Dreams

I’ve been really looking forward to going to bed recently, and seeing what sort of weird, wild dreams my subconscious tries to come up with. This has meant that I’ve often been disengaging from my computer at 11pm, sometimes 10pm, and once even 9pm this week, so that I can go to bed earlier and hopefully catch a good sailing wind to let my yacht drift off into the dream world more effectively. Still have to work on my dream retention skills though, but there was a weird one this week where I tried to write down my dreams while still in my dreams. That didn’t work very well.

Here’s another relevant mood piece from Touhou Mystia’s Izakaya:

But despite being a bird-brain, I had two days this week with a Dream 1 and a Dream 2 recalled and written down, so I was very happy about that.

Dec 26 2022

• I was working/studying/staying at a building that reminded me of a livehouse, it had a front double door leading to a lobby area and then side rooms leading away from that. Different people were in charge of this building at different times, Matt was in charge at one point and complained briefly that no one had told him something while he was in touch that his predecessor had known, and at another point I think a girl named Erin who I didn’t know at all was in charge.
• My family was there too and I remember going out with Jon and/or Kel at some point to do something, but I don’t remember what exactly.
• One snippet I do remember is that there was an uploaded collection of CDs, but someone named Sheldon found and uploaded three of the Fabled Lands books — book 2, book 4, and book 5 — and then really wanted to read the rest as well. I said that I owned physical copies of all 7 books that were published so far, and even had an official digital copy of 7 since I had kickstarted it, and that I would upload them for him at some point when I could.
• Another snippet I remember is that there was some sort of primordial dragon or blob in the front lobby that could only be interacted with once a day, to try to defeat it or to retrieve Erin‘s hand, which was apparently somehow stuck there in the possession of the primordial being.

Dec 27 2022

Dream 1

• I dreamt I was pulling into a connecting train station on a train with some of my friends. We were discussing where to get something, and Yucheng and Yaoxiang both said they’d check out a field to the east of the train station for it, because while we all had the same final destination, they were going to take a risk-free route there that involved leaving the train station and walking past that field to an adjacent train station about ten minutes walk away, and catching their connecting train from there.
• Zixiang and I had a different idea however, and we were going to try to catch a connecting train from the same train station that we were arriving in, that would leave us on a much slower route if we didn’t catch the proper trains, but that would take us there faster if we could. We made sure to stand by the doors so that we could rush out when it appeared, and we pushed forward to be near the front of the surging crowd that left the train.
• We were in the front group of about 10 people or so descending the stairs from the arrival platform to get to another platform where our connecting train was. On the way down, Zixiang was talking to me about some board game that he either had or was getting, and how it was time-limited and on sale by the author if I wanted to consider it as well.

Dream 2

• I dreamt that I visited a University that I was going to attend in the future, and went to a festival that the swim team there was holding. I met and befriended some of the girls on the team, including one who was basically Nijika from Bocchi the Rock!, as she had vibrant blonde hair in the same hairstyle.
• At one point she was posing in front of a door, when four boys on the team opened the door as they came up the stairs on the other side of the door. The first boy leapt back in surprise at her flamboyant pose, jumping up and backwards like he was going over a high jump bar, landing on top of the other three boys who supported him as though he was crowd surfing. The four of them then tumbled back into the basement. I learnt later that this was completely choreographed and was being used as part of some promotional material featuring her.
• At another point the girl herself was being carried by some of the other girls, and after she was let down, one of the taller girls on the team complained that she had accidentally touched the other girl’s panties with the side of her hand while carrying her, and there was a spot on the side of her hand was now dirty. The Nijika girl huffed at her for that.
• I had initially come to this swim team to play Minecraft with them, and that was how I had befriended about four of them in the first place. This game was played in first person mode, and we accessed the map through a portal that was hidden in a cupboard under the kitchen sink, crawling into there and then appearing in the virtual world. The first time in, we came to the bottom of some underground stairs and crossed into a rocky cavern area where we got slaughtered by a horde of skeletons who then pushed past us and over a cart that we were carrying without destroying it, before climbing the stairs.
• The second time around, most of the girls were busy with the festival so I was going to go in myself. I saw Johannes pass by on his way to something as well and I invited him to join, but he said he was busy. He gave me a weapon and some advice on something about ray-tracing weapons though, and once I clambered back into the zone, I found that there were tracer trails everywhere, little white streaks that showed the projected path of bullets without there being any actual bullets. There were only a couple skeletons left, I had no idea where the rest had gone, but I finished them off with the weapon that I had received, which pulsed out a red beam that turned out to be rather overkill, retrieved all the dropped items and the cart, and dragged it back to a makeshift bed area that we had. I then left.
  – A few days later, I came back to the University again as part of the actual school festival, separate from the prior swim team festival. This time, I didn’t go visit them — I walked around the campus instead, and at one point remember walking up and down a roadside pavement in the evening and noting how this city was really safe, and comparing it to New York City at night.
• I spent time in a hotel room near the campus with Dad and Kel, and the next morning when we woke up, I beckoned Dad to the window and pointed out at two radio tower structures further out in the city, each one with a long string rising up from it, attached to a kite that was suspended in dark clouds above the city. I said that they might be trying to replicate Benjamin Franklin’s lightning experiment to see if it was a viable way to gather lots of electricity at once, and Dad said something about them having watched too much science fiction shows.
• I then beckoned him a few feet to the side to a spot between the beds, so we were still near the window, but instead of looking out at the city skyline, this time we were looking at a tree located just outside the window. This tree grew little red buds which turned into red flowers and then into blue flowers after some time. This tree had various buds/flowers in all three forms, and I pointed it out to him and said how beautiful it was. He agreed and took a picture with his camera.
• I then went back out to the second day of the school festival. I ran into Shinya there, who asked me what I had came to/was going to Japan to do. I said I was hoping to buy some CDs, and he mistakenly assumed I meant Chinese CDs and told me that there were two main routes from Canada to Hong Kong or Singapore and asked which place I was going to. I told him that I was also aware that there were two main ways to Singapore from Canada as I had ended up taking both the last time I went there, one that went around the north side of the Pacific Rim and one that went along the south side.
• But no, I said, I meant Japanese CDs. I suspected that Chinese CDs were easier to get in Edmonton because there was a higher concentration of Chinese residents there. To prove that, I pulled out a guidebook to a local Chinese festival that apparently Mom had provided me, and we flipped through the pages to try to see what they had. We ended up on some page showing pictures of a play that they had put on, where nine girls were huddled together on the ground after some oni had chased them into a rocky area next to a pond and surrounded them. Shinya said that he had seen a very similar Japanese play with my sister before, and Kel had then sent her this very page from the magazine as she had also seen this one before and wanted to show him the similarity. Now he knew what magazine she had taken the page from!
• He took the magazine from me and flipped it forwards several pages until we reached the vendors section. We pored over that but didn’t find any vendors selling anything that remotely seemed music-related, so I harumphed and said that maybe Edmonton also lacked a Chinese CD store after all.
• I don’t remember exactly what happened from there, but later on, I was thinking about the swim team, and then won some sort of math award that I had to go up on stage to receive, and from there I could sense that a few of the girls that I had met and befriended prior had recognized me and would come up to me after to say hi, even though I never ended up joining their club.

Dec 28 2022

• I dreamt that Dad and I were at an airport, specifically the airport that I call Vancouver Airport, located in the northwest corner of a certain recurring dream town. We were flying off somewhere, and I was carrying with me some reward from a previous segment of the dream where we had played some sort of game at the house that we were staying in at the time. Forgot the details of exactly what happened there though.
• We arrived at the airport 90 minutes before the plane was meant to take off, and got in the checkin lineup. There were two lines side by side, so Dad took one line and I took the other, but his line progressed much faster than mine, which was stuck thanks to the person in front of me having a lot of things to clear at the baggage check area. While I was waiting, an airport attendant came up to me and asked to see some paperwork to speed things up once it was my turn. I showed her the sheet of paper that she wanted to see and she nodded.
• After we passed the baggage check area, I met up with Dad again, and there was a desk of people that we had to give those sheets of paper to. I somehow recognized one of the attendants at the desk as someone that I had seen the last time I came to the airport, and I gave him my sheet of paper, wondering if he would recognize me as a repeat customer. He did not.
• There was then a short passage leading to a security check at what were basically arcade machines. This was really quick, a few presses of the button and we were done.
• A door next to those arcade machines led directly outside onto the tarmac area where we could walk to and board the plane. There were still about 45 minutes or so before the plane would take off, but there was nothing else to do, so we walked out to the plane and got on board.
• Once on board, we checked out the plane and saw that we had two side by side seats that could be swivelled about together, as they were both attached to a circular base that could be spun around and that turned both seats at once, or swivelled about separately, as the seats could be “lifted up” from the base and further spun to whichever orientation we wanted regardless of which direction the base was oriented. However, when the seats were both facing the same way, they could be joined together with a soft click, and the two armrests could be pulled down and activated. When they were spun different ways, the armrests were locked in an up position.
• – Editor: Some other dreams involving this Vancouver airport included Sep 20 2017, Jul 21 2021 (although this airport is portrayed as having a flight TO Vancouver), and Jan 26 2022, basically anytime I have had a dream involving an airport “in the northwest corner of the city”. This dream also isn’t recorded down, so it must have been before I started my journal in Aug 2016, but I remember a vivid dream where I piloted the plane between this airport and Vancouver as well, sitting in the cockpit of what was essentially a tiny military-style jet, and watching the sun rise over the horizon from the cockpit as I flew it. Another time I remember being in this airport with some girl friends and there being extremely long escalators that crisscrossed each other (some going top left to bottom right, top right to bottom left, etc, and some going to different levels even if moving in the same direction). Different escalators led to different lobbies in the airport which in turn led to planes departing for different cities. Half the time this airport is Vancouver Airport though, and the other half of the time it leads to Vancouver to the north of it.

Dec 29 2022

• Snippet: All I remember is a partially-covered outdoor walkway with a part that looked like a trellis, a quest to hunt for CDs that I wanted to buy, and at one point being able to “switch on” being an esper and being able to advance the plot in some fashion even though I wasn’t an esper for the rest of the dream.

Dec 30 2022

• I remember at one point leading a party of nine into some sort of “final boss” encounter in a building. I don’t remember who else was with me besides Satinel and Kynji. I do remember that I had several abilities, including a heal skill, a poison skill, a turn to stone skill that lasted for about 20 seconds, and a skill that summoned a large crackling electricity wall.
• The final boss had a bunch of minions and looked like a large Pacman ghost, and they all had a lot of health and ranged attacks that could be dodged. The boss could shoot fireballs with an incredibly big explosion radius. They were all located behind a partially broken wall and inside a pit in a separate room so we didn’t bother trying to approach them. We fought for a bit, before someone else in my party called for a retreat and we shuffled off to an adjacent building. I told everyone I was proud of them for surviving and fighting and to continue to prioritize survival over damage.

Dec 31 2022

Dream 1

• I took a bus with Mom and Kel to a school in Singapore where Kel was going to pick up some graduation papers, which were supposed to signify that she spent four years of secondary school and passed her O-level exams there. Due to bus transfers, there were a couple routes that we could have taken to this school, and I was trying to help Mom out by planning a different route there, to try to squeeze our entire trip there and back onto one bus transfer, but she said not to worry about that.
• While waiting for a bus, there was also a small, cramped convenience store that was fully automated and thus lacked any sort of attendant or even a cashier area, where I stopped by to grab lunch from. I was confused as to how it worked at first but figured out that I could just pick up a tray of food or whatever else I wanted and the system would automatically charge me and even heat up my food for me.
• Once we took the bus to the school, Kel left by herself into the depths of the school hallways and I initially waited around with Mom. I noted that this event, held by the government, involved graduation papers being given out for students from -all- secondary schools, and I saw two of my old Dunman High teachers, Mrs Teo and Ms Lim, walking by and descending some stairs into a school hall. I avoided making contact with them, but I realized that it was likely that some of my friends would be there too, even though I technically shouldn’t be there since I never graduated from secondary school myself, having left the system after just two years.
• I left Mom and went down into the hall too, wandering amidst the throng of people there until I found a small gathering of people I recognized. There was a small circle of guys there — Paul, Allen, Xuanjie, and about three others, and I joined them with a greetings. Xuanjie in particular greeted me and called me Jess without hesitation, as he and I had met in Japan prior to this and we recognized what the other person looked like now even after about 25 years apart.
• I told the group that I hadn’t originally intended to be there and so had not announced that I was coming back, but had managed to enter Singapore the day before that due to the government letting me in again with my family, so here I was, and that I was glad to meet them. We stood around and chatted for a bit. There was a brief commotion nearby at one point as Zixiang also cut through the crowd to get to us and join our circle.
• Strangely enough, I “woke up” soon after that while still in my dreams, and “scribbled down” a bunch of notes about the dream on a piece of paper, with far more detail that I can now recall, a little bit before actually waking up in real life and trying to write all this down again to no avail.
• Editor: Kel never took secondary school in Singapore at all though, so that part of the dream made no sense, but my dream self didn’t think to question her presence there in the plot, just mine. Also, while I am pretty sure that the others looked like their Secondary 2 forms in the dream as that’s all I know of them, both Xuanjie and Zixiang looked like a mix of their Secondary 2 forms and their adult forms since I had met them in the past year.

Dream 2

• This segment consists of a bunch of loosely connected snippets that took place in the same “world”. Firstly, I was stuck in a school washroom — it was a narrow boys’ washroom, with at least seven boys who came in, but I was a girl in a girl’s uniform in there, and there was at least one other Indian girl in there as well at one point, and no one really seemed to care besides me.
• There were cubicles on the far right side, stalls lining the walls on the left, and sinks on the near right side. Two of the sinks were partially clogged with water and urine, though they both cleared up at some point, though the right one was my fault as I had been using it to relieve myself somehow when there were lesser people around as I really did not want to use the cubicles. Once more people came in though I stopped, cleaned the sink, and went into a cubicle anyway to finish up.
• The cubicle was extremely cramped — I could not even fit my body in there without turning to the side, and both my covered breasts and the back side of my tight school blouse rubbed against the cubicle walls on either side, which themselves were filled with pen graffiti from previous students that were mostly two letter abbreviations or short sentences that made no sense to me, as I tried to lower myself as best as I could to finish my business.
• Once I was done, I was irritated with this part of my dream so I gave myself a teleportatation blanket power, which would teleport me back to my class and seat and also camouflage my arrival so no one else would notice that I had been gone so long nor notice me teleporting back. I used it and patched myself back into the dream timeline before ending it.
• Later on, I got a larger sense of the city world I was in, and why the school was so run-down, as the city had been partially destroyed by a war or something that had recently ended. We lived on some apartment buildings near the south side, though the map was rotated so that “south” to me was on the right side of the map. Our neighbours had helped my entire family, Mom, Dad, and us three siblings, repair our apartment, and now they were trying to repair their own one next to ours. They said at one point that they were big fans of the south side as they hailed from there, as did we, and that they wanted to eventually repair and rebuild the entire south side.
• Even later on, the five of us went to a bulk grocery store somewhere else in town. While outside the store, Dad pointed to an elevated train track in the distance and said that while he was in Toronto, he had taken the Limited Express train instead of the Local train even though it cost a bit more, and it had taken him by a scenic route similar to this. We were going to chide him for wasting money but realized that it only cost 80 cents more, whereas it was a whole two hours faster, so we agreed that this was a prudent move. I said that I had also done the same thing in Japan.
• Inside the store, we were talking about some aspect of a music video that could no longer be found in music videos these days, and this was somehow plot important. We listed a couple examples of songs/videos in the past that contained this element, and Mom, who was still standing just inside the entranceway of the store next to Dad, started playing one of the songs’ music videos on a large holographic projection that basically covered the entire long entranceway, with the fuzzy holographic projection’s height about as tall as Mom was, and the width about three times as long as it was tall.
• It went through the regular song, and then started playing a Christmas song, and I asked Mom to switch it off at that point as it was embarrassing since there were other shoppers in the store too. Also the store attendants had apparently picked up on that and were also broadcasting that Christmas song over the store loudspeaker radio, and that wasn’t anything anyone needed to hear.
• While we were standing there, Jon tugged my sleeve and pointed to some sort of candy bars on the shelf. He asked if we could buy some of those and I shook my head. I jokingly said it was a bulk grocery store and we would have to buy at least five, so he put five in the basket I was carrying, but I took them back out and said that he would have to ask Mom about it but it would probably not be in the family’s budget.
• In the meantime, Mom was filling up her own basket, it was full of rice and meat and vegetables and sauces, so much so one of the packets of something fell out of the basket and onto the floor. I reached down to pick it up and put it in my empty basket, as I was the only other member of the family carrying one, just as Dad said something snarky (in a joking manner) similar to “if only we had another basket to help put all this in”.
• Just for that, when Mom went down a narrow part of the aisle, I moved in front of him with the basket to innocently block him from following, but then Kel moved out of the way so he went around me and through where Kel was to follow Mom, so I slid in after him to block him from moving out instead.

Jan 01 2023

• My dream was confusing but what I remember was some sort of festival event and many friends and workmates from various times of my past there — people from Dunman (Antonia), people from McNally (Justin), people from work (Ronnie), my family, and more, were present at various points in the dream. There were a lot more people than what was named too, I just don’t actually remember who was there.
• Various snippets I remember include me at one point hanging up my clothes and other possessions on a bunch of pegs attached to a really complex multi-layer clothing hanger that was hanging on a rough stone wall to the side of a sheltered passage that people were walking through to get to and from the festival. I had claimed that little area to the side of the passage and next to the hanger for myself and was using it as a sort of home base to put all my possessions. The hanger couldn’t really support all my clothing, though.
• The festival included a bunch of races that we could split up into smaller groups to do, and I joined up with three or four other friends and we began to race around a circular course that was basically a bunch of rocks, grass, trees, and bushes, with a river cutting through the middle of it. While it took about 30 seconds to make a round around the circuit, I realized that there was a large rock in the middle that I could circle around to make a circuit of the track in 10 seconds, since the track had no defined boundaries, and after breaking the game and getting an obscenely low time that round, I told everyone else about the trick and suggested that we put in a formal rule not to do that.
• Someone else pointed out that there were other tracks we could load up and try as well, but our leader said something to the effect of how it didn’t matter because we were all going to split up shortly anyway as the next event was starting. That event had something to do with pairing up with your lover and competing with other couples, and I had no one that I wanted to partner up with so I retreated out of the story and watched others play.
• At one point, there was a short story in here where a girl befriended an anthropomorphic duck or something that could not speak, and due to a series of miscommunications, she wrongly concluded that the duck had just given birth to five ducklings and was trying to care for them, and was giving her all sorts of advice and help while the duck struggled to pretend that she was right, so as to not embarrass either of them in public. The next day, the two of them met up again, and the duck had tried drawing a series of panels on a large square sketch book to tell the human girl the truth, that she did not have five ducklings and that the girl had misinterpreted her, but the girl managed to misinterpret the situation even more from the story somehow, and concluded that the duck really had it rough trying to keep the ducklings alive.
• Separate from the festival, I remember being in a place similar to our Edmonton 2012 main hall at some point, and Dad coming home after an overnight stint and leaving the door to the garage open in order to get some fresh air in. I closed it after he stepped inside though, so that no insects would get in. This was in the morning after some sort of event that had taken place overnight, where I think I had stayed up all night in preparation for something that had the same kind of vibe as a family trip the next day, while everyone else besides Dad had gone to bed.