Dreams

As mentioned further above, my sleep was really truncated this week, but yet I had a more or less full lineup of dream entries. I also found it interesting that most of my dream entries were actually from the truncated 1-2h part of my sleep between 3 and 5 am or so, shortly after I finally manage to coax myself to sleep each night, instead of my longer period of sleep between 4-5 am and 8-9 am, which I generally woke up blank from. How odd. They weren’t snippets for the most part either, but often fully fleshed out stories with multiple scenarios, especially the one on Jun 15th.

Jun 13 2022

• I visited a modified version of my Dunman High School with some of my 1L/2L friends, I remember Huihan and Allen for example but there were at least 8 of us, split across two or three different groups and featuring some outsiders as well. I wasn’t sure if we were allowed into the school in the first place while school was in session, so I stood around near the front of the gate and played with an exhibit that involved arranging some of my plushies — Orson, Toodles, Ally, and more, but conspicuously lacking Tigey — at the front of a small, top-down view, model scale version of our old classroom, and then taking a photo opportunity with them as “students”.
• However, most of the people I was in forged on ahead anyway and I eventually joined them with some misgivings, one of the girls eventually pointed out a sign that showed that the campus was public and people were welcome even when classes were in session, though.
• We visited our old classroom, though it was located on the ground floor of a square pavilion that was more like Rosyth‘s layout, rather than a round one like Dunman‘s. The students were out of the classroom for Phys Ed class, but we could see their bags and clothes strewn on their tables and chairs.
• We wandered to the front of the class and noticed a little hand-drawn picture on a poster pinned below the chalkboard that was a modified version of a memorable doodle that Allen had apparently drew during our year here — something similar to stick figure images of two people under an umbrella, though I’m not certain what the exact image was — apparently this was some sort of indication that the current class was keeping alive a tradition that we had started years ago, and we were both surprised and happy as this validated us somehow.
• We then headed to the canteen for lunch, and this canteen was modeled after the old Dunman High canteen, a square, covered area without walls and with lots of long tables and benches, along with stalls on one end. There were food trays laid out on a table near where we entered, with a tray of black fried rice and several other trays of food that went with it, and many of the people tucked into that.
• I was hesitant to do so as I couldn’t find any indication as to what the food was for, but again no one else seemed worried. I sidled up to a table where Brad, James, and someone else from work were eating, and I heard Brad start talking about the rice so I stopped to listen in as they looked at me. One of them said that there was a baby canteen on the other side of the school and there were similar food trays there too, so it was probably fine for us to tuck in. None of the other actual students in the school seemed to take offence at us digging in too.
• I decided not to partake though, my reasoning after all being that I loved the canteen food here anyway and wanted noodles rather than rice. I had brought 40 cents with me, so I went to one of the stalls, and ordered a plate of fried noodles for 40 cents, but one of my girl friends who was with me and had lent me a dollar for use was playful-unhappy that I had not only not partook of the free black fried rice, but had ordered such a cheap dish to boot, so she took back her dollar once it was clear it was leftover money anyway.
• My friends actually tried to quietly intercept my order and get rid of my dish when I was sitting at a bench with them while waiting for it to be cooked, so that I would eat fried rice with them, but I managed to tell them not to — we all apparently felt that we no longer really fit in with the school but I said that this was my way of reconciling some of my memories of the school.
• Editor: This 40 cent fried noodle dish is a dish and price dear to my heart — I think this was actually a Peiying or Rosyth era dish but there was definitely a time in school when I did order a steaming plate of 40-cent fried noodles on a somewhat regular basis from a store whose layout was similar to the one in my dream here and several other canteen dreams. I could see some of the other food on the menu as well that looked familiar — Mee Rebus, Mee Siam, and more, all at very cheap prices. Also, I woke up feeling a bit sad and wistful. But it’s interesting to see the effects of my school visit bleed in to my school-related dreams (particularly the part about re-visiting the school and feeling sad).

Jun 14 2022

• I was in a sort of dream Singapore with more or less only four general areas in the country I could and needed to visit, roughly in the north, south, east, and west corners. They were arranged on the main MRT lines, so it formed an upside down capital T, and the south point was in the middle of the east and west points, and it was more or less equidistant from the other three directions.
• For some reason, I had need to travel between the areas prior to meeting up with my family and then travelling around the country again, I seem to remember some sort of delivery needing to be done. We lived in the east, but I travelled to the north with a few items to do this delivery, and my original plan was to then go home again after my delivery so that I could pick up some items I wanted to bring around with me, like a book.
• Instead, I met Jah in a northern residence block and we ended up being sucked into a Scrabble tournament. I thought we did decently, but the tournament host told us after the end that we had taken 8th and 9th place out of 10. I asked how it was possible that we ended up with different scores if we were collaborating and playing as a team. She said we had both actually won 8th, and to treat it as so, but our names wouldn’t both fit on the same digital scoreboard line as we had too many letters in our combined names. In a Scrabble tournament? Really?
• I don’t remember anything about the game as the dream fast forwarded to that, but I do know that when I stood up and surveyed the board at the end of the game, it was our final turn and we had a high scoring word in our rack — with our letters, we could form either Jinxed or Jinxes, and we had quite a lot of room on the bottom third of the board to possibly play it. We didn’t have time to sit and think about it though as I was going to be late for my family meeting.
• I bemoaned the fact that I had been caught up in the game, although I had finished my deliveries, I didn’t really have time to go back to my home to get the book. It took easily about half an hour to travel between any of the points, and a bit more going from any two points that didn’t involve the southern one as the start or end goal. This travel was done using the MRT trains, and I remember being in a train station and watching them go by. There was a sense that I was visiting some HDB flats on some “back streets” that had a great view of the station but aesthetically felt like I was entering a house through its window when I went there to deliver. I did at some point go home to get my book before my dream ended though.
• I also went window shopping at some point and noticed an online listing for Singapore gas canisters filled with petrol that a car owner was willing to fill up at a petrol station and then send overseas to Canada for $114 or so per canister plus a shipping fee of $10. It still seemed like a great deal compared to gas prices back home, although I didn’t drive.
• I did ask about ordering one but said something like it couldn’t be delivered to my house because I had someone else in the family who was doing the driving, not me, and I mentioned my younger brother. I did not have the knowledge as to how to install and use the canisters and they would be too heavy to bring elsewhere.
• The seller said I could get some movers or something to transport the canister to wherever the car was, and it would still probably be cheaper than buying gas directly from Canadian gas stations. I joked that I could probably ask them to install it/empty the canister into the car tank and even that would still be cheaper. He misunderstood one part of what I said, assuming that I had meant that the male relative lived with me and thus was actually my son, and he said something to the effect of how I could indeed ask the movers to do that, just as long as I asked my son to keep out of the way and let them handle moving it to the car. I knew Jon was an adult and would be able to figure it out on his own given a hose and the canister though.
• There was also a food scene in the northern area somewhere in the mix, where I was trying to try some sort of food from a store but had to describe it before I could taste it and couldn’t actually do so because I had never actually eaten that food before. It was something similar to Kaya Toast, which came well recommended by several people, and that I could roughly figure out the expected taste from knowing the two halves of the word, but I still wasn’t sure. I postponed it and it ended up in some sort of game or task list that resembled a pack of cards.
• Editor: We had just talked about and compared gas prices in our Discord 3 days ago on the 11th, and I think that played into this dream. Also, my childhood homes have all more or less been in the west, north, and east ends of the city and our final home, Tampines 294, was indeed quite far to the east of the country. I believe the east also represented Canada on occasion in the dream, though. Lastly, kaya toast was a dish that Kel had recommended to me when I visited Singapore but I never did get around to trying it (because, well, bread).

Jun 15 2022

• I lived on the 2nd floor of either a hotel or a large house with a bunch of rooms that were rented out to different people. I was in a single-room unit. Throughout the dream, I had a parade of friends and different guests come through the place in different scenes, though most weren’t based on any people from real life. There were also two ways up to my room and two doors that I could ultimately enter from. Adjoining doors down the rear corridor were the “public” doors and led to personal rooms, shops, and unknown other things, but most of the rooms also connected to the “main house” out their “private” front door, which was considered a back door where they could reach the domestic maids that belonged to the owner of the house, but the house portion of the dreamspace also had a main entrance that people could reach our rooms from.
• One of the corridors took me and a couple friends to a door that led into a University-style lecture theatre that I barely realized was in session at some point, and I stopped myself from disturbing them by opening the door and embarrassing myself. There were also a couple forgotten scenes where various doors were important, even though I didn’t know what was behind most of them.
• I was running a business from my room regarding helping people with their passport or job applications or something like that. But there were several different scenes of people joining the room and the main scene. Earlier ones that I only vaguely remember had to do with a banking thing, a train station thing, a word puzzle of some kind that we had to solve, having to figure out and pick out the true items from the forgeries in a group of items, and scenes where I ventured out of the house for various interactions with others. In general there were many “weird people” I had to help that I understood were transient and vulnerable members of society, as we lived in a rough neighbourhood. But I had a number of good friends that would come visit too, and I appreciated them.
• One of the earlier incidents I remember vividly is when I opened the private front door and saw three people standing there, two guys and one girl. They asked if it was true that I helped people with anything at all to do with proofreading and writing their application. I said no and they seemed disappointed, but I clarified and said that I helped people with most things. I asked if their request or job ad was political in nature, they said no, and I said I’d help them. They seemed relieved and came in.
• I had been doing a jigsaw puzzle on the floor in front of the TV before they arrived, in which I was given or had already done the outside pieces to start and was now purposely working on middle pieces that formed little islands that didn’t connect up with the edge pieces. I pushed that off to the side so that they had space to sit. There was also a contractor I had hired to come in to fix something in the building and he came in soon after them through the private front door as well, I waved him in and toward the other door while I talked with the three people.
• One of the three people had an application for a job that he really wanted down the street from the house, and him and the other male friend really wanted me to help them pick what to say from a list of phrases that they have. The third person, the girl, seemed to stay out of it.
• The two guys didn’t speak very good English, and although I helped them the best I could, in the end they still had to choose what to pick, and their final “resume” was on a thin and long piece of paper with the words slightly out of focus or smudged, and which looked more like the cocktail menu at a cheap restaurant trying to be fancy. The sentences made no sense as well. However, the two men were very happy with it, and I escorted them out the main door along with another female friend that had also joined the dream.
• The girl that had accompanied them was still hanging around once I saw them off, and I made an offhand comment that I wasn’t sure about the quality of what we had just written. She agreed and said that they had done a lousy job, and both my friend and I laughed in relief and agreement. We said we weren’t sure if she would have been offended if we said that as we weren’t sure how close she was to them. She said she wasn’t at all and we invited her back to our room to chat.
• Another incident involved a client whom I thought had missed their meeting and wasn’t going to arrive. I didn’t particularly like them so that was ok. But it was night and I was watching the public landing from my back door, which was a long, straight corridor that went from the second landing down some stairs to the ground floor and continued on some ways. I saw the client’s family coming down the hall, recognizing them by the bright colours of the clothes that their grandfather was wearing, almost like a Hawaiian shirt. I also noticed someone that I recognized as a dream friend coming in behind them though and she also seemed to be hobbling or otherwise having trouble of some kind as she was moving slower than even the grandfather.
• I went out to meet the family and pointed them toward my room, telling them to go along and that I would meet them there. I then went to meet my friend and helped her toward my room as well, as we each put one hand around the other person’s waist in a rather intimate way so that she wouldn’t fall over. She did seem happy about this, especially when we passed one of the other ground floor rooms, which was a restaurant that was still open late at night and had indoor and outdoor tables that still had people, and a couple of people turned to stare at us as we walked by. I was a bit embarrassed but she clung on tighter to me in a possessive pride sort of way.
• I talked to her about and asked to see something of hers to do with her body. I don’t recall exactly what I asked for, though I feel it was some sort of action or dance or reenactment, but I did add the disclaimer that it was only if she didn’t mind or it wasn’t attached to any trauma. She said she could show me a couple examples, but would be skipping an incident when she was out at an eatery with her boyfriend when she was 14 years old and a group of 11 year olds slipped a date rape drug into her drink just to see what would happen, and caused her to faint and black out and not remember anything else from that day. I nodded as I escorted her back to our room. This was also the only friend whom I could almost map to an actual RL friend, I remember thinking that she looked like or seemed to be somehow based on Debbie, but wasn’t her.
• There were two other incidents I remember involving the corridors. The first was another female friend coming up the public back way, and I was coming down to meet her when I saw a large Asian man drop some coins on the floor in front of her, and then knock her over and pseudo-pinned her to the ground messily while “picking up the coins” on his hands and knees, as two of his friends watched on in amusement. She was right in front of a door to a nondescript shop next to the restaurant, and I remember hearing that this was some sort of Asian gangster shop where they laundered money and also gang-pressed people into servitude.
• The guy tried to bundle my friend into the shop, but I rushed down to save my friend, punching the guy and sending him flying off of her and then taking my friend’s arm and pulling her to the safety of the restaurant front, where there were plenty of witnesses able to watch anything that might happen. They pulled knives as we regained our balance, but they were unable to move because of where we had retreated to, so they disengaged angrily and we were able to leave safely.
• There was another incident near the end of the dream out the private front door, where we could hear the master of the house yelling at the maids for something they had done or not done. A tall female friend and I crept out once things quietened down as we had to retrieve something from the bottom level, and we could see and hear the maids sobbing together in another room. We tiptoed quietly back up the stairs, each of us holding 3 ping pong balls in our hands and trying not to make any noise. But then I dropped one of the balls as we were going up the stairs, which bounced through the banister and back down onto the ground floor with a clatter. I rushed down to grab it as my friend also dropped all three of her balls in a panic. Abandoning stealth, I focused on catching the four balls and did so by watching their bounce angles carefully. I thne told her to come to me as I’d use a teleport item to get us back to our room safely in case the racket had disturbed the master and he was on his way to come scold us. If he never saw us he couldn’t be sure which patron had done it.
• Editor: This house definitely was vaguely inspired by my Singapore homestay house, and the teleport item felt like it was from the modded Minecraft server that I was currently playing on.

Jun 16 2022

• I remember being on vacation in a foreign place and visiting an art gallery where my own artwork or something was hung up for display. There was a sense of only having limited time to visit different locations in the country while on my trip, and so I had to pick and choose what I saw, but that the gallery was a really important place to visit in order to prove my eligibility to even be in the country so I absolutely had to see it. The dream also involved me visiting several other places, but I don’t remember any of them.

Jun 17 2022

• I remember visiting a tall and strange shopping complex with only a few shops per level, but which had many levels in the structure. There were two elevators that brought people up and down as needed, and the shops on each level were basically arranged around the central lobby area on each floor, and that was it. There were at most five shops per level.
• What happened in the dream is fuzzy, but there was a school scene at one point so I guess one of the floors or shops opened out into a school area. There was also a scene involving waiting for a delivery of a roast chicken or something to a family living in one of the units that adjoined the elevator lobby, before I went in to that house to try to talk to the family and get something for my quest.
• My next dream has a number of snippets which started off involving a futuristic train system inspired by part of Singapore’s east-west train line. There were a couple groups of people in the dream and we were travelling separately along the train line and stopping at a couple of the eastern stations for who knows what.
• I was in there somewhere and although the group I travelled with wasn’t static, I remember at one point accompanying and helping out a 3 or 4 year old girl and hoisting her up onto a stool to watch two people I knew use computer consoles to pilot a spaceship or something. A narrator character commented that she was still at the edge where children were very observant and didn’t really know what anything meant and could make sharp, unfiltered observations on life.
• At another point, a couple groups of people including me were on a spaceship piloted by a suave renegade captain of some kind whom the government didn’t like and was trying to capture. We were apparently going near the government palace, or a separate government planet or something.
• I “saw” a rebel attack a palace guard that was on patrol near the entrance of the palace area. The guard had a fixed route and was wearing the front half, the head portion, of a lion dance costume over his own head, while the rear half was left to drag on the floor behind him. The rebel charged in to attack him by knocking him over the head with a big stick while the guard yelled out in pain and ran further into the maze of corridors with the rebel chasing him.
• I wondered why the government made the guards patrol this area alone — it was the only/main entrance of the building so it was by far the most dangerous part of the guards’ patrol route, but there were several ways to make it safer (patrolling in pairs, a permanent guard here, etc).
• At some point, our space captain was detained and then was told he was going to be put to death due to assaulting a government agent that was part of a small group that had boarded his spaceship at some point. He was still free to walk around though and our group told him we were going to leave because a girl in our group had to pursue some sort of business elsewhere. He nodded and said not to worry about him, his associates and crewmates would get him out. Probably. He flashed us a nervous smile.
• In a separate part of the dream, I, Jon, and Kel all had our own Steam Decks, and we had brought it along with us in our travel suitcases as we went around that futuristic train system doing our visits. However, at one point, we discovered that Kel‘s Steam Deck had vanished, which meant that we probably left it on one of our previous stops somewhere. She was upset at this but we had no real way of tracking it down, especially since she had shown no interest in using it for quite some time up until that point, and we had done a full circuit of all the other places that we were visiting already before she tried to pull it out only to find it missing, so it could have been left behind in any of our stops. It was apparently a repeating circuit that we were doing though, so we were going to start from the first place again and keep an eye out for the missing Steam Deck this time.

Jun 18 2022

• I was staying with friends in an “overnight camp” sort of format in some dorm rooms on the 3rd or 4th floor of a shopping centre. I remember Yongrui and Allen being there in particular, though there were a number of people overall. We were here on a temporary basis and not everyone was present for every sleepover, some parents didn’t allow them to stay overnight, some allowed them to stay overnight on weekdays but not weekends, and so on.
• In addition, the “camp” event only went on for so long, in particular I remember a scene where it was late Friday night and Yongrui said that he couldn’t be here on weekends and Monday was our final day so this would be his last night here since we would all be leaving on Monday. I was really sad at this event coming to an end.
• I don’t actually remember much about the event, however I remember that one of the things we did was sneak out in the middle of the night, descend through the escalators of the deserted and dark shopping mall, and go to the neighbouring shopping mall in order to explore it. Although there were only two neighbouring malls and they weren’t that big (and it was night so everything was likely closed anyway), we spent five hours exploring the first mall and thus completely ran out of time for the second one. We then hurried back and snuck back into bed before morning came and our escapades were discovered by the teachers that were there.
• I remember Minecraft making an impact on one or two of the scenes as well, though I’m not sure how. I had the feeling that I was trying to build or rebuild something at some point using a weird input cube that had to be built right where it was and couldn’t be moved, but it wasn’t something I absolutely had to do — like doing it would lead to some storyline and not doing it would lead to another different story, and even if I built it there might have been an additional option of whether to use some sort of extra component or not.
• Editor: The set of three malls located by each other were definitely inspired by the Tampines malls that I visited several times in Singapore last month, and used to stay fairly close to when I lived there.
  

Jun 19 2022

• This dream snippet took place in a generic school, particularly in the computer lab, where there were 3 rows of long computer desks joined together, and a computer assigned to each member of the class of 18 or so people, each spaced about four or five feet away from each other.
• Everyone in class had been playing a game that they had chosen out of a list of two or three games, as part of a class assignment, but we then had to “turn in” scores for our class as a group before people could leave for lunch break or their next class or whatever. The thing was that about halfway through turning in the scores, which had to be done one by one on a separate handheld object that we passed from one classmate to the next, a new game was released and the last couple people who joined the class late got to play it and submit scores for them.
• Half the class didn’t care about it and wanted to just move on to the next class, but I knew a couple people wanted to try out the new game, and were just too shy to speak up about it, so as class monitor, I said that we had to pass the object back to the front and do another round of scores because I wanted to archive my scores and check out the new game and I’m sure others would as well.
• Some people got mad at that, especially the people in the latter half of the class that already had the chance to check it out, but I knew that some of the quieter people were grateful for that. No one could actually disobey me anyway, so the handheld object, that looked like a black ball, got passed back to the front of the class and quietly went on another circuit around the room, which took about 45 seconds to a minute per person.
• When it got to me, the boy after me irritatedly asked me to hurry up and pass it on to him already but I said no, I had only just gotten it, and to wait. I had a chance to check out the new game itself and it involved someone balancing on a haphazard one-car roller coaster on an odd, descending track that looked like we were descending a large Snakes and Ladders board that was stood up vertically on its edge, as the track went from right to left, then a vertical curved drop, then from left to right exactly below the above track, then a vertical curved drop, etc, then right to left again, etc. It was also possible to drop off the track entirely and fall back onto the roller coaster car further down the track.