Bad Dream 134 -- Morning of 1/3/21

In my dream, I am in a large room -- which might be an informal theater as it seems to have a stage feeling to it and/or theatrical curtains (although neither of them play much of a part in the story line).  The area in which I find myself is empty with a large good solid, flat, and horizontal floor.  

I am practicing with a diabolo.  I'm trying just to recapture some of the tricks I've been doing for years.  The string has been used rather heavily and casually, as it's got black streaks of grime on it.  I promise myself I will change the string as soon as I finish practicing. I know the logical thing would be to change the string first, which would make practice easier and better, but I disregard that sensible advice and continue with the used, dirty string.  

I crank up the diabolo to as fast a speed as I can to allow me maximum time to try a few tricks in a row.  Faster and faster.  Just as I am about to stop cranking it and start doing tricks, the string catches in the axle so that it just winds up and whacks one of the sticks.  Rats.  Gotta unwind it and start again.  

This pattern repeats itself several times.  I begin to chastise myself by saying "That's going fast enough.  Don't bother cranking it any farther or you'll get the wind-up thing again."  But consistently, I go for one last big crank and the diabolo winds up whacking the stick again.  

Intermittently with these frustrating events, I find myself looking at and holding a Sudoku puzzle that is almost solved.  Out of the 81 cells on the puzzle, there are only 10 or so that still need to be filled in.  Normally, filling in those last few cells is quite easy.  I pick one cell and determine that it should be such-and-such a number.  I then go to cross-check it via a different line of logic.  That line of logic give me a different answer.  

Like the Sudoku on my phone, I can -- and do -- check to see if my current answers are valid, expecting to be told that there's an error in the answers so far, because both answers can't be right.  But I'm informed somehow that the puzzle is, in fact, correct so far.  And thereby is an unsolvable problem: the answer for a given cell must be a particular value, but I'm coming up with a choice between two values, which is not possible with Sudoku puzzles, but the progress so far has been judged to be correct.  

So I return to the diabolo practice with the same results described above.  

So I have two leisure-time activities in which I have invested a large amount of my real waking time and am coming up with frustration and lack of success with both of them.  

At the edge of my awareness are two guys whom I know a bit and who are responsible for the building in which we find ourselves.  They express regret but need to inform me that the building needs to close sometime soon.