The dream started off with me at work. We had to try and get some songs our clients had recorded onto the radio, but we weren’t getting responses. That’s all I remember from that bit.

In the next part, I went to karate. I skipped dinner to go, as I thought our instructor, Roger, wasn’t going to be there and I’d need to help out teaching. As it turned out, he was there, but I still needed to teach. There were two young white belts standing on their own waiting for me. There were also two new girls started. One was a big blonde girl called Ellie. She’d done karate before, so she was training with the higher grades. The other girl was a shorter, dark-haired girl called Alli. It’s odd how my mind knows unique spellings of names even though they’re only ever spoken out loud in the dreams.

I spoke to Ellie before the class and managed to flirt with her a little, but it didn’t go anywhere. When we started training, the beginners and I were with Roger’s class. One guy in his class made a comment that Alli was ‘beautiful’ and she blushed. I was annoyed because I fancied her and now I had competition. However, throughout the dream, I managed to get in some compliments and jokes and it was clear she liked me too.

At one point she was on a fence and trying to climb over. I pointed out she could just walk round cos she was at the end. She didn’t realise what I meant, but she eventually saw what I meant and walked around. Then we were holding onto a railing while sitting on a bench. Roger was sat to my left and talking about the class, Alli was sat on my right and started sliding down, nudging me into Roger. We all slid down to the end and I asked Roger if that was what we were supposed to do. He brushed it off because he could see what was happening.

After karate, Alli came back to my house. The first thing she did was fix the washing machine. I said “You’re a girl of many talents I see.”
“I’ll show you some more if you-” she said, but started laughing at the idea of trying to sound seductive.

She then told me that she did have an interesting talent – she could waddle. She put her legs together and waddled around the kitchen. It wasn’t that impressive, but I pretended it was.

“When did you first learn you could waddle?” I asked.
“When I was walking,” she replied.
“Ah, of course. We’re you drunk at the time?”
“Maybe,” she chuckled.

Towards the end of the dream, I noticed a few odd things about her. Firstly, she had a little flat box in place of her tongue that had a photo of a baby on top. I wasn’t sure if it was her baby or not, but I didn’t want to ask. Even weirder, insider her mouth there was a tiny plastic purple thermometer so she could check the temperature of the baby photo. She also had a patch of skin on her left cheek where she’d clearly had some sort of injury and they’d sewed the skin back on. They hadn’t done a great job though, as there were bits on the edges where you could still see what was underneath. There was also a bit where they’d used a tiny screw to fix it on. I wanted to ask about these abnormalities, but I thought she might be sensitive about them, so I tried to ignore them.

Later in the dream, I was walking home down College Road and saw a guy called Chris who I’d been friends with in school in real life. He was with his daughter and another guy. Chris and his daughter crossed the road to his house, but his friend didn’t see. I pointed it out to him and he joined them. I watched as Chris started shouting at his daughter and hitting her. It was quite a sad sight. He looked rough and was clearly going through a tough time.

There was also a bit in the dream where I was at home and my niece, Halle, was in the living room playing with Zeta. Mother was in the kitchen (probably trying out the newly fixed washing machine) and hadn’t noticed that Halle was supposed to have gone home a while ago. I told her, but she didn’t listen. Meanwhile, Halle jumped up impossibly swiftly onto Zeta’s back and started riding her around the living room.

Then I woke up, with the song Allie (by Belle and Sebastian) stuck in my head.