Dreams

I had some rather interesting dreams this week — Jun 20th was memorable and vivid to me, Jun 21st was really interesting because of the double dream layer that happened in the end, and Jun 23rd consisted of two very memorable and long dream entries as well.

Jun 19 2023

• I dreamt that it was my last few days in Japan, and we were staying at some sort of place that included a miniaturized town located in and around the mouth of a cave, with buildings that were around 2 feet tall or so. As my parting gift, I was going to help set up some tiny tunnels or tubes leading from the hotel and down some steps to the cave area, using a chisel and a tube to punch holes in the rock somehow, in order for people to get around. Other people that were staying with me were doing other projects, like someone was building a bakery for them.
• I had to get Ronnie and Gordie‘s help to set up these pipes, as there were security concerns with them that had to be solved first. It was something to do with the types of accounts that were going to be connected and usable by the pipes, as everyone had different types of primary or secondary accounts depending on their resident status, and it was going to work for only people with primary accounts, whereas I did some sort of logic proof that showed that it made sense from both a humanitarian and a security standpoint to open the system up to secondary accounts too. Gordie agreed, and asked me to estimate how many secondary accounts there were in the city so that they could at least deploy a plan to get them access as soon as possible after it was built. It was over 10,000 accounts, so he said he could do them in stages, starting first with everyone whose account started with A to C, and so on.
• Oh well. Just like my workplace, I would not be there by the time that improvement was launched anyway, but at least it was coming, so I moved on. There was also some sort of war going on, where our army was fighting another group of invaders inside another cave and there were workers dressed in blue who were also working in the same area and would sometimes get shot. Someone kept yelling to the opponents that the blue people were not worth any points and to stop shooting them.
• Our army was made out of several platoons or groups and each one carried a tank, but we were using the tanks to carry some supplies to some people that were up a flight of stairs, and each of the weakest fighters in each unit was left to guard the tank and carry out that mission since it was a non-combat one. I had been helping my team move our tank there before leaving it in the hands of someone else on our team who gave me a strange look as I moved away. Lacking a tank, we then hopped on a cart that was headed for the battlefront, it was the type of cart that was supposed to be pulled along by a horse but there were no horses there so it was travelling by itself somehow.
• At one point, I also infiltrated yet another cave with a science facility belonging to the enemy, and I sidled up to a side window and asked how the progress on their research was. A couple guy scientists looked up at me from the table that were seated at, and the leader of the group, who was a female scientist standing behind those two guys, said that things were going on fine, but research had stalled a bit, partially because someone (she dropped a western guy’s name but I forget what it was) had gone missing and could no longer be found. I said that I would file a report to see if we could hire someone else.
• Later, I was walking along a miniature city when I noticed a small black spider or something stuck at the bottom of the wall on my left, it was worth some points so I picked it up. There were also five bugs with long legs and no wings hopping around on the ground, trying to chase me, and I defeated them by holding out a strand of plucked hair and letting water or dew drip down on them, which they apparently loved. A popup appeared in front of me detailing the types of dew that existed in the world and which ones they liked. The next time I came into the area, I noticed that the spider and the five bugs had respawned, and I realized that the area was stuck in a localized time loop due to another person “saving the game” in the past while it was in an active state. Apparently there was a second black bug on the wall somewhere, as there was one “on the left” and one “on the right”, and some people farmed those for points, but I wasn’t sure which one the one I found was and never did find the other.

Jun 20 2023

• My class was making an end-of-semester school play for something like Drama class, and while I didn’t care much for most of my class or the play itself, I did find upon reading the synopsis that it was somewhat interesting, so I did decide to take part to the best of my ability.
• We were due to meet our drama teacher in a large stage room on the 2nd or 3rd floor of a side school building after school, in order to find out our roles and lines and to rehearse the script before next week’s performance. As we got there before the teacher, we settled in various groups around the place. I sat down on a chair with a back rest that tilted backwards a little, and that chair was part of a small circle of chairs facing each other.
• A couple other students I recognized sat down on those chairs, including Aurora, as well as other students that I didn’t know. One of those students said he had a couple of extra flip flops, and whether anyone wanted to try one on. I did, so I asked for a pair and he handed them over.
• The teacher then came in, and did a head count of the students in class. He then frowned at one of the boys that was wearing flip flops and asked about them, and he was going to do the same to me but I showed him that I also had shoes and was currently changing back into them, so he passed over me. The boy said that he wished he had shoes too because he now knew that flip flops were a bad idea because the stage part of the room was made of wood and the flip flops would make too much noise on them and possibly damage them.
• We were each given a copy of the script — sort of. We actually each just got a piece of paper with our specific lines on it, and the act and line number that we would have to say the line at. My sheet of paper said that I was a nameless Fireman character, and that I had ten to twelve lines spread out across mostly Act 2, with three or four lines near the end of the play in Act 3.
• Even though it was a nameless role, I had more lines than any other person that wasn’t in a named role, and even a couple of minor characters that were named, and looking closely, I noticed that it was because I was playing several different firemen chbaracters that came to the scene of the play at different times, including one who died when a wall fell on them in the middle of Act 3, so he ended up pinned, and was pleading for help from a named character who then put him out of his misery since the place was falling apart. I idly wondered how the logistics of that scene was going to work — most likely they’d have a bunch of empty oil cans stacked up to form the wall and then have those fall on me, but I also played another fireman with one line in the final scene a few minutes after that, so the stage crew would have to rescue me and remove those oil cans without making noises to distract the audience.
• Anyway, we were then all ushered off into the backstage room so we could start our rehearsal. The backstage room was separated from the stage by a double door, and I tried to peek through it to watch the play but was asked by someone to stay in the backstage room properly so that they could actually close the door, the reason being so that the people who finished their lines and came backstage through the doors could drop character and sigh or laugh or so on without that noise floating out to the stage or audience.
• I asked how this made any sense — if we could not watch and only had our lines and not the full script, how could we tell when it was time to go out? Someone then showed me a flat LED number display panel above the door that showed the current Act, as well as the line number that had just been read. It incremented in real time as someone outside spoke their line, and we would know when it was our turn since our scripts also had Act and line numbers.
• I started to practice my lines, and noticed that one of my characters was a fireman from Southern Australia and that his couple lines were written in with a grammatical accent, and then devolved into squarish characters that were not from the English language but that I could still somehow read correctly, although it was difficult as I didn’t know the language well. I tried to bounce my lines off of someone but he said that I was not pronouncing it correctly. I said that yes, I didn’t know how to do an Australian accent very well but whatever I could do would have to do.
• Just before the rehearsal actually started, I also remembered that several people were not here at the moment due to being overseas and not having the proper clearance to come back into the country yet. There was at least one person from Canada, as well as Zian, who was in China. I went to inform the teacher that they would not have been able to pick up their lines yet, so we would have to skip them, though thankfully they both only had minor characters. But just then I saw that Zian actually had managed to somehow just make it to the rehearsal. I was very glad to see her and we waved to each other.

Jun 21 2023

• I was a girl in middle school or early high school, and as part of our school activity, we were in an RPG world playing a game of sorts. I was in a party with three other female characters or players, and I was the leader.
• We were in a cave, looking down at a small cave ruin on the level below us. To get down to it, we would have to climb/slide down a ten-foot high rock wall to reach the level below. We did so, just as another party of 3 guys walked in to the ruin through its normal entrance.
• Their leader captured and handcuffed one of my companions, but I jumped on top of his two subordinates at the same time, pinning both. Pulling out a similar pair of handcuffs, I handcuffed one of the top boy’s wrists, slid the metal chains of the cuff through the horizonyal handle of a kitchen drawer that was part of the cave ruin, and thern handcuffed one of the bottom boy’s wrists, trapping both of them there.
• With two of his teammates incapacitated, it was 3 versus 1, and the other leader gave up. I told him to free my companion, and he did so. We finished looting the ruin, and then I told him I’d give him the key to his companions’ cuffs once we climbed back up the wall. He commented that I was a good leader, caring about my party mates before looting the place, and even caring about his party mates afterwards.
• After we all ascended, I tossed the key back down to him and we all left.
• After this, I “woke up” from my dream, on my Edmonton 205 mattress in the living room, but the mattress was on a slightly raised bedframe instead of the floor. I slid to the foot of the bed, with my blanket still covering my legs, and I heard a weird dingling noise.
• I swung my feet over the side of the bed and kicked my nylon blanket off my legs and onto the floor. When my feet were revealed, I saw a small bell attached to a dainty decorative chain around my ankle, as well as a locked combination lock that wasn’t attached to anything and fell to the floor by my feet. I was so surprised that I actually willed myself back awake in real life immediately after this and was very confused for a second.

Jun 22 2023

• Snippet: All I remember is cycling with Zian along really wide, but short, streets that curved back and forth like a squarish snake, forming an elongated 2 or S pattern.

Jun 23 2023

Dream 1

• The dream started with two factions in a game-like world, Blue versus Red. I was part of Red, as were several of my friends. There was a dangerous feel to the “game”, as though if we died it meant a long-term hospital stay, or something like we would be forcefully logged out of the game with no way to log back in for some time afterwards, except like with most dreams the “game” felt very much like the entire world with no knowledge of whether there was an outside world or not, so there was very much a threat of permanent death.
• The game itself involved medieval-style castle sieges and faction battles. Blue controlled the top half of the map and Red the bottom, but Blue had an army sailing aboard a ship down a river that cut through our land, and was busy attacking and taking zones and castles along their way, whereas Red had several smaller armies strewn across the land, each one led by a guild leader/captain.
• I was in a multi-guild coalition that consisted of a few smaller merged Red armies, led by our captains, who had commissioned some boats and were chasing the enemy along the river. We were about a day behind and even had to plan logistics like how to transport food and people and where to lay out beds (not tents, but actual 1-person mattresses on small bedframes) for the night.
• The Blue army followed the river east and landed on the north side of the river, overwhelming and taking over a castle there right next to the coast, and seemed to settle down there for a bit to regroup. We had a window to land next to them and attack them, but the captains were very wary of this because it would be a slaughterhouse trying to land within range of the castle. They pored over scouting records to figure out if there was a beach to the east or west of that castle where they could land instead, but there were not.
• Eventually, I convinced them that this was likely a trap, and not to fall for it. Instead, I said to circle back and take the last castle before the one they were in to cut them off and continue whittling away at their resources since they were deep within enemy territory. I showed them the game map and pointed out that some of the earlier castles that they had taken were already being retaken as well, either by other groups of Red players or by NPC militia that had swarmed out of nearby towns once the Blue army had left. They didn’t actually have much property in our Red side of the map outside of the immediate vicinity of wherever their army blob currently was.
• The captains agreed in the end and we circled back to take back an earlier castle that Blue had taken, about a day west of their current one, while setting scouts to watch them. For the actual fight, the castle had a king and prince NPC that we had to defeat to take the castle, but neither one was aggressive or attacked us on sight, they just both stood side by side in the top level of the castle. I was scouting ahead and walked right up to the two NPCs, standing next to them and waving the main army in.
• I stood behind the king with my weapon drawn as some of our fighters came up, and when the signal was given, we attacked and killed the king in one strike. I prepared to do the same to the prince but was waved to stop, and at this point a large tyrant troll from LotRO dressed in red garb (thus signifying that was on our side) walked up to become the new NPC king of the castle, and the opposing prince NPC ceded the throne to that king instead of becoming king himself, and turned into a red-aligned NPC himself. Apparently that prevented us from needing to recruit a new prince.
• My captain pulled our guild together and asked us how many of us disliked the game’s default built-in player titles of Duke, Lord, Baron, etc. A couple people raised their hands, as did I, and I stated that even though I had a Duke rank in game, the game’s title system was not gender-aware, and I would have loved it if I was Duchess but hated that it remained Duke. He nodded, and said that we had just completed the prerequisites for a new achievement that would be released in tomorrow’s patch, and would get a new title from that, and that hopefully we would like it. I don’t remember what the title was but it was a phrase made out of two short words.
• Zian then arrived at the castle, and I was super happy to see her around and alive. We embraced, and then dinner arrived in the form of catered meals soon after, and the two of us ate together.
• The leader of our combined armies, who was called our program director, announced a new course for us for tomorrow over a loudspeaker, saying that we were going to take yet another Blue castle in Red territory, since today’s plan worked well. This would be their last one minus the one they had taken today. He suggested that between these castles, there was a good chance that we could wait on the Blue army’s likely route back to Blue land in order to ambush them.
• Zian and I took out passport-like books at this point and submitted them for participation stamps in preparation for tomorrow’s campaign. The stamps apparently could then be used as proof of allegiance later on so we could acquire rewards or buy stuff from special stores. As training, since she had just arrived, the two of us also decided to take over a tiny two-storey tower or pagoda where a local lord had been installed by the Blue army, set inside a small walled keep area with other buildings and rooms in it.
• Zian was an attacker class, she was good at dodging individual attacks but could easily be overwhelmed, so she waited for me to aggro an entire room or area, then ran ahead to engage and kill enemies once they were shooting at me, but then waited for me by the next door or outside the next building before going through, so that I could go in first. For me, I was a slower character but could absorb arrow and sword attacks without being hurt. We soon reached the tower and overwhelmed the local lord really quickly. We were both very thankful for the existence of the other person and the synergy that it allowed us to do.
• There was a button on top of a bookshelf-like structure in the middle of a room that we found and used too, that gave us a bunch of Japanese yen as a reward. We pressed that on our way out, after thoroughly exploring the place and paying an impromptu visit to a tiny museum that we found within the walls of the keep. We also noticed that some of the walls of the keep had engravings that formed a little cartoon strip, and we read that strip and pieced the plotline together too as we walked along together.

Dream 2

• This dream started on a train, where I and several friends or team/guild members of some sort each had a large semi-private seat to ourselves, that kind of looked like the first-class seats on airplanes. However, on one of the train stops, Matt, who was seated in front of me and whose dream identity had overlapped with Gepard from Honkai Star Rail at some points, stepped out of the train door to take some pictures with his camera and didn’t make it back in in time, so the train left without him.
• I pointed this out and said that we would proceed to our final destination anyway, but I would take all his stuff and wait for him over there, even though the next train wouldn’t be until the next day and we didn’t originally mean to stay overnight. I pored over a map and noticed that I could in theory go home, but to get from my home station of Yishun back to the meetup destination the next day again would require either a nine stop train ride including one train transfer at Paya Lebar Station, or a five or six stop train ride including three train transfers across the Singapore MRT line, and either option was a little annoying, so it was better to stay overnight at the location. Several other people also offered to stay behind with me.
• We settled down in the town next to the station, renting some rooms in a tavern that had both a front and back side, each side facing one of the two main roads leading away from the station through the town. Our room was on the second level on the back side of the tavern. Dusk soon arrived, and since we weren’t expecting Matt yet, all the people who were staying overnight sat around a tavern table on the ground floor and started to chat. One of them pulled out a red camera, which I recognized as my Olympus Tough TG-5, and snapped a photo of another member of my group, who had pulled out his or her own phone to simultaneously take a picture of the person with the camera.
• An old man in a nearby table saw that happen, and laughed, stating that just a few hours earlier, someone else with a red camera who had just arrived in town also snapped a picture of him while he was taking a picture of something else with a phone. I realized that Matt had the same camera and so this could have been him, and I asked the old man where that person then went. The old man shrugged and pointed west down the northern road, which ran along the front side of the tavern, and said that he seemed to be headed for some lodging outside the west side of town.
• There were free huts there where people who did not have money could stay and log out in, so that also sounded like something Matt might have done as all his money was with us. Satinel and I set out to see if we could intercept him before night fell, but by the time we reached the hut, darkness had more or less arrived and any players in that hut had logged off for safety, since the hut was located outside the town and there were often monsters nearby.
• In fact, there were two tomahawk trolls lurking just outside the hut, so to protect it and anyone else who might come by or log in, I paralyzed one with a spell from atop a slope while Satinel murdered the other, and then tossed a returning throwing axe at it once Satinel had finished with her enemy to injure it so that she could finish it off with ease. I caught my returning weapon with ease and a flourish even though it was so dark that I couldn’t actually see the axe at that point. We then returned to the tavern to rest for the night.
• We eventually found Matt the next day once he logged in again, and led him back to the tavern and to his stuff in the room that we had booked. He thanked us and asked if I wanted to settle the fee for the tavern now and I said that we could if he wanted, but that it made no real difference to me, it was a fun adventure for probably everyone except him.