Had a dream last night where I went to karate. In real life we’d been to a karate course yesterday, so the dream’s influence is evident. When I got to karate (in the dream) our instructor, Roger, was there. He was not happy with me though. The grand master (who was at the course in real life) had apparently seen me yawning throughout the course (as I’d done in real life because I was very tired) and said it had brought disgrace upon our club. I was quite upset at this, so I went home. When I got home, mother was there with her friend, who gave me some advice to deal with the karate situation. I can’t remember what the advice was now, but I did end up going back to training and sorted things out.

At this point I momentarily woke up and went back to sleep, which is when I had possibly the nerdiest dream I’ve ever had. But then that’s what you get for watching Doctor Who right before bed.

I was with Mike, mother and my nan and grandad. We were driving down Boldmere Road, Sutton, on our way to a meal later that evening. I was looking out of the window and noticed a new charity shop had opened up called Vanityness, I pointed out the new shop and a couple of people made mumbled noises to feign interest. I then noticed that we’d passed a shop that sold sci-fi merchandise. I’m sure I’ve been to this shop in another dream. Just as I was thinking to say something about it, we pulled up. Mother announced it was 2:40pm and we did not need to be at the meal until 3:30pm. I said that Mike and I would go off for a bit – so I could go to the sci-fi shop – and meet them back at the car in half an hour. Grandad then said to be careful, as that didn’t leave much time. I explained that half an hour would still leave us 20 minutes and he was okay with that.

So we went to the sci-fi shop and I started looking through the Doctor Who video cassettes. I have over 90 of these in real life, so I do often look through them if I see them in charity shops or markets. I saw a few episodes that I’d already got – including The Claws of Axos and Seeds of Doom – but then I found one called Moons in Space which I said I didn’t have (probably because there’s no such episode). We continued looking around the shop at things like old GameBoy games and Star Wars figures. I paid for my video and we left.

Since we still had time to kill before the meal, we decided to go to Laura’s house – despite the fact she lives in Lichfield, which is miles away from Boldmere Road. Anyway, we went there and her mother made us a meal. The house was a big, grand estate house. The table we sat at was one of those long ones you see in rich people’s houses in TV shows. Whilst we ate, I told them about my earlier purchase and we started talking about Doctor Who, in particular the length of the episodes. Laura’s mother was surprisingly knowledgable on this topic – although I’ve never met her in real life, so it might not be all that surprising – so we had quite a good debate about whether the old 4-part 25 minute serials were better than the current 45 minute standalone episodes. We both liked the 25 minute serials but agreed that the 45 minute episodes were better for today’s audience. Laura’s mother – Laura herself wasn’t very vocal in this discussion, nor was Mike – pointed out that the 45 minute episodes don’t feel cut down and I said that they’d managed to get the ‘beginning, middle and end’ structure from the old episodes and fit it into a shorter time frame. Looking back after waking up, that was a pretty dumb comment, but still. We then talked about our favourite cliff hangers for a while, before Mike and I thanked them for the food and left to go meet up with my family for our next meal.