Dream Diary Entry recorded March 1, 2019

Last night's main dream was remarkable in its clarity and its interesting qualities, which it stylistically appropriated from several stories or series in pop culture, almost as if it wanted to be told. And in the dream that followed, I was in fact attempting to tell someone about the story of that main dream. I had none of the phenomenon of losing the memory of the dream upon waking, and so that's interesting.

The main dream started, or seemed to start, with me in an apartment in an old building, seemingly in an urban area like New York. I'm not alone: the one person with me is The Tenth Doctor (David Tennant), wearing his brown pinstripe suit. We are having some sort of adventure together, but the exact nature of it I don't realize until I'm in the kitchen. I am preparing lunch for us, some sort of pastry or stew - it genuinely could have been either - with pastry-like materials such as flour, butter, meat, and rice all together. There is a coffee-maker-like device in the back of the small, cluttered kitchen with the ingredients already in it (from a previous occupant? from whoever was leaving the place for us to stay?), designed to mix the ingredients together properly. I shut the lid on the advice and turn it on. It makes a "chunk" sound and deposits all the ingredients, barely combined together, onto a lower stage of the machine, whatever it is. This won't work, and so I start to gather the ingredients together, including a big block of soft, melt-y butter, and put it in a bowl to try to salvage the recipe and prepare it in or on the regular oven.

It is at this point in the dream that I remember, and report to The Doctor, that this has happened before, precisely, with only slight differences. He realizes it too, and we perceive that we are caught in some kind of time loop, where we are experiencing this series of events, over several hours, but will soon experience them again, over and over, until we figure out how to break out of it. I don't think either of us realize it as being a dream: It's more like the loop in the movie "Groundhog Day" or perhaps more precisely in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Cause and Effect." (A favorite episode of mine, from before I became a big Doctor Who fan, but very evocative of some of that show's time-based puzzle plots.) But some things, we can tell, are happening differently this time, which The Doctor ascribes to our growing awareness that we are caught in the loop. In my actual dream, we have only experienced the events of the loop once or twice, but we remember going through them many other times, and even remember, gradually, that we've started taking note of the particulars of the situation and how they differ from time to time.

The Doctor has gone into another room or has entered it from the larger apartment complex where he was trying to figure out what to do. I turn back to face the kitchen and dining area, and I see an unfamiliar man standing there, and realize he was not in any past repetition of the loop. I feel a sense of urgency, and say to The Doctor "Fire alarm?" He says "Yes! Hit the fire alarm," which I do, using a red box/lever on the wall similar to the school building fire alarms I remember. I then go outside using a kind of rear entrance or fire-escape-like door and stairs, at which point the dream does start to lose its cohesive quality: Did that act actually break free of the loop? It did not feel like it, but the dream did not really proceed from that point. Except that ...

I found myself in a large swimming pool with many other people, including my wife Wendy and my daughter Susan. I begin telling them about the dream I had, as described above, but first Wendy, and later Susan, find the details so interesting they begin going off on their own conversational tangents, making it difficult for me to resume the story. I eventually don't, as Susan goes swimming off into another part of the pool. I suspect I dreamed that I had already told Wendy the story of the dream earlier, and Susan was the main person I had wanted to tell this time. Someone, an unidentified friend, wants to take a picture of me swimming - they've already done so with Wendy. I decide to comply, closing my eyes and attempting to back-float (successfully! it could only happen in dreams), but then I realize it would look gross with my pot belly cresting the water, and so I cross my arms over my mid-section in a very clumsy/awkward fashion. Soon after this, we are told everyone must get out of the pool for a few minutes while they fix something. We do, as does everyone else, but the pool is soon rendered fine, or at least we're told so, and Wendy and I and others go back in. She and I swim over to where the apparent lifeguard or apartment supervisor, a stocky woman with auburn hair, is tweaking the knobs of an orange-colored hard plastic control panel near the water entrance steps and railing that regulates the pool.