SammyTheSnake

I'm riding a motorbike around a race track that has a couple of twinges of familiarity to it [when I wake up I recognise it as being similar to one in a dream I had a year or so ago] As I go around the track it alternates between being realistic and exhibiting various unlikely features, such as being very narrow, having junctions, going off-road and through bushes etc. Sometimes I'm catching up on other bikes, or even overtaking them, other times I get a corner wrong and lose ground. (One corner in particular surprises me by being a sudden narrow dirt track up a steep hill, with a hairpin and an un-signposted junction!)

[Gap - probably a micro awakening]

I'm in the canteen of the race track and I'm very excited to know that I've been selected as a wildcard entry in the MotoGP! I managed to qualify on the basis that I could keep up with the traffic, even though I was pretty inconsistent.

The canteen is full of motorcyclists and their various entourages - parents, managers, wags etc. I recognise a few faces, including some that I'm surprised to see here until I rationalise then as being friends of somebody less unexpected.

Everyone is wearing their leathers and boots and tucking into food and drink. I realise I haven't brought anything to eat and the race is about 40 minutes of concentration so I'll need to eat something. I pinch some left over bits from somebody else's snack but it's not very satisfying. I notice that there are some huge loaves of bread on the counter at the end of the canteen, but I notice just to late to take some because we all have to go and get ready to race.

As a total n00b, I haven't got my own leathers and bike, so I try to find out where I get kitted out. Eventually I end up with some rather fetching dayglow yellow leathers and an orange safety vest that I shove into a pocket on the thigh of my trousers. We're all jostling around trying to make sure we have or bikes and kit in order and so on. I realise I'm going to be starting from the back of the grid and on a weaker bike than most, but I'm still excited to be able to join in with Valentino Rossi (who I see on the grid) and I assume Marc Marquez is around somewhere nearby, too. I'm also quite pleased that at least in some parts of the track I'm quick enough to be competitive, though I'm a little nervous that I still don't know the track at all as well as I might.

Unfortunately, I wake up in the middle of the grid walk and miss out on racing! Boo!

Dream one: Supermarket catacombs
Somebody is ill in a large traditional church building.
I call an ambulance, the person in the other end of the phone appears to be almost expecting the call and even knows the persons address, but I explain that the person is not at home but at the church. I go and try to spot the ambulance in case they don't know where to stop and see a variety of shops built into the edge of the church building, like a shopping arcade. I investigate behind the shops and find a large underground storage facility full of what looks like supermarket stock on dusty shelves with some yellow jacketed men shuffling around with clipboards and fork lift trucks. I snoop about a bit before realising I probably ought not to be here and heading back upstairs by means of a rickety old open lift somewhat reminiscent of warehouses in 101 films.

Dream two: Naughty motorbiking
I'm on a dirt bike flying through streets and tunnels doing wheelies through large puddles and trying to skim over deeper water.
I get to the end of a tunnel and it opens out into a covered space on the bank of a river, it looks like this area is perhaps tidal or otherwise occasionally flooded with banks of sandy silt and puddles it feels a bit like the space under a pier or a large concrete pontoon. I carry on toward the bank of the river planning to use a RIB as a ramp to get over the river. At this point I think through the manoeuvre several times with variations as my dreaming mind is interrupted by the first flakes is lucidity. This repetition as my subconscious tries to decide how realistic the scenario needs to be to pass muster is a classic dreamsign and the lucidity grows until I opt to land in the middle of the river and sink down, enjoying the impossibility of breathing and riding a motorbike underwater. Unfortunately the darkness and minimal lucidity mean I lose the dream and wake up.

I reenter the dream but non lucidly (boo!) I'm back on the motorbike coming up to a backstreet industrial area with a variety of garage sized units each occupied by separate concerns, mostly #full of boxes, some appear to be running repair shops of various kinds.

I pull into one unit that apparently is where the bike belongs, but I get an uneasy feeling that these guys are up to nefarious activities and decide to go back out again. I see two motorbikes this time and realise a friend is with me and we head off to play in the streets and puddles again.

Dream three: Lots of sex
That's about it really, an awkward succession of stilted and vague sexual encounters in which neither party was all that interested and both seemed to be putting up with it for the benefit of the other. Eventually we stop because it's getting a bit sore. Heaven knows what Freud would make of that dream...

Dream four: Tree in a car
Leaving a large modern church building en masse to go and have lunch together. This is not the same church as in the earlier dream. I decide to take a chair with me for stone train, it's exactly like one of my table chairs. I head directly through the nearest door rather than negotiate several internal doorways, explaining the logic to Andrew on the way past. I ponder how in going to get the chair on my bike as I've left my car behind today. I overhear Maddie taking to somebody about how he wouldn't let a tree grow in his car and I investigate the subject of the conversation, pulling a small tree out of the suspension of some numpty's car. Freud would probably claim the tree was sine kind of sexual symbolism in this dream, too, I expect...

I'm at work and apparently I drove my car, which I now need to park somewhere and I'd rather like not to have to pay for parking, so I drive off south looking for somewhere I can park on the road. The road very rapidly starts feeling like an out of town road. I even consider parking in the entrance of a wheat field, but decide that I've driven too far from the office to walk back without being late for work, so I turn bank.

As I head back toward the office, I get lost and the roads don't look familiar, so I check on the satnav feature of my phone and realise where I went wrong. I'm on a road called the T3. I retrace my path again and end up coming through a whole bunch of narrow pedestrianised areas that eventually become inside. At some point, my car has become a motorbike.

At one point, my path seems to go over a very narrow footbridge - too narrow for me to go across without all the pedestrians getting out of my way. I consider going through the water underneath as it's very shallow, but am put off by a combination of the idea of driving a motorbike over what will probably be a very slippery surface, and the fact that the shallow water is teaming with tiny sharks!

I turn around and am briefly sidelined by some confusion about whether I'm supposed to be pedaling or not and when I pay attention to navigation again, I'm indoors in something like the mailbox in Birmingham (a mostly indoor collection of shops, restaurants, flats, hotels...) So I get off the bike and push it through. As I head down some stairs there's a scuffle going on between two blokes and one of them kicks out at me so I take his shoe off and throw it over the banister.

We argue a bit and I get bored of that and start looking for the way out. I end up in a cinema where the film is about to start but the adverts are still playing. I try to keep out of people's line of sight as I look for the exit.

I see that a section of wall looks like a screen but I realise somehow is actually a holographic protection covering an exit from the cinema. I step into it and as I do I realise it's just the entrance into the toilets but this is too cool not to investigate!

As I step through the screen, my view is replaced by a cartoon like facsimile of both myself and the scenery. I go down some stairs watching my cumbersome cartoonish feet on the steps and feeling how the view and the feeling are just fractionally out of synch because the cartoon view is drawn with slightly wobbly lines and not quite right angle corners. At the bottom of the stairs, I see a mirror in which I can see my cartoon self reflected. Apparently the system has decided to draw me like a rakishly thin Walter White, complete with the fedora like hat and sunglasses. I notice that I'm actually wearing a beanie hat and cardboard 3D glasses and am impressed that the system has identified what I'm wearing and created a cartoon replica that reflects that but not slavishly.

I notice in the mirror that there a chap behind me to the left who I think is part of the behind the scenes functioning of the illusion but somehow my 3D glasses let me see him vaguely. We chat a little bit about how cool the illusion is and he asks if I've looked at my hands yet, saying they usually have six fingers but they're still working on the rendering of that part. I look at my left hand and it looks like two images of a hand superimposed, both hands have long fingers, one with then curved to the left, one with then curved to the right. The overall impression is of far more fingers than I'm used to!

I switch to looking at my right hand. At first it looks fairly normal, though I notice I seem to have coloured felt tip pen markings. As I look a little harder, I realise that several of my fingers terminate with a further bifurcation into sub-fingers. I note that the sub fingers are made by duplicating my hand in miniature on the fingertips, though how complete the mini hand is varies from a couple of stubby blob like digits to a complete hand from the wrist up. I wiggle my fingers and delight in setting my teeny little subdigits doing their thing.

I decide to wash my hands and note that the pen markings come off very easily - perhaps they were illusory? The chap also washes his hands and while he goes off to the other side of the room to dry them I'm smugly satisfied that my magic glasses allow me to see there's a hand drier directly under the sink.

I head back up the stairs watching my goofy feet again, then turn a different way out of the cinema, ducking down to avoid blocking anyone's view again.

At this point, I have a micro awakening and managed to almost pull off a DEILD but wasn't quite lucid when I reentered the dream.

I'm in what looks like a dingy but dry basement or hidden storage area of an office building so I resume my mission to get to work on time having somehow sorted out the issue of parking. I realise that it's a long way up to the 25th floor where my office is but there's no lift in sight. I start on my way up a helix (*not* a spiral!) of platforms around the walls of the space. After about one storey of climbing, I come across some people working at desks spread out on the bare concrete floor. They give me disapproving looks as I climb over their desks and filling cabinets to get to to the next part of the building. As I climb off the top of a shelf full of boxes, I enter something much more like a house with large white gloss painted doors. Lots of corridors and small rooms give a general labyrinthine feel to the layout.

I come into a room that feels like a living area in somebody's home. There's a chap sitting at a table and a couple of figures I don't really look at but I take to be his children sitting around on the floor and sofas.

At this point, I GET LUCID! Though I have an of feeling that I more realised that I was already lucid (weird, huh?). I say to the guy at the table that if this is a dream then I should try to do my tasks, right? He looks a little confused but plays along. I remember that one of the TOTMs is to put shoes on and tie the laces. I ask the chap if I can borrow some shoes to do the task and he reaches around to get a shoebox from behind the table. Inside are an assortment of odd shoes from which I manage to pick out a pair of red baseball pumps. I fish out a black gym dap from inside the left shoe and put it on. I notice that the laces aren't looped into the eyes of the shoe properly and I don't fancy my chances of sorting that out in dreamland without cheating, but they are in place enough that I can try to tie a bow. I tie a bow in the left shoe laces with surprising ease and as I finish it off I realise that the laces are now correctly threaded through the eyes. Handy. I repeat the process (complete with removing another shoe from inside the one I'm trying to put on) and while I'm doing it, ask of the guy has any fortune cookies. He looks surprised again as if it's a huge coincidence that I want fortune cookies when he happens to have a bowl of them on the table! I explain that this is my deam so if I want fortune cookies, I get fortune cookies. He seems to be mostly satisfied with that but still looks a little unsure.

I shove a cookie in my mouth, it tastes and feels like a stale prawn cracker. I try to pull the paper slip out of the cookie while I bite it and after a few false starts manage to get a bit of paper but it doesn't have anything intelligible written on it. I take another cookie and more carefully bite it open to get to the fortune. This time the fortune is a tea stain coloured mah jiang tile with a Chinese symbol I don't recognise on it. Frustrated at my second attempt being thwarted by a lack of language skills, I decide that I *do* know Chinese and have another look at the symbol. I realise that it means "Fortune" and figure that's good enough! :-)

Next up, I want to try the toilet portal. I go through a couple of doors and find a large white porcelain appliance of a style in fitting with the late Victorian feel of the house. I pull the chain and jump into the bowl. Unfortunately, all that achieves is soggy feet. I try going in head first in a dive but chicken out because the porcelain feels intimidatingly solid!

I give up on the toilet bowl (I should have thought to shrink myself but hey) and scan around for something else to do. I remember that Sensei's competition back in July had a task to transform a DC and decide to give that a go. I go back to the room with the table guy and children and look at a skinny girl who looks about twelve. I tell her to raise her arms sideways and grow some more arms. That seems to work quite well, she now has six arms, though the four extra ones coming out of her armpits are a little small and underformed. Inspired by the slightly odd appearance of the new arms, I decide to see if I can make one of them form into something more impressive.

I will the fingers of one of the new arms to grow downward, which they obligingly do. The thumb of the hand also extends and becomes a head while the descending fingers become a body and legs. Eventually there are two girls looking like conjoined twins who share an arm. Shame I didn't manage that during the competition, eh?