least half a roll of toilet roll I realise I won't ever get myself clean and am starting to get sore, so I flush and give up.

Back down stairs the man of the house is in the garden so we go outside, and he seems to be fixing something made out of wood. When we get closer it seems to be a bee-hive, although there are no bees. He tells us he will be with us shortly.

Back inside the house we continue to wait for him. The grandparents and some of the children are setting up some kind of board game that involves singing, and we watch them. They ask us if we want to play but we tell them we have to go soon.

We look at our watches and it is 10:00pm and we realise we've been there for four hours! We say that this is the most disorganised house viewing ever and decide to give up. We call the man of the house by playing a tune on an instrument (I think he told us to do that earlier but I don't know for sure) and he comes down the stairs, still looking like he's franticly trying to finish something. We tell him we have to go and he doesn't even ask about finishing the tour and lets us out.

Outside we comment on how weird that was and look at the house from the outside. I realise that it really is a kind of flat, and say so to Yu Lee. She says that she isn't interested in a flat and I tell her that it is not an ordinary flat.

From the outside we can see that the building is made of brown concrete in a brutalist architectural style. The flat itself has no other flats above it, but is connected to a small building on the left, and to a large block of flats to the right. Scanning further along I can see that the block of flats is attached to a multi-storey carpark and that the two buildings are integrated together. The cars can somehow drive out onto the roof of the house we just looked at and there are parking spaces on the roof.

I say to Yu Lee that it's not really like a proper block of flats, because the only thing that the building shares is the parking spaces on the roof.

Standing outside in the dark, Histon Road doesn't seem like a nice place to be, and it has a feeling of danger about it. We agree that we should go, and Yu Lee comments that she thinks maybe the man of the house was in some kind of trouble, possibly drugs related. We get in the car and Yu Lee pulls away.

When in the car, we need to turn around so we look for a good spot. We spot a grassy track and decide that is as good a place as any, and Yu Lee drives into it and start to turn the car around. The neighbourhood seems pretty sinister and I can tell that Yu Lee is in a rush, and as she starts to the turn the car around she puts her foot on the gas a little too vigorously and the car spins. She slams on the break and we come to a halt.

At this point there is something weird going on with a tent. I think maybe it fell out of the car, although I don't remember exactly how it got there. All I remember thinking is that our tent was outside the car, and it was all dirty where the car had skidded over it. I was thinking to myself that I couldn't be bothered to sort it out and I just wanted to get out of there, and when Yu Lee drove off and left it there I was relieved. This is the last part of the dream that I remember.

An interesting thing about this dream is that this version of Histon Road seems very similar to another dream that I had (Friday Afternoon at Work) where I decided to walk home through Histon Road, and the area seemed to be dodgey. I have no idea why Histon Road is a bad area in my dreams, or why it is half way between town and my house, because in reality I rarely ever even go to Histon Road.