Dreams

I didn’t have a lot of good dreams this week. A lot was forgotten, tales left behind right on the edge of consciousness and the dream world.

Apr 05 2023

• I was playing a game that involved a world map mechanic. There were six or so different nations, provinces, or regions spread out around the edge of a land mass that had a large, unclaimed mountainous area in the middle. Our nation, which was on the bottom side of the land mass, was holding diplomatic arrangements with a white-coloured nation on the north side that was correlated somehow with the number 4, and I spent some points to build a diplomatic embassy or something in their nation because I was hoping for a quick way to teleport there.
• When I clicked on the button to create the embassy, something that looked like train tracks sprung out from my nation, burrowing a trail east and north and around the mountain in an anticlockwise fashion on the world map screen I was looking at, which involves going into a fog of war area belonging to the two nations to the east between us that I had not uncovered yet. However, I could still see the train tracks being laid down in small puffs of smoke, and at one point between the two eastern nations, deep in the fog of war, the train track suddenly zipped forward at a high speed in a straight line before settling down again to its usual slower burrow speed, and I surmised that that meant that there was a large river there that it had just crossed.
• The train tracks finally reached the white nation to the north, and connected up with an embassy symbol on the northwest side of the nation that had appeared on the world map.
• This game had third person camera scenes too, and one scene I remember is looking in to a family and seeing a scene where a group of dogs, cats, and mice, about six animals in total, were chasing each other in a line toward the door when the doorbell rang. This was somehow connected to one of the abilities I had as the nation’s ruler and the game player, and I was very amused by this and tried to show it to someone else.
• Snippet: I remember being a bow-wielder in a small group of adventurers, maybe three of us or so. I don’t remember the context, I just specifically remember the bow and shooting things from afar.

Apr 07 2023

• Our Dunman classroom was in some sort of school-wide event to help craft items and bring them to a central location, and the item we had been building toward were wooden chairs, which took 6 slabs of wood to build. Instead of building them in our classroom and then bringing the completed chair to the submission tent, I would bring the 6 blocks of polished wood to the tent before assembling them there as it was a little faster.
• This worked for at least one chair, but when I brought a second one over, I found that the work order for the remaining chairs had been filled by the other classes, and that the next item didn’t require any wood at all, so there was no need for the wood I was carrying any longer. I donated them to one of the women at the tent anyway though, and she was very thankful for this.
• The next set of items was a cooking work order, it was something like 22 of some sort of pastry, 17 of another pastry, and then a larger number between 23 and 40 for the third item. I tried to memorize this but kept forgetting it once I left the room so I stopped and stared at it for something like 30 seconds until I had committed it to memory, then left the tent area while reciting the items and quantities under my breath.
• Returning to the classroom, I went to write it down on a large white sheet of paper hanging on the wall across from the front door, but I found that there were only two girls and one guy left in the class, everyone else had gone somewhere. The tables were arranged in rows and columns like a normal classroom, and the three people in the class were all located near the middle of the room, with the two girls seated one behind the other, and the guy seated to the back and left of the back girl.
• I asked where everyone was, and the guy held up an envelope and said that another event had happened and a bunch of people had left to go try to do it. When I looked at the envelope, I saw that this was a math quiz full of open-ended questions, and according to its header it was the qualifying round for the country’s Math Olympiad contest. I was happy that so many people had decided to pursue math contests like I did when I was younger, although I felt like it was now out of my reach since I had not been taking math classes in so many years now since leaving high school, and could barely understand some of the notation anymore. I did notice one of the questions had things like a summation ∑ symbol.

Apr 08 2023

• I was walking toward the bus stop and waiting for a bus, while knowing that I needed to take a transfer at a later stop because my final destination was Yishun. Upon boarding the first bus, I consulted the bus driver to see what the best route to getting there was, and she independently gave me the same answer — I would have to take the current bus something like 13 to 17 stops, and drop off at the one bus stop where it intersected with the route of bus number 73, which went to Yishun. That bus stop was one that I had visited in previous dreams too, a rather busy one on the main road outside of a school and bus interchange. She gave me a handout showing all the bus stops that her bus would stop at, along with bus transfer options at each stop.
• Later, I and another male friend sprung or collected Jon from jail or detention, and brought him home to our safehouse where we relaxed together. He had apparently been in jail for 13 months (possibly years) and I said that the most that I had ever been detained was 1 day that one time I visited Singapore. I hoped he was doing well. He seemed to be happy and serene now that he was free. I showed him a virtual chess board that we had on the floor between us, and said that I suspected that technology had progressed quite far while he was incarcerated.
• I and the other person who had sprung him out loaded up an unfinished game between some chessmasters and tried to figure out whose turn it was. Each side had three queens on the board somehow and it was quite a wild offence-first game that we had stepped into. The chess board was upside down somehow and we couldn’t spin it around, so my black pieces were on the opposite side of the board, attacking downwards toward me, instead of on my side and attacking the far side, but we made do with that. My king was in the B8 spot on the far left side, with a rook in A8, and a Chinese Chess 相 elephant piece in C8. In front of them, from the A7 to D7 squares, were a row of pawns.
• We traded a bit until we both realized that one of my queens was seated in the middle of nowhere, and a piece in between us that I thought was blocking line of sight was actually a pit that he could just leap over with his queen and capture mine. Rude. I also noticed soon afterwards that my king had been in check for several turns though and that that invalidated the game, so I said we should just start afresh and not have to deal with figuring out whatever the chessmasters had been doing before we took over their game.
• I offered the board to Jon at the time and asked if he would like to play a game with the other person who had helped me spring him out, while I rested. He said yes and thank you.
• Later on, the scene had us in school, 6 of us including Zixiang and I had brought costumes to school and were standing and posing in front of the canteen or something as some students clapped at us. We were wearing some sort of crinkly plastic suit that matched each other. We also had secondary uniforms in our bags — I had my real life Dunman blouse and skirt with me — as the first thing that people had to do once school “started” was to go change into them to prepare for PE class in the form of dungeon delving.
• Soon enough, the whistle blew, and I took my bag and went over to a cubicle located outdoors in the middle of the canteen, alongside several other cubicles, and changed my clothes in it. There was another changing space nearby with little rooms but they had to be booked in advance and were already very full, but these cubicles were not. They were coed, however, so a guy had just left the stall I managed to snag. And once I was inside, I could hear, and see through the gap between the doors, both guys and girls walking past toward the other stalls or the changing space. I heard Huihan chatting to someone as she walked past. I did wonder at this point why the changing areas weren’t gender separated.
• When the dungeon delving part started, I went down into a dark dungeon area with one other person, and we climbed down a deep pit and saw two watery depressions on either side of a small bridge. The left water pit had a nice spear, which we fished out and I gave to the other person, and the right pit had three items in it — two rings, so we could have one each, and a paper crane, which was our quest objective. I took the paper crane and gave the other person with me first pick of which ring he wanted.

Apr 09 2023

• There was a school festival going on in school, and I was with my secondary 2L class in an unfamiliar classroom on the second level of the school building. Our class was holding a dinner party and mystery plot for the guests. In the backstory plot, basically there were a couple of villains, led by Yucheng, who had kidnapped most of the other students, who were something like various heirs to the kingdom or the only people who could use a certain type of magic that could oppose him and such.
• He hadn’t kidnapped all of us yet though, there were two or three of us still on the loose, including me, so he organized a dinner party and forced the ones he had kidnapped to cook and serve the guests a banquet, which the visiting students were enjoying, in order to draw the remaining holdouts out. For our part, we had apparently spent the time collecting magic weapons or destroying a means of escape for the villains, and then we also had joined the party, mingling with the waiters and waitresses or the guests and pretending to fit in to the atmosphere.
• When the last of us had arrived, and people had finished their food and it was time to advance the plot, a witch appeared out of a dome-shaped entrance onto a platform that was set impossibly high up on the classroom wall, and she raised a staff. Little black-coloured squiggles poured forth from it and ran in single file down the classroom wall, and then out toward the doors to seal them, and that was apparently her sign to Yucheng that all the people who could challenge him were detected to be gathered in this room. He ordered all the waiters and waitresses to line up near him in two lines, including us new ones that he had now “kidnapped”, preparing to execute all of us with his dark magic.
• However, by that time we had spread a plan to the kidnapped classmates, and many of them, I remember seeing Paulene and Gillian there in particular, had little grins on their faces. We pretended to be helpless and allowed ourselves to be kidnapped, but once we all got together, we sprung a trap and attacked Yucheng and his gang and all hell broke loose, to the entertainment of the watching guests.
• We overwhelmed the bad guys as scripted, and Yucheng made his escape — the witch’s staff that sealed the exit doors in a shield of darkness also allowed him to easily break it as he was attuned to it, and he ran out. I ran after him in pursuit, and chased him down the stairs and out into a grass field in front of an adjacent classroom block where some class was holding a barbeque.
• I lost him there, as he seemed to vanish into thin air, so I rested a bit as I was feeling a bit light-headed, before heading back. On the way back, I stopped into the wrong classroom at first, walking into the classroom below ours, which was not holding any event and had four students or so standing around near the windows. I adjusted one of my shoes, which was coming loose, before heading out and up the stairs to our proper classroom.
• By then, the dinner event was now over and the guests had left, so my classmates were cleaning up the room. I said that Yucheng‘s escape was an unexpected twist of the story to me, but we could easily make it so that it set up for a sequel event next year, if everyone was interested. The consensus was that yes, the event had gone well, and someone from the 2K class next door said that we could make it even more extravagant next year by opening the dividing wall between our two classrooms so we had double the space for guests, and planning it a little further in advance, as we had only pulled their class in at the last minute to help us because we needed more people. They really liked it, though.
• Snippet: Later on, possibly in a separate dream, I was playing a VR game at the behest of some teacher figure who wanted me to try out a pair of VR goggles, that were like thin swimming goggles that I could nonetheless fit over my regular glasses, even though it felt weird and uncomfortable. The game was an arena fighting game, I controlled a little floating spaceship that looked like a shrimp on a little square platform floating in space, and an enemy ship spawned in front of me for me to fight. The game gave no instructions or tutorials, but I had apparently played this game before, so I quickly realized that I could hold a button to shoot or tap the same button twice in quick succession to rotate between weapons, one of which was a huge minigun. I dodged and backed up in circles to maintain room between myself and the enemy ship as I shot it up and defeated it, at which point I levelled up, and my maximum HP went from 2 to 5.
• As part of the story surrounding the teacher and the VR goggles, I remember someone else coming by and asking if we needed help, and I said no. There might also have been something about being on an open-air trolley being pulled along by a train. I don’t remember the overall context of that part of the dream, though.