It was four in the morning, and I was in my room, doing the dodgy with Bryn, when Soppygit and Ibid walked in and started using my computer.

I was in a class of twenty eight people and we were divided into groups of seven to do a project on OHP sheets. Abigail, a girl in the year below mine at school, was the dominating force in mine; the rest were all boys in her year. At the end of the lesson, our work was ready to hand it, but the teacher insisted we all wrote our names on each OHP sheet. Since most people insisted on coming up with a fancy symbol instead of writing their name, this process took fifteen minutes, by which time our break was over.

I was in a town near Carlisle with Anna who was also in the year below mine at school. We went to a laundrette. Using the machines was very complicated and took considerable skill - I copied Anna and referred to a manual and still messed it up. When we left, it was nearly 6pm. I asked if I could get a bus back to Brampton, but she said they’d stopped running for the day: I’d have to get one to Carlisle and then catch one to Brampton from there.

12 January 2003: Removing People's Little Fingers In Creative Ways

I was walking through a large (in real-life non-existent) room in the Cornwallis building at UKC. There were about two hundred people there, being taught French. The lecturer was having conversations with students one by one. I looked around for my friend who studies French, but I couldn't see her.

I was living in Naworth Castle, which was on the edge of a perpetually dark and frightening village. In the village lived a boy who liked make people lose their little fingers off in creative ways. One ended up getting theirs caught in an electric pencil sharpener.

13 January 2003: An Empty Month

In waking life, I'd just put on a classic rock night. In my dream, I had to run a second one, the day aftewards, and come up with different songs I could play on it: there was only one I was happy with.

I went on holiday to a seaside resort in the Greek part of the Meditteranean with my family. Our villa was at the top of a cliff, which was covered in sand. The area was very quiet and very boring. We stayed there for a week in November 2002, and returned home on the 16th. My birthday had occurred while we were there on 11th November. (It's actually on 11th August.) We spent the rest of the month mooching around the house, doing little, and I reflected that it had been a strange empty month, since getting over Bryn had been the dominating activity in the first days of it. (This much was true.)

14 January 2003: A Letter From France (But Not A French Letter)

My brother was on the first fifteen rugby pitch at our old school, reading a book by Roald Dahl about a boy called Danny, but it wasn't "Danny The Champion Of The World". It was very similar to the first Harry Potter novel. I borrowed it off him and began to read it.

I had received a letter from a girl in France. It was eight pages long, and written in meticulous fountain-penned writing. I went into a room that led off from my bedroom (that doesn't really exist) where I began to write a response of comparable length, but half way through my Dad summoned me.

15 January 2003: The Quest For The Crystal (And Sanitory Products)

I was living with my Mum in a terraced house on a shabby street in a suburb east of Carlisle . . . except it was in Northern Ireland. A man we knew instructed me to go to a house in a Currock, a suburb on the other side of Carlisle, to get a crystal. I also had to go to the supermarket to get some sanitary products.

I got on what, in the dream, was my bike. It had pedals that acted in the same way as a car's, but because I was in Northern Ireland, they were the opposite way round to what I was used to. The man warned me that not many people could ride such a bike, but I managed without difficulty. In my hands, I clutched two pairs of knickers - one pair were green with white spots on and made of cotton; the other was a black and purple satin g-string.

I rode through central Carlisle until I reached Currock. I went to the supermarket there, bought the sanitary products, then came outside to find two local girls were riding around on my bike. I managed to get it back off them and tried to find the house where I could get the crystal. I couldn't quite remember what the address was, but felt sure I'd recognise it when I saw a roadsign.

I got to the third last street in Currock. It looked just like a street in Brampton, but I realised that it wasn't, and that an old friend of mine had lived on the next street, but I had never been to her house. I was curious to see what it looked like. The street was a lot more run-down than I'd expected it to be, but I couldn't find her actual house, and suddenly, I actually was back in Brampton.

17 January 2003: The Pigout, The Unwanted Tryst And The Big Red Circles

I had finished my novel “The Fake Sound Of Progress” - it had happened a lot sooner than I’d expected - and had printed it out and was running around a warped version of my house, showing the bulk of paper to all my family. They were unimpressed, especially Mum, who took me to a doctor, who measured that I’d consumed six thousand calories in a single hour on the afternoon of 10 January 2003. I remembered how - eating a giant tube of Smarties I’d got for Christmas - but weren’t Christmas pigouts normal? Apparently not - the doctor started printing something out, and I hoped it wasn’t a diet sheet I’d never be capable of following.

I was in a changing room, along with online friend Sam. I watched her taking her clothes off, so I could get a better idea of the state of her figure.

It was a Friday and I was in Rutherford computer room after six in the evening. I knew I had to hasten home before 6.50, although I couldn’t remember why. So I went home, and Bryn turned up. We went to Eliot computer room to go on the Internet, but we hadn’t been there long, when I had to leave to go back home - Zak, a bloke I know from The Beercart, was coming round. I left Bryn there.

Just outside Eliot College, I wondered several things:

1. Why was Zak coming round?

2. What would we talk about?

3. What would we do? I had a fair idea it was meant to be dodgy, but I didn't want to be dodgy.

4. Why hadn’t I brought Bryn with me? The two of them got along well.

5. And what conclusions must Bryn have jumped to after me leaving him there to see Zak on my own?

My family was travelling by car to Newcastle. We travelled through two small towns just outside Newcastle, where by both sides of the room were continuous spectator stands, which were filled with all of the town’s citizens, watching our progress. We were all quite embarrassed.

I was in one of my classes. The lecturer taught us, drawing a lot of pointless diagrams on the board, showing a pair of boots, and two rockets, and similar. At the end, he asked us to do something, in his hard to understand accent. Then he started handing us our pads of file paper back, which contained the notes we’d taken. I was given three for all the people in my row, but one was the wrong one. A Chinese boy who was sitting behind me asked me what the lecturer had just asked us to do; as I told I didn’t know, the girl beside him took the surplus pad of file paper off me. I turned to my own. The lecturer had criticised me for not writing in complete sentences, but had later declared joy over the number of full stops in my text. He was also angry I hadn’t copied all his silly little diagrams, and had drawn big red circles around something.

20 January 2003: Gah, I'm Even Selling Pit Tickets In My Dreams!

I was staying with Twi. She was having a party in her apartment (the one she had when I actually stayed with her), and I was trying to sell Pit tickets to the attendees. A couple of people I knew at school - Moggy and Liz - were there and both bought them, with ten pound notes. I later grew concerned that some people were paying in pounds and other in dollars, and I might be giving them change in an inconvenient currency.

I kept the money in a metal cashbox, which I left in a corner of the room, only to see a man, who resembled one of my lecturers, attempting to steal it, but I caught him in time.

Mum had a new partner. It was a sunny afternoon, and my new family went on a boat cruise on a big lake.

26 January 2003: Bryn's Evil Friends And My Useless Teammate

I was in a large square carpetted room with bare walls and a lot of people. Everyone was divided up into teams, and the teams took it in turn to play five Crystal Maze style games. My team went last. When you won a game, you got a ball that was either yellow, white, red, green or blue. We won our first four games and quite coincidentally, the four balls were of different colours. We were pleased. But we lost the last game. Then we all got on gym benches, alongside keyboards, which were carried into the adjoining corridor, where we all started playing keyboard. Adrian told me my team had lost because Tom had messed up.

Bryn had two evil friends who invited him to go to the Hobgoblin with them. He didn’t dare say no. Then one of them took him to a chav club, where they insisted he pulled a horrible girl.

(Bryn dreamed of a re-enactment camp.)

27 January 2003: Multi-Player Chuckie Egg

I was staying with Sarah Yoj and she had a black-screened computer that I’d used once as I child and had longed to use again. But when I tried to type something in the word processing program, it kept displaying letters I hadn’t typed in all different sizes and it was difficult to correct my typos. Sarah Yoj recommended I played a game, which was a bit like Maniac Mansion and you could could play it in several different orders, but some of them, she warned me after I’d died on them, were impossible. The game was broken up into several challenges - I played one which was like Snake, only it was for four players and on the screen at any one time there were two snakes in competition with each other, who moved at different speeds. I couldn’t work out how to play it, so I died a lot. Then it moved onto a version of Chuckie Egg. There were four different coloured Chuckies - red, green, yellow and blue - who were battling to get the majority of the grain, which covered most of the platforms. You could jump over geese that were the same colour as you, but not over those of other colours. I was the blue player, and to my surprise, all the keys more or less worked and I managed to win.

28 January 2003: Return To Maths Summer School

I’d just finished my final year at school and I was spending five days at Maths summer school (for the second time - indeed, in actuality, I spent five days there two summers earlier). The participants stood in a big airy room, in which I’d stored a sheaf of paper on one of the shelves. The administrator insisted on talking to people who he hadn’t met before, those who hadn’t been there last year. There weren’t many - I was approached third - which made me feel like I was an impostor in an exclusive club. He asked to see examples of my work, which I retrieved from a walk in closet in my room. I felt embarrassed to be exposed as so unintellectual. Then I remembered I’d been here two years earlier - didn’t he remember me from then?

I found the sheaf of paper had been returned to my room, and I felt embarrassed I’d tried to leave it in a communal area. I was told we were given half an hour each day to write letters home - between 3 and 3.30 - and then for the next three and a half hours, we were to do homework, leaving the evening for entertainments.

I realised there was a lot of confusing admin I had to deal with (purposefully so, to provide us with a challenge), like getting registered at two medical centres. I remembered now, why I’d left the Oxbridge environment in the first place.

I got an e-mail from the band who knew about stage hire, saying that we should probably start shifting the stage at 5.30 - this I agreed with - and that the drama department were content for us to borrow it as long as we told them a month in advance. Since there were all of ten days left before the gig I was putting on, I was not best pleased, and I woke up, stressed, not realising it was a dream.

30 January 2003: Toilet Invasion

I was in a large toilet. I locked the door, but a couple of girls forced their way in. But when I creid, “Oi!”, they left before seeing me.

1 February 2003: Newcastle University: The Amusement Park

I was at home, and it January, and all month, the sky never grew fully light, and most of the day was dark. I suspected this was something to do with current events.

I went to an open day for a postgraduate degree in Aerospace Science at Newcastle University. The campus doubled as an amusement park, along the lines of Disneyland, except space-themed. My family came with me, and we stayed in a hotel, right in the middle of the park - we could see the various planes and rockets, which were rides, whizzing past our hotel window. This surprised me, but my family laughed, as they had known it would be like this.

Dad and I actually tried to find out about the course, with little success. We ended up in some sort of hardware shop. Meanwhile, Mum and Noj attempted to go on the rides, but it was confusing; I saw Mum frantically fleeing to join a queue to get on a ride - she made it - and Noj following a few seconds later - he didn’t. I decided I didn’t particularly want to go to university here - give me a quiet, sense-making campus any day.

In a library there, there was a race for kids of wheelchairs; they formed teams of three, and between them, they all had to make their way through identical obstacle courses: this involved shifting giant books, which were stacked in a carefully designed pile and required two people to shift. If they did this in the most obvious way, the books would block the kids’ path completely.

3 February 2003: Dad's Life Story

Dad came to visit me in Canterbury a lot. On one visit, he told me that while he was recovering from his operation, he started writing the novel about his life. I admitted that I also had started on a novel that based on his life at any rate. He was really surprised and wished to collaborate, but, on thinking about it, I couldn’t face showing him my version of his story.

9 February 2003: The Death Of The Random Young Mother

I was standing by the doors on a train, travelling through the Irish countryside. In the carriage next to me, a lot of middle aged men stood on one side of it. Some of them were so tall that their heads were level with the top of the cutting outside. They were having a jovial conversation about the differences between the behaviour of men and women. There was a young mother standing opposite me, with her son, who was about five. She leaned against the door, and fell out of it, her body crashing against the side of the train. I started to cry, and hoped her son, who had also vanished, was safe.

It was early evening, and I was on Brampton’s high street, near the chip shop. Suddenly, I heard an amused shout of “Goth!” and turned to see five of the Canterbury goth contingent coming towards me. We went into a Games Workshop (which doesn’t really exist), which was at the end of a corridor of a shopping precinct. The bloke working there said, cheerily, “I really have to enforce the rule where no more than two of you kids are allowed in at once.”

Sarah The Vice Goth bought something and then we went back onto the high street. I saw two teenage girls dressed in black, so I yelled, “Goth!” at them. Then they turned, and I realised they weren’t goths at all. “Who are you yelling goth at?” Matt asked. “Yourself?” We were all highly amused.

I was writing a book about a group of girls who went to a comprehensive school in a town which was like Brampton, only a bit bigger - big enough to have two secondary schools. The girls met some boys who went to the other school, who lived in the houses near where my grandfather lives. One night, they had an orgy, but after that, they paired off into couples and threesomes. The main character went out with two boys (together).

12 February 2003: I'm With The Band

I got an e-mail from someone in Silent Minority (a band playing at a forthcoming gig I was organising), asking if his girlfriend could get into the gig for free.

15 February 2003: We Are The No-Bodies! Want To Be Somebodies!

A cross between me and a teenybopper who was obsessed with fame and glamour, was taking a train from the north of England to London. I got off at one stop, which was this heaven dimension for anorexics. It consisted of several small fields: in each one, a skinny teenage girl was dancing, trying to get good enough to be famous. Hollywood was at the end of the sequence of fields, which is where they all wanted to go, as did I. The girl in the field next to me consisted of just a head and a very long pair of legs - she was as tall as me, and her knees were at the same level as my hips. There was also a girl called Lisa who I made friends with.

I got back in the train, in order to explore this dimension further, but ended up back in reality. I didn’t mind, since Bryn and we started having sex, even though there were other people in the carriage. Then we heard the conductor coming (ahem, that would be coming to check our tickets) and stopped.

I reached my destination, which was a flat in which I lived with my family, in the south of England. Shortly afterwards, six of Lisa’s family members came to visit. In explaining to us how messed up their family situation was, mentioned someone with an unusual female Christian name, whose surname was the same as mine. I seemed to remember Mum had once mentioned the Christian name in describing my extended family, so I asked her about it. “Yes, she was promised to Noj,” Mum said, “but instead she’s marrying her grandfather.” I was struck - not only by the incest and the extremity of the age difference, but the fact that Noj had been promised to someone, and I hadn’t. My two cousins nearest to my age, were in long-term relationships, so I couldn’t even be now.

I was tied to a bench in a room, filled with people who were going to perform torturous scientific experiments on me. They were all dancing around. On another bench I noticed the girl who was just a head and legs. At least she’d be undergoing the same treatment, I thought, but then she got up, and started dancing around with the rest of my tormentors. I felt betrayed.

17 February 2003: Dreaming Of Reading A Maths Text Book. A Bad Sign.

I was lying in bed reading the text book I got out of the library about Discriminant Analysis. In the final chapter, it referred to a haunted mansion, which I was simultaneously in, with some other people. In the centre of the house, there was a large area covered by canvas, and you had to press hard-to-find certain buttons to make lights come on in it, in geometric shapes.

On the second to last page of the book, the author had written that he’d just written a 277 page Valentine’s card top his wife. I took it he meant the book by this, and was quite amused - presumably she was sick to death of him writing it, but now it was finished, she’d be happy, and it was dedicated to her for her patience. Then, on the final page, it suggested doing Analysis Of Variance as a means of solving the problem, and finished. Although I was disappointed it had ended so abruptly, I was most pleased with myself for having read an entire Maths text book, and understanding it too.

I was not pleased to discover this was a dream, since I’d believed myself to be working really hard!

19 February 2003: The Lesbian Rampage Begins

I was on a train to London with some people I know. I’d decided to spend the day visiting some nearby towns, including Hemel Hempstead. I went to one town, which I went on a guided tour of, by travelling around in a horse drawn cart.

I was going to run away with some friends. I was in a bedroom (presumably mine) and my friends were there. I’d just finished packing my stuff, when I noticed Abi (fellow rock soc person), and started snogging her. I reflected that she was a good kisser, better than girls I’d kissed in actuality.

20 February 2003: It Continues

I was starting a job in a large office building in Brampton, near where the old newsagents was. Bryn also began work there. When you entered each day, you had to wait in a queue to hand the majority of your possessions over to baggage controllers, before proceeding to your office. The offices were up flights of stairs, and it was very difficult to locate the right department. I was working in a different one to Bryn. Three of the women there were very friendly, and it turned out they were lesbians. I pretended to be one too, and got off with one of them. (Ok! Ok! I know I kissed a girl on 17th, and I’ve been having irregular lesbian dreams since before I kissed *anyone* but this is getting ridiculous! I’m straight, foolish subconscious! Unless it's right and I'm wrong?) They owned a large flat unusually shaped trolley, which they gave me to look after for one night. The next morning, I tried to drag it to work (I lived in Naworth Castle), but I found it hard to manoeuvre and once I got into the centre of Brampton, it kept whacking into things. (So is this trying to tell me that it’ll be really tiresome being a lesbian? Oh yoj!)

21 February 2003: This Is Totally Gay

I was taking an exam, in which I had to write three essays in the space of two hours. I had a lot to say about the first topic, even though it wasn’t entirely relevant, so I carried on working on it for an hour, although I knew it was a bad idea.

There was a small library, which, at one point, had contained several shelves of Babysitters Club books - only they were dark red hardbacks, and they went up to number 631. Then Bryn looked at the shelves, only managed to find about five of them, and asked me to find out where the others were. I discovered they were in a store room, along with some other stuff (big cardboard sheets and stage risers) the library intended to get rid of.

I suddenly realised that Twi’s lack of recent livejournal entries was because she was lesbian, but no one had cottoned on to this fact, so she wasn’t going to write about her further adventures. Then I was watching my online friend Dina and rock soc Stef have sex. I was standing right beside the bed they were doing it in, but they didn’t notice me, since they were too caught up in passion.

Then, later on that day, I watched Stef and online friend Steph having sex. I went to a large gym, along with Anna The Goth and four boys (who I knew) and claimed, “I’ve never watched two women having sex before - but it’s happened twice today!” Then two of the boys started snogging, and the other two did as well, and then Anna and I started snogging as well.

Bryn got a job at my old workplace, only it was in Sittingbourne. When his first lunch time came, I met him, so we could walk to the station, and he declared a wish to go to this place where they sold sandwiches for £1. On the way, he’d showed me what he’d done in his spare time at work: he’d created A3 glossy multi-coloured Pit posters: when you looked at them one way, they said something, and when you looked at them another, they said something else. I was very impressed, and surprised to see he hadn’t misspelled any of the words either. I sifted through the pile, finding there were about twenty five posters and various company forms, as printed by other people. We reached the station, and I pointed out Bryn hadn’t bought his sandwich.

4 March 2003: Goths, Goths Everyhwere

I was in Brampton with Katrina, who was back for a visit. We were going to get a bus to Carlisle, though we were standing on the wrong side of the road for one. When one approached, Katrina yelled, “Bus!” excitedly, and we boarded. I was pleased to discover the fare was only £1.80 (as opposed to the actual at-least-£1.90 I’d usually pay). We went to the back - there were no seats, so Katrina sat on the floor and I stood. Katrina turned into Klair Goth, and my online friend Syl was sitting on the floor in a corner. “Hey, Syl!” I said. “Do you know who this is?” I pointed out Klair Goth. “It’s Klair Goth who you used to chat to on the TYWC message board.” I felt a bit strange in doing so, as neither of them were very goth anymore and they probably wouldn’t have anything in common. In Carlisle, we went to a place that looked like a theatre, but showed films. A film of the most psychedelic and intriguing dream I've ever had (annoyingly, I don't seem to have written about it, but it featured a girl who lived in dark marshlands in southern Canada) was showing, and I was delighted at the chance to enjoy it again. However, as waves crashed on the screen, before I’d had a chance to get comfortable, I got thrown around in my seat, and struggled to stay in it.

The film was three hours long and there was an interval in the middle. During it, I went to some toilets above the theatre, where Anna The Goth was selling Pit tickets.

18 March 2003: Success, Kind Of

I had sent a poem off to a writing competition run by Writer’s News, and received one of the runners up prizes, and had it printed in Writer’s News. I submitted it under the name (my first name) (my aunt's first name) (my aunt's maiden name). I looked through the other competitions they were running - there was one for a short novel. I’d been writing a short novel, which was pretty pants and not finished, but I decided to send it in anyway. The prize was a £150 WH Smith gift voucher and the book to be published, and a few days later I received it! “I knew you’d get it,” Mum enthused. I was surprised at how quickly the competition had been judged, and doubted anyone had actually read the novel. Then I considered that not many other people had entered, in all likelihood, and they’d have quite a few judges, and each could easily read a short novel in a few hours. I was slightly annoyed, because I had submitted it under the name of (my first name) (my surname) (my aunt's maiden name), but it had been printed with (my first name) (my aunt's first name) (my aunt's maiden name) on the front, so people were going to think it was by my aunt.

23 March 2003: Kidstock

There was a Kidpub festival happening at UKC, where various authors were giving talks and holding competitions and stuff. (Althougb it kept turning into a goth festival.) I went to see the second author’s speech - it was the guy who’d written “Captain Underpants”. (This isn’t totally random, since Bryn’s brother recently forwarded me an excerpt from it.) He held a competition, for the age ranges 7-10 and 11-15 to write a poem about poetry. I had a really good idea for an entry, in which I contrasted the vocabularies of the two age ranges, but I thought intelligent ten year olds would take exception to my assumption, and decided not to bother. (Apart from the fact that I was, you know, too old to enter.)

At the end of the first day, shortly after midnight, I walked across campus with rock soc member Lex - her to go to her room in Keynes, me to go to Eliot computer room - where else? She said she couldn’t wait to hear the competition entries people came up with.

I realised that I wasn’t going to get into Eliot since it was after midnight and the door would be locked, but I discovered it open. The sole receptionist on duty stood just inside the entrance and told me to get into a corner. “Why?” I asked.

“Just do it,” he said, so I did. Then he said he was going to pay to have sex with me. I screamed and ran to the computer room. There, I checked the festival website. There was a bulletin board on which the Kidpub owners (who are, in reality, the Kidstuff owners) posted interviews they’d conducted with aspiring young writers, on which people could comment. The first one was with a fourteen year old boy from America - it included a sample of his writing, which was terrible and nonsensical, but the interview went on to say that at first he’d wanted to be in a band, but then he’d decided to become a writer and already has his work published in a collection of short stories. I felt sure it was a vanity print collection, but everyone who had commented seemed really enthused about it. I skimmed through the message board and found a message from Lawrence, as far as I could tell. I then sent an e-mail mentioning “The two Johns and Chris” along with some other names, and went home.

The next day, John and Chris came round to my house, asking if I’d meant them. I had - I told them they needed to sort out next year’s rock society committee, and something else. They left then, reluctantly, and for some reason, it seemed important to watch them heading up the road. I dashed from room to room (my house was a lot bigger than it is in reality), trying but failing to catch glimpses of them.

(Oddly, the next day I got an e-mail from John, and the day after that, I happened to see Chris walking past my house - something I’ve never done before.)

26 March 2003: Contacting An Old Friend

I decided to answer the letters from my penpals lying in the intray of my bedroom at home. I picked out one at random - it had been sent in the latter third of year 2000; and was from a girl, who I really did write to, but whose name I can’t bring to mind. She had large neat writing, and her letters tended to cover three sides of A5 paper. I had always been a pretty appalling penpal to her. I began to write my address on a piece of paper, only to find myself writing it, on the worktop in the kitchen at her house; I had gone to stay with her for a few days.

Her mother was there, preparing dinner; she spoke to me, but she kept - deliberately it seemed - getting in my way, as I was trying to write the letter. I watched her spread a bread roll with various condiments. My penpal’s younger brother came in - he was fifteen or sixteen, and reminded me of my brother at that age - and he complained about being forced to eat the roll. I couldn’t understand what was wrong with it, and my penpal’s mother told him, “At least you don’t have to have two.”

29 March 2003: The Hellmouth In Sittingbourne And "Life After Potato Famines"

I was the back yard at Naworth Castle, with my family. In the sky, missiles were raining down. I was figuring out whether they were going to hit us, so we could move in time, but none of them were. Then the scene changed to Oxford Street and I turned into Buffy. The missiles were still coming and some bloke in his forties told me that as a form of war protest, he was going to roll a huge stone sphere down the street - would I help? I didn’t want to, so I fled to an apartment.

I had been there quite a few times before; most recently, on an occasion when I’d run away from university briefly. (Sunnydale (Buffy's hometown) was where Sittingbourne is. Well, I suppose there must be a hellmouth there as well, judging by the number of evil people on its streets.) In the apartment lived a bloke a few years older than me, who I’d met him over the Internet. Last time I’d visited, he’d been living in a very small space, with two of his friends - one male, one female - and their very large CD collections, which I’d looked through - they consisted of loads of promotional copies of rare 70s singles. (Never mind that they didn’t have CDs in the 70s.) They’d originally all had their own flats, but burglary had compelled them to all move in together. At the end of my visit, I’d sat beside the bloke, in a murky sitting room on a brown leather sofa. He’d seemed interested in me, and scared, because I was only nineteen and going out with Riley (Buffy's boyfriend at that point in time), I’d gone home at that point.

Now he lived with his elderly slightly-hippie parents, who enjoyed vegetarian cooking. Now I realised he was Mark Renton from “Trainspotting”, and it was his destiny to save me every couple of years.

I, Zed once more, was staying with a cross between my cousin Joanne, my online friend KatherineF and Claire from “Watermelon” by Marian Keyes. She lived in an airy cabin in a small settlement beside a large forest in Staffordshire. (Could this be more random? I think not.) She was showing me her collection of books, which mostly consisted of large hardbacks with pale turquoise spines. She explained that it was her aim to get an Irish and English edition of everything in her collection so far. I looked through the titles, some of which were highly mad and distinctly Irish - “Life After Potato Famines” type of things - and I kept laughing that she’d be lucky if an English edition existed.

I had to pay some money into a bank account, but I had a new paying in book. It was about twice the size of normal ones, and the first few pages said I could now go into any bank or building society and pay money into any account. There were small photos of all the different banks and building societies. The actual paying in slips required you to fill in what your skin colour was: you were given a choice of black, brown, pink, white or blue. The first few pages showed pictures of various people, and you had to identify what skin colour you thought they had. The first showed a black guy in his thirties; the next three showed women in their twenties, who could either be Indian or tanned Mediterranean types; the fifth showed a goth woman with blue wool wound into her black hair - she, I obviously had to choose “blue” for.

Still in the woodland, I went for a walk along a path with Natalie, Helen Wo and Katie, who were in my year at school. We didn’t talk much, and Natalie and Katie started running. Then suddenly, the others turned back along the path. I was disappointed as we hadn’t reached any logical turning point and I thought Katie was being foolfaced, because she was bound to have an asthma-attack. (As she always did when she exerted herself too much in PE lessons.)

30 March 2003: The Cyber Warehouse And The Packed Lunch

I was in Canterbury, near the station, with a girl I knew in the dream but not in reality. She was an online friend I’d just met, but lived locally. We walked towards central Canterbury and passed this huge shop, the size of a warehouse that sold cyber clothes. We both mocked the stupid looking trousers we saw in the window - but then we both, on our own accord, decided that they were cool after all and went inside.

We looked through racks of t-shirts and I was surprised to find some Einsteifen ones, which didn’t look anything like actual Einsteifen t-shirts - they had a red and white gory picture on the front. I put one on over my clothes. My friend came across a white t-shirt which had “Top Hat” in pink letters written on the front - it was very teenybopperish. She put it on over her clothes, and told me that she’d played a gig at UKC recently, but the only clothing that had been available for her to wear on stage was this very white shirt. It occurred to me that Top Hat were a boyband that supported Mel C when I saw her (they were actually called Tom Cat, but me and Will thought they were called Top Cat, so you can appreciate my conclusion), but couldn't work out what band this girl was in.

Suddenly, a large security guard grabbed me and started dragging me towards the front of the shop. I hoped I wasn’t being arrested for stealing. But he explained, in a confusing manner, that it was time someone from the shop won a bar of chocolate, and since I was a regular, it should be me. I assumed that, although this was the first time I’d been there, I looked like a regular. He left me at the customer care desk, which had a telephone on it; in order to win, he told me, I had to call a radio station and simply declare “I won”.

So I called the radio station and heard the DJ talking to some caller. I didn’t know whether I should interrupt, but I did: “I won.” The voices went silent for few seconds. Then the radio presenter said, “Blimey, someone’s actually won.” Then he started talking to the caller again. I wasn’t sure if I should stay on the line or not, but a few minutes later, when he was talking to another caller, I hung up.

It was a Sunday and I was in a large hospital with my parents, where one of us was to have some tests done. I was school-aged, and as we left to go home, I asked if I could get a hundred-gram bar of chocolate to have in my lunchbox the next day. Noj said that he had two and I could have one; once we got home, I watched him looking through the cupboards until he found it. I noticed stacks and stacks of Heinz Baked Beans glistening in one cupboard.

I instructed my Mum to ensure I woke up at a reasonable hour the next day, but when I woke up it was 8.30. Considering my lift to school departed at 8.10, this was drastic! I went to the kitchen, and started simultaneously making breakfast - toast - and lunch - sandwiches. When the toast popped, I realised the toaster, amazingly, had been put on setting a half (the one at my house in Canterbury - which I thought this was - only goes as low as setting one and a half, and even this turns white bread brown) and the toast was actually only lukewarm slightly stiff bread; I decided to use this to make sandwiches for my lunch. I also looked around for a slice of chocolate cake for my lunchbox.

At school, I had religion second period, in which people were having to give five minute speeches. Thomas, a boy in my class, asked me what I was going to do mine on; I said I’d be shortening the speech I’d given earlier that year about vampires. Then, at four o’clock (since school had now half-turned into university, this seemed a reasonable hour), I went to see an on-site doctor. He was trying to fill in a table, detailing how my various measurements had changed over the years; I told him I could write down how my height had changed, as far back as age seven, so I did. It occurred to me that most girls would be able to describe how their weight had changed, but not me, I remembered my height. I chatted to him, about how unlikely I was to remember my exact blood pressure at various ages, when I suddenly realised it was 5.05, and I had a lecture on the other side of campus that was starting this minute. I hurried to the other side of campus, only to realise I couldn’t remember what room it was in. I got my timetable out of my backpack, only to realise that I was mistaken: I did have a lecture on at 5 on a Monday, but it was somewhere else and it wasn’t happening this week anyway. I felt annoyed, because I’d enjoyed talking to the doctor.

There was a rock night happening at William Howard School in Brampton. I wanted to go, but I wanted someone to go with, so I decided to go to Katrina’s old house, to find out, if, through some strange chance, this was one of the rare occasions she happened to have come back from New Zealand and she wished to accompany me. (Rare occasions in dream world, anyway; she never does in reality.) The entrance to the cul de sac she lived on was mostly taped off, but part of it wasn’t, so I went through there. As I approached her house, I noticed some lights being turned off - the occupants were clearly about to go to bed (it was 10pm), but definitely in. I knocked on the door, and found Katrina and her father were present.

I made my proposal, and Katrina said angrily, “Looks like I’m not being given much choice in the matter, am I?” I ensured her she was; then she noticed a peach-coloured stiff envelope, addressed to her with my handwriting on it. “See, I probably sent you a letter containing the details,” I said, although I couldn’t remember doing so. She opened it, and inside she found a typed letter, on the same stiff peach paper, that I’d sent to all my penpals in late 2000, telling them I couldn’t be bothered maintaining such high levels of correspondence anymore.

31 March 2003: A Truly Old Fashioned Supermarket

On the final Wednesday of lectures, Will’s Mum (Will being the autistic boy in my lectures) invited me to a small party at their house at the end of the day. But Lydia, a classmate, also invited me to go to her house. I struggled to work out whose I should go to, and where I would stay, since they both lived on the other side of Kent, but would probably be unprepared to drive me back that night. Perhaps I could get a train to London, but I didn’t know where the stations in their towns were. I was supposed to meet both of them at 4pm, presumably in one of the main university car parks. However, I kept remembering things I had to do first, and didn’t get there until 4.50. Will’s Mum was still there, but I ended up not going to either event, to my relief.

Emma (livejournal friend I've met once) and I went to a small conference somewhere in Kent. Although I knew most of the people there and she didn’t, she kept speaking. Then we went to one in Antwerp, except it was in my old workplace. Once again, Emma kept speaking, and pointing out all her piercings to everyone (well, all the non-rude ones). I feared she was annoying people. Then she asked me to show her where the bathroom was, so I took her there, and was delighted to find it had been redecorated since I’d left the company. Less delightfully, there were now two toilets, separated only by a low wall, so if both were used, it was very hard to do so discretely. Since I needed to go as well, I then discovered the toilet I used was so big it was difficult not to fall into. I succeeded in using it, then asked why Emma hadn’t used the other toilet and was about to use mine. Then I noticed that there wasn’t actually another toilet - the sectioned off area was instead a shower.

Afterwards, Emma asked me if we could go home. I was disappointed, but then she suggested another country. Since it was late afternoon and we didn’t have much money, I suggested France, Luxembourg, Germany and Holland. I hoped she chose Holland as I’d never been there before. She did. Then I realised that while I knew how to get there by train, I had no idea how to get back to the station.

The dream shifted, and I was back in my company’s office, with a bunch of people, including Bryn and never-met-online-friend-Ulrika. We had a threesome(!) which he enjoyed immensely and I strangely didn’t mind. Then Bryn and I were on a small beach, near a run down building, with met-online-friend Twi. We also had a threesome, and our opinions were the same. Then Bryn and I went behind the building and started to have sex, but he got bored and went inside. I waited for nearly an hour for him to return, while still thrusting my hips. Then I noticed Sleeve leaving the building, holding a bunch of carrier bags. “I know you saw me shopping last weekend,” he said, “but I needed more biscuits.”

So I went into the building - concrete steps took me into the basement - and found it was a very weird supermarket; the walls were grimy concrete, there were only three aisles, and there were hardly any products there, and those present were placed in holes dug into the concrete. At the entrance, there were some trolleys, and then a flap you had to pass through to get to the main part of the supermarket: if you had a trolley with you, a recorded message said, “Well, at least someone knows how to use a trolley properly.” (Is this Freudian for safe sex?) I went through, without a trolley, and looked around; I found Bryn gathering food for lunch, which seemed sensible, and noticed vast packets of toilet rolls going for low prices. As you can never have too much toilet roll, I checked my wallet to see how much money I had: just over £2, so I picked up a £1.99 pack of nine rolls. The packaging disintegrated in my hands, and the toilet rolls went everywhere, so I decided I should get a trolley to contain them. As I hesitantly passed through the flap backwards, the recorded message said something cheeky. You had to insert money to get access to the trolley - I feared I wouldn’t have sufficient coinage - but it was only 5p, which I possessed.