Is my mind trying to tell me something?

I had a dream that wasn't horrible last night, which usually counts as unusual enough that I feel the need to record it here - but this one's a long one, and featured an unusual number of people I recognized as people I know through various channels. I have a sort of thought process of running through a dream when I wake up and consciously affixing different points and scenes from it to counteract the normal behaviour of dreams to slowly slide off the fridge door of your mind like elderly magnets, which unusually lets me actually remember more of the dream as long as I keep thinking about it.

I'm fairly sure that this part was separate from the rest, but I distinctly remember playing or watching some sort of point and click adventure/actionish game that looked a bit like Beneath a Steel Sky. As always happens in these dreams, my viewpoint alternated between watching it on a screen as I thought I was and actually being inside the head of the main character. As I struggled with the last task of picking up a giant rocket launcher and hitting an incoming cargo plane five times to break it apart before it landed, kjorteo was talking to me in another window about how when certain unexpected keys like F1 were pressed the game or character behaved erratically (I believe the term he actually used was "spazzed out", but I don't think he normally says that.) I explained this somehow by saying that DOS games sometimes translate the non-alphanumeric keys into combinations of other keys depending on what keyboard driver they used, or something. Anyway, I promise some of this is relevant later on.

The dream moved to watching a scene from The Young Ones (or it could have been my youngest brother's flat. I imagine they're pretty much identical) where they were eating something that Neil had prepared with what he believed to be tomato juice from a tin, but which it transpired that Vyvyan had replaced with rum. To test its rum content, Bill Bailey turned up to look at the remaining contents of the saucepan it had all been boiled up in, sprinkled a beige powder over it all, then sucked it up through a straw and spat it out on to somebody nearby's lab coat. (I don't think that last part was actually a part of the procedure, but I wouldn't have swallowed it either).

We prepared to go out - for by this point I had become a character in the scene as well - to a cafe that I remember had a name that began with "Water", and then on to see a film. Bernard Black was going to join us at the cinema in order to get time to clean the place up first (which is possibly the single most unlikely part of this dream) so as we left I phoned him to tell him where we were seeing a film. Nobody could remember the name of the cinema, though, so I just told him "Everyone's forgotten - you'll just have to guess" and hung up.

It's not often that dreams keep their promises without veering off into something entirely different, and I don't remember a cafe, but we did arrive at the cinema eventually after walking down a dark road. By now my companions had changed into mercuryanna, gr33bo and rakarr - Rakarr being the most unlikely of the three because I don't have any idea what he looks like. But sometimes in these things you just know to attach identities to people.

The cinema unusually had no lobby area, instead having signs pointing to entirely different entrances for different films. We bought tickets to see something that I remember was meant to be what whinknee went out to see yesterday - "Watchmen" - but it had a different title in the dream. However, as I got a spare ticket (for reasons I didn't understand at the time) the others suddenly ran off to the entrance to see "The Human Oddity" instead (possibly another ploy to prevent Bernard following us?). This is a phrase that I didn't recognize before the dream, but Googled when I got up to slightly eyebrow-raising results. The others were hoping that the woman taking tickets at the entrance wouldn't notice the switch, and she didn't - though she took each part of our giant airline-type tickets and didn't give us the stubs back for some reason.

The actual theatre part of the cinema inside looked more like a pub than anything else, with tables laid out haphazardly on the floor area (there may have been tiered seats at the back - I can't remember). We sat down at a square table, which put two of us including me facing the wrong way to see the screen, but someone in the group assured us that American cinemas were like this and that they wouldn't start the film unless all the chairs were pointed in the right direction. While we waited, a growly Metallica song (that probably doesn't exist) came on quietly on the background music - it had also featured on the soundtrack of the game that I had been playing at the very start of the dream, and people were surprised and slightly perturbed that I could recognize and sing along to it.

The projector eventually came on, and to get a better view we all clambered on to a large plastic rock that was part of the cinema's theming near our table, and I looked over the edge to see a steep drop on the other side down to lava. Whitney had joined us by this point as well (she must have been the one I had the extra ticket for), and we all watched the previews while wearing bunny costumes.

Sorry about this, everyone. I'm going back to bed.