Woken

The dream I remember form last night was particularly strange, even by my standards. I think I remember it so clearly because I woke up several times during the night. The first time I remember waking up it had been after a dream in which I saw somebody creeping up on me, asleep, and so I woke myself in order to repel them. When I woke up I grabbed my phone (it’s bright screen serves as a pretty good torch) and looked around before realising I’d been dreaming. The second time I was woken was by Claire‘s rats, Mario and Luigi, who had pushed over something or otherwise made a loud clattering sound. The third time I woke was by my "system clock," about two minutes before my alarm went off, during the following dream:

My dream was set in a network of concrete buildings on a hillside (somewhat reminiscent of Penglais campus at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, only not). It was Claire’s birthday, and Paul had come up with some kind of surprise celebration and wanted me to help make his plan succeed. Critical to this plan was that I delivered a six-pack of canned lager to "Claire’s bedroom" without her noticing. This room which was on the top floor of one of these concrete buildings, a black-painted hotel of some variety.

Claire wanted to know where her room was, so I hid the lager in a carrier bag and led the way up through the building. The top dozen or so floors before our destination was some kind of nightclub, comprised of a number of small interconnected rooms with steep staircases running through them. Climbing upwards through them all was quite strenuous, and not helped by the masses of people stood or sat in each of the rooms. Claire began to get tired, but persevered.

Finally we reached the correct floor. A wide, upwards-sloping corridor lead towards a cinema, and somewhere along this corridor we know we’d find Claire’s room. Paul reappeared, having followed us up through the building, because – he announced – he’d forgotten to tell us something: it was only possible to get to Claire’s room by walking along the corridor while nobody else was (as if the destination changed based on who was traversing it). He advised us that there were two regular cinemagoers who were liable to walk down the corridor at any time, thereby potentially scuppering our chances of getting where we wanted to go, and he excused himself for awhile to check whether or not these two people were likely to appear any time soon. He returned and said that they were not likely to come here soon, and so we waited for a break in the human traffic in the corridor (remember: we needed it to be empty for it to "work") and the three of us started walking down it.

Unfortunately, we were still unable to get into Claire’s room because the door was locked with a complicated combination lock that seemed to have been modelled on a tile-sliding puzzle. A block of tiles, each with different coloured circles on, eluded us: we tried a few combinations, but not one of the three of us could decipher it.

We backtracked to look for help, but because there were now other people using the corridor, we instead found ourselves in a cave mouth which opened out over a sheer cliff face. A sterotypical cave man sat near the lip of the mouth, alternately looking over the edge and retreating. We noticed that the reason he was unable to look over the edge for long was because an enormous ostrich – about fifty metres high – was reaching up the cliff and attempting to eat him. Fortunately for him, he had a small black umbrella which he was able to hide behind, which was sufficient to distract the ostrich and trick it into thinking he wasn’t there at all.

And that’ll be where I woke up. Which is probably for the best, because that was beginning to get distinctly trippy.