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.