Dreams

Apparently there’s a thing called Hatsuyume (local), or the First Dream of the New Year, in Japan, where your dream on the night of the 1st of January (i.e. what I call my Jan 02 dream) is supposed to foretell your luck in the upcoming year. It’s considered extra auspicious if your dream contains Mount Fuji, a hawk, or an eggplant, but those seem awfully specific, even Japan-specific, and I don’t think I’ve ever dreamt of any of those things.

Anyway, I did have a Jan 02 dream, though I’m not quite sure what to make of it in this context.

Dec 29 2021

• I was in the University region around a city, and part of the city had rain that was causing electrified water to pool on the ground, and people had to steer clear of that sector for a day to wait for it to clear. Also, while I could return to my apartment, which was modeled after my current real life apartment, I had to stay clear of the part of the house where the baseboards had still not been fixed, for similar reasons.
• The Facilities & Operations and Sustainability departments of the University were holding some sort of event out by the entrance of a carpark, where they were handing out brochures at a line of table and then followed it up with some sort of talk. This attracted quite a few students, though some guy commented that he was trying to actually get into the carpark beyond them and could not do so.
• After the event was over, the organizer noted that there were a lot of smokers at the event, and a girl nearby mentioned that that was because they had started to advertise the event outside a building where those smokers had already congregated and were puffing their cigarettes at. Most of them joined before anyone inside the building even knew about it, and the event spots were immediately almost filled up by them. She said that regardless of that, she was still very interested in the event.
• Later, I was modding the Tip of my Tongue subreddit’s Discord server, except in an actual physical room, where threads were represented by boxes on tables or something. There was a random person there trying to chat my ear off about some thread to do with someone asking for equivalent or similar medicines for different types of minor issues (like tummyaches, etc), and I listened patiently for a bit before telling him I was not remotely interested in the subject, and he left.
• I noticed that I had posted a thread earlier in the day, from the sustainability event, where they had given out Steam keys. My post had 3 Steam keys, but Reddit’s formatting had messed up all three keys. Still, the thread had an upvote score of two (so a net gain of +1) and there were two replies to it, one of them noting that someone had already redeemed the third key.
• I also noticed that the first key in particular had a section where two dashes had been truncated into one by the formatting, and another section where it had :ghost: as consecutive characters, and that had been translate into an emoji symbol. I thought that was too odd to be true, even for a dream, so I opened the webpage and tried to redeem it anyway to see if it was indeed a valid key.
• Before the page would tell me either way though, it needed me to fill in a captcha, which turned out to be a grid of coloured dots surrounded by other random dots, and I had to replicate the dots from the main picture grid in a blank canvas. The colours were automatic, but I had to pick the right dots from the grid, and the image was of Yukina, the lead singer of the band Roselia from BanG Dream!, singing a song. The page did indeed play the actual song as well while I was filling it in. Anyway the Captcha worked after I filled in the dots, and told me that the key had already been redeemed.
• Snippet: I’m not sure where this fit in, but at some point there was a boy on a horse, following a girl on a horse around a fantasy kingdom. Her name was Pecan, she was dressed fully in green, and she was collecting ingredients for a Moonlight Potion.

Dec 30 2021

• I was playing a game where I and two others were in a camp in a jungle, and we were going to hunt down something that someone at camp needed. The three of us were all different types of units that had a rock > paper > scissors style battle advantage over each other, and we didn’t know which one the target was, so we resolved to split off in various directions alone to look for it as there was a sense of competition over the outcome.
• Later on, I dimly remember some school and classroom scenes, with a Singapore friend commenting that I had switched back and forth between my Singapore friends and my online friends three times in terms of picking a seating position in class.
• That school segment culminated in Eugene deciding to go abroad to study, and specifically to walk to Kenya in Africa to do so, which was north of us and would be somewhere between a 1 to 1.5 hours walk to reach, because no roads went there from here. He promised we’d all meet again someday.
• I missed him and thus decided to follow him to keep him company when he went, and trudged along paths and up some mountains and then across log bridges with him. At one point one of the bridges started to break, with a wooden log that was a support beam falling onto me, though it was light enough that I could carry it to the end of the bridge before laying it down, as laying it down in the middle of the bridge would probably have caused the entire thing to immediately collapse. I commented that I wasn’t sure if I could now make it home on my own if the bridges were all damaged like this.

Dec 31 2021

• Snippet: In one scene, Nyari was trading wheat, and then beer, with some sentient sharks using a large electronic machine set against the wall that acted as a market. The wheat was an older trade that he had made with the sharks some time ago when they were selling it for cheap, and the beer was something he just obtained in exchange for the wheat, but he knew that they paid a slight premium for beer and would even round prices up if they were just below a round number. He made a tidy profit off of this and opened the door for future trades with them as well.
• Snippet: In another scene, there were two towns, a vaguely good town and a vaguely bad town, and a brown man had just turned over a new leaf and moved to the bad town to raise a family. However, the town refused to fully accept him, with neighbours constantly gossiping about him and such, and he was eventually ruined and either left or passed on. My family lived in the good town, but there was a box of photos belonging to the man that Dad refused to let the neighbours looking through the remnants of the man’s house they’d just throw away, so I flew over on a magic carpet-like vehicle to save the box and bring it back. The man’s young son also had something that he had named Dizzypixie, and Kel noticed this, realized that the name was my Twitch channel name, and asked the boy about the origin of the name. The boy said that that was the name of a guardian angel that had helped him when he was really young and in trouble, lost on the streets somewhere. Apparently I had met the kid somewhere before.
• Snippet: There was a train scene where the train tracks were arranged in a large, eight- or ten-petalled flower pattern, with a station on the tip of each flower, and a station in the middle that acted as a train depot, but could only be entered from the northernmost petal. Kel was on the train going around the petals and I was waiting for her with a van of my own at the northern petal. There was also a security guard waiting at the entrance of the train depot and getting annoyed at me waiting for my sister for some reason, and we had some interactions while waiting for her that I don’t quite remember.
• Snippet: There was also a classroom scene, where our classroom was on the second level of the building, but we found out that a specific class in our timetable was changed this semester to a classroom on the ground floor beneath us, so most of the class had gone already even though it was still 15 minutes before the class started. Another teacher entered our class and noted that we had to go as well because our class was going to be used by another class during this class block while we were out, but I hadn’t showered yet, so I hurriedly packed up my bag so I could spend ten minutes or so washing up before the class started.

Jan 02 2022

• I worked in some company that consisted of a mix of real life work people (Ronnie, Rick), Singapore friends (Yucheng, Harvey, Zixiang, Xuanjie, Allen), and even my family (Jon), plus other strangers. It was made out of a lot of smaller teams, and just like in real life our team was getting merged with another team, which was represented at some point by the physical knocking down of the walls of some room on an overhead map. There were several work-related snippets I can remember from my dream.
• One snippet involved a new girl that was sent to our team by upper management at work to help us with some task or other. She wasn’t good at it but it was part of her training, she wanted to become a lawyer even though she hadn’t been working in a related role, but management supported her move and wanted to use us as a test bed for her.
• One involved my team and me going out to collect a bunch of items, or so I thought. My cue card told me what to collect and say, as we had to do some sort of mini presentation or answer some questions as we went along too, but I had no actual idea what we were collecting the items for. I found out later that everyone else’s cue card told them the real reason and just said to play along with me, though. This reason was to collect funds for a birthday present for me, and between everyone we raised about $125 and these funds were split into several gifts, the most expensive one being $50. My team had noticed that I was feeling down and had arranged this somehow, which completely blindsided me, even in the dream I had no idea about the surprise happening until the last second.
• Another snippet involved me leading a bus full of people, who were split into groups of 3-5, against an opposing team in a card/board game tournament of some kind. As captain, I went between the teams to assign roles and give pep talks, and even split up and reassigned a few teams, whose players I knew wouldn’t really play well in their existing group, in order to complement each others’ strengths and shore up weaknesses.
• The game involved placing down numbered cards on a small grid and moving them around to attack opponent cards. Only the cards that were exposed and attackable were visible, every other card was face down, and the way attacking or defending worked was that when two cards clashed, the lower number would be subtracted from both cards, and the one that hit 0 would be defeated and removed from the board. But there were various techniques you could use to weaken stronger cards and such too, so much so it was advantageous to attack your opponent’s larger cards with smaller ones first to weaken them significantly.
• Zixiang was apparently really good at this game, as he soundly beat the opposing team’s top player who hadn’t lost in 5 years, even while he was narrating all his moves to the opponent.
• Yet another snippet involved three brown bears that our company somehow owned. The three bears were of equal level, but one of them had a slightly increased experience total due to helping out in the birthday snippet earlier in some capacity.
• Another one involved our team going out to watch some street performer give a pep talk or something, as a prelude to some work event. There was a crowd of people listening to him. The rest of my team, which was made up of Singapore friends at this point, crossed the road to get a drink from another vendor, but she refused to serve them because she didn’t like the performer we were listening to, so they went back across the road and returned to where I was still watching the original performer and where I was silently praying that they’d return as soon as possible for some reason.
• Lastly, I remember a train ride to a separate location, and in particular we ended up outside a building at night, where there were a bunch of squishy-looking, green cabbage plants in a neat row in a vegetable garden between the outer road and the carpark. The cabbages were shaped like flat cuboids, and looked like comfortable, green square cushions on stalks, except that I noticed that they reached out toward passersby and tried to eat them. This never worked as their stalks weren’t very long though, and the green cushiony parts were constrained by the short stalks, so they kind of looked like sunflowers reaching out to the sun as we stood nearby and watched them try to reach us.
• No one knew what species of plant these were though, as the company that had made them had only come into existence 3 months ago and had also shut down 1 month ago, so the window of time that they were even active was a really small one, and the plants hadn’t been well-documented yet outside of their website, which was now not working.
• Editor: The cabbages were basically shaped exactly like green versions of Ralph, my tofu/smores plushie.