Dreams

Another nice 7/7 week. There were definitely several tie-ins to real life this week. For example, the May 17th dream about ice hockey playoffs match real life, although not the exact round. The May 18th dream about Mom and Dad having a wedding likely tied in to all the scanning that I had done recently, as there are a lot of wedding photos in there too. On May 19th, besides the gender bending/focus (which my dreams tend to include since I’m transgendered), the group chatroom thing likely tied in to the last or second last episode of an anime I had just finished watching the night before, Kono Bijutsu ni wa Mondai ga Aru!

May 20th’s dream doesn’t directly tie in to any recent experience I have had, but I thought it was a really cool dream nonetheless. Although that reference to Taichi from the Taichi Lunch Box was a Chihayafuru one, the one anime that has made the largest impact on my life in terms of how much I’ve associated with/written about it, and there was also a recalled memory during the dream of the issue with my China 302 class from previous blogs. May 21 might relate to a game that Satinel had outlined to me the previous week and said she had a dream of making one day. May 22 contains references to the real life Israel-Palestine conflict going on and all the news about it. And finally, May 23rd has a potential tie-in to Great Pretender, which my group watch group had, similar to the one on May 19th, just finished watching the prior day. Of note, there were also several violent dreams this week, more so than I usually have, which maybe reflects my level of frustration in real life with various things.

May 17 2021

• The ice hockey semi-final playoffs were on. My team, the Edmonton Oilers, were up 3-1 against our opponent, whereas the other conference had either Saskatchewan or Calgary up 3-1 against an American team as well.
• One of the Canadian provinces whose team was eliminated by the Canadian team in the other conference, was still cheering on that team against the Americans despite the team being the one that had knocked them out. The cheering province was either Sasketchewan or Manitoba.
• They showed their support by buying a full KFC ad that was plastered on the side of chicken buckets that people ordered during this promotion period.
• There was a “moral of the story” theme here in the dream as well that was highlighted, where even though that province had wanted to win badly, it was still OK for them to cheer on their rivals after they were defeated.
• The hockey matches itself were played out like soccer matches, complete with a large goal, lots of players, and a goalkeeper dressed in standard soccer attire. I could see a game through a camera following one of the goalies from inside the net behind the goal line. I saw the opponent kick the soccer ball past him to score as he stood still, caught off guard or off balance and unable to react.
• Snippet: The dream might have had a tie-in somewhere along the line to two people on a journey together, and this journey involved magic as well as a snowy forest (or at least an area of snowy trees) at some point.

May 18 2021

• There was going to be a wedding in my family! To be precise, Mom and Dad were going to be wedded again. People from our extended family (both sides) in Singapore were here, as well as friends from my Secondary 2 class and also people from my current workplace.
• Some of our relatives came to our 4012 house to stay, which annoyed me a bit because I wasn’t really close to them and some of my classmates were already going to be staying there. The relatives would take a couple of the rooms downstairs though and mostly leave us to our own devices. They either wanted to butt into our card games that we played sometimes though, or had done so in the past on a prior visit, and that part annoyed me.
• Someone (Spaling from work?) said that they could earn points with us kids by watching the Street Fighter finals that were going on at that time. I told them that this wouldn’t work as I had no interest in Street Fighter.
• My Secondary 2 class was returning to our classroom after Phys Ed class (which involved us walking through a number of other classrooms) and when we got there, we saw that someone had written out a riddle challenge on the board. It was basically a three or four word substitution cipher and we needed to figure out what the message said.
• It was lunch time, so some of us (including me) had lunch from our lunchboxes as we tried to solve it. Eventually, someone did solve it (perhaps accidentally) and moved away from a certain section of the room to trigger something there. That absence of a person triggered a trap mechanism which trapped the evil Riddler (from Batman) nearby in a cage.
• A group of us travelled to my home after that using a combination of train and van. We waited for people to arrive the next day, which was to be the wedding day. The first relatives started appearing outside the window around 5am before the first rays of dawn had even appeared yet, asking to be let in.
• Mom and Dad were among the first group to leave the house for the wedding place, as they wanted to get there to take more photos to add to the collection of wedding photos that they already had and that I had already scanned IRL. They left in a van.
• On the contrary, I was in the last group to leave, along with a couple Dunman High friends. The three of us left on motorcycles, each riding one. We swerved in and out of traffic but it never felt dangerous. We also stopped by a couple places on the way to the wedding, and I wondered when we’d get there.
• We did witness a major accident on the way too. A police car sped toward us on the way to some call or other, and it clipped the side of an ambulance that was speeding the other way and trying to get to a hospital. The ambulance flipped over, crashing into a building at the side of the road, and we saw the word “Death” flash up and fade away twice through the walls and debris, kind of like damage texts in an MMO over a mob’s head, indicating that the patient and a nurse had just died. I gestured to the police car, pointing accusingly at them to let them know that they had done that, and the car skidded to a stop and pulled over to go to where the ambulance was.

May 19 2021

• Snippet: At some point, I visited the female washroom but noticed that I was using the male urinals in them. A couple other girls came in, but they looked more confused at the room having both types of stalls than at me specifically.
• Snippet: There was some sort of a magic box and a person fell out of it, exhausted.
• Snippet: Three of us were at an airport saying goodbye to each other at some point at the departures check in area, with 1 of us already past it and in the security area while the other two waved from outside.
• There was a group of 6 made out of my Singapore secondary school friends and me. I remember Allen and Eileen, not sure about the other three. There was a team profile screen I could check where I could see name, picture, our gear, and our named weapon. The weapon names were two words each and had an edgy fantasy tone to them. At one point one of the weapons was renamed.
• I realized that our group chatroom name was named after all the first letters of our preferred names (Except there was a slight typo and one of the two n’s got turned into a p at some point along the way).
• The overall game seemed to partially involve an evil person that could control cameras and was trying to root our planted spies in the organization out while we were trying to secretly help them while avoiding detection ourselves.
• For example, in one part of the game, we were travelling first by car, then by hot air balloon, remotely driven along by the leader of the bad organization on his way to ferret out a spy that he had figured out, and our quest was to try to figure out a way to convince or trick him or his cameras and save the spy’s cover along the journey, or to alert the spy of our impending arrival so he could make good his escape.
• At some point, one of us (that looked like an avatar from Soulworker) had to enter a room and seduce a bad guy with words. She succeeded but was shaking her head and facepalming in disgust once she left the room.
• A part of the game also involved something about using skills on a really strong opponent to trick them and tagging out with another member of our team after a while so he couldn’t figure us out. At the same time, we were both creating a miniature 3D city on a grid placed on the ground in front of us.
• The game would summarize how we were doing with a popup screen now after each game. The summary screen for one of our team’s players was a picture of a frog character’s face.
• There were green, white, and purple blobby monsters to kill in another part of the game.
• When casting a spell, the camera view would briefly change into a screen where you could see only the character’s narrowed eyes, and a lot of focus lines radiating out across the rest of the screen from the eyes, as though it were some sort of JRPG ultimate ability.

May 20 2021

• I was trying to order food from a canteen stall that was in my apartment block. I had seen Huihan and a few others in front of me order their desired lunch dishes from the proprietor just fine. But when I queued up and tried to order, he didn’t seem to understand that I wanted a dish from the lunch menu too, the exact one that Huihan had ordered. He kept trying to offer me some scrambled eggs from the breakfast menu instead. I wanted the lunch menu item because I was going to bring it home and save it for later.
• Although he eventually understood what I meant, he still couldn’t understand which dish I wanted. I forget the dish that I wanted to order, but it was $13, and there were other dishes worth $13 on the menu too like Pad Thai. But the proprietor instead put a $25 Taichi Boxed Lunch in front of me and waited expectantly at the cashier for me to pay him. I looked down at the $100 note in my wallet and seethed at him and was suddenly reminded of my China 302 teacher and debacle from school.
• When I reached back to my HDB apartment upstairs, it was night and my parents were in their room with the door shut, arguing about the cost of a Costco membership and how we never used it but it was several hundred dollars per year. I was unpacking a package of some kind, some item I had arrived that I didn’t care for any longer because it took so long to arrive.
• A friend was there with me, she put my feelings and my parents’ words together and decided she would help me hide the package from the parents, even though I told her there was no need to. She took the box, sealed everything back up, and dragged it outside the apartment door into an external storeroom that was conveniently situated there in an angle that would have been blocking the corridor in reality. The door squeaked twice as she opened it and shoved the box in and then shut it again, and I wryly noted that I’m sure everyone could hear what she was doing perfectly fine.
• My younger brother, Jonathan, was sleeping beside me, and I was studying all night at a table in the main hall or something as I watched over him. I fell into a fitful sleep and woke up drenched in sweat in the morning, as Mom had come by and put a sweater with long sleeves on me and then a scarf around my shoulders. I tried to take it off but Mom protested, saying that they were symbols of the country. I said I didn’t care and that I was mostly dry now but still hot. She eventually at least let me loosen the scarf and I told her I would just take both off the moment that her and Dad left the house (and they were indeed preparing to leave for work). She frowned.
• Once they left, it was just me and Jon left. I closed the front door’s grille but left the door itself open, so that I could peek out of the house down the hallway in both directions. There was a piece of white cloth that covered the front entrance too, on the inside of the grille, and it would flutter in the wind sometimes.
• I understood that it was important that no one heard me or saw me, so I tried to be really quiet around the front door area as well as when using the kitchen sink.
• The backstory at that point had changed so that while we were still a family, I was also a heroine slated to protect the kingdom, and a male friend that had mysteriously arrived into my apartment was one of the other two heroes. The current princess/queen was in an apartment suite across the corridor living a really normal life, to the point that even her kid, the crown princess, was happily playing in the corridor while we watched both sides for threats while hiding from her.
• Jonathan was my child in this scenario, and he represented the “next generation” of heroes. I told him he should go out to play with the crown princess and befriend her, but he said he had to go attend kindergarten. I told him maybe he could go play with her later that afternoon when he returned, since there was no hurry, this arrangement would last for years. He agreed.
• The third hero arrived via a magic portal after some time, he was a brash, muscled hero that spoke English and I also saw a logo that featured all three of us heroes — I was some blonde heroine that was scowling but was also really pretty, and was on the front right side of the circular logo, whereas the first male hero was standing beside me while the brash hero that had just arrived was towering above both of us from behind.
• Anyway he said that the kingdom was doomed, and the two male heroes kept on talking about how they hoped the next rulers of the kingdom would be better than the generation before us, even if they weren’t as good as the current generation’s leaders. I didn’t understand it and they wouldn’t tell me the details, but I told them to stuff it as I didn’t think everything was lost yet.
• Snippet: At some much earlier point, there was a classroom scene where we were swapping letters either on a board or outside a doorway of some kind, to try to form a word or figure out an acronym of some kind from the letters.
• Snippet: Some business I was working at or some place I was staying at came under new ownership, and we were told we were not wanted anymore, and that the new owners themselves didn’t plan to stay there long and were going to move away.
• Snippet: At some point, I was playing a first-person over the shoulder camera version of Civ with Zixiang. I was setting up my capital city in the middle of the map, next to a river and adjacent to a really rich tile that looked like a really complex river delta with tons of smaller rivers. That tile was a Wonder and was named Mesopotamia, the Cradle of Life, and would give me big bonuses for settling down there.
• Zixiang had actually reached that spot before me but was unable to settle down there because he was playing the Zombie civilization. He looked a little forlorn as he trudged off so I tried not to look for him so that I wouldn’t know where he was and would then be able to immediately crush him. But the map wasn’t very big and the camera was over my shoulder so I couldn’t prevent myself from seeing him trudge off to the very corner to settle his capital city there.

May 21 2021

• Two of the girls from my Secondary 2 class were organizing a reunion meetup for the classes in a gazebo in a park. We were told to feel free to bring along 1-2 family members.
• I found out about this through one of the people that I was still in contact with, but he or she didn’t leave the location, only the date, and I realized I had forgotten to ask him at the time.
• On a school trip to some location, however, while I was walking around the area and looking for lone patrolling NPCs to isolate and kill while avoiding guards, I met two girls from the class handing out flyers for the event and I told them I’d be there. I remembered to ask them where it was this time and they told me and said they hoped I could make it.
• The patrolling guards had terrible AI and would stare at me accusingly but not actually be able to accuse me if they stumbled upon me in a room with a blood stain and/or corpse as long as they didn’t actually see the kill I made.
• At one point during the school excursion, when we were all together, a school teacher from my past came to observe one of our meetings. My “group” was basically Ronnie and a bunch of people from work though, and Ronnie was leading our meeting. We strayed off-topic from the meeting agenda and laughed a lot, which really irritated the teacher who was not used to others having fun, and felt like it was time-wasting.

May 22 2021

• I was with my mom and younger brother on a train platform on a day off from work, waiting for a train. From the elevated train platform, we could see a lot of the landscape around us in hex tile form, and in particular not far from the station weas a river, and city hexes ran along both sides of the river, five or six hexes in a row on each side.
• Two of those city hexes, five tiles apart, were dirtier-looking than the others, and I knew that one was Israel (Jerusalem) and one was Palestine (Gaza). The dirty look was due to smoke from the unrest in both cities. I knew that the real life holiday that gave me time off work was a public holiday in Israel, which was the nearer hex.
• Suddenly there were a series of loud explosions in the Israel hex as tall buildings collapsed and fire broke out. There was a lot of screaming and a lot of panic at the station, although we were fine as we were two hexes or so away.
• Soon after that, an airplane that was above the Israel city hex suddenly lost control, flying vertically downwards and crashing into the city hex, exploding in a fiery ball and sending a shockwave through the surrounding region as well. This hit the station in the form of a visible shockwave, tinged with fire. I dropped to the ground and protected Jonathan as the fiery shockwave barely missed us.
• From where we were, we could see firefighters in the Israel hex spraying water to try to contain the fire and rescue citizens.
• The train station was packed with panicked people at this point and we realized that the train was probably not going to be easy to get onto, it would be packed and also in danger of taking damage from any future explosions. A man at the top of the escalator in the train station yelled that news vans were nearby and offering rides to people in exchange for their story. Mom decided it was better for us to take that, and I agreed. I retrieved Mom‘s handbag from a kind passerby lady who was watching over it for us after we had taken cover during the explosions, and we headed down to the van.
• Snippet: At some point, there was a large school gym and prisoners (basically students) were held hostage in the gym by enemy soldiers, each student crouched down about ten feet from each other, collectively forming the shape of a grid. There was only really one guard though, and I saw a couple scenarios where the guard was murdered by a student who had a sharp weapon or stone hidden on them, which allowed several of them to try to escape.

May 23 2021

• Snippet: Dad warned me/us siblings not to visit New York in the summer as it was too hot and too crowded, though I said that I liked the density of the place and wanted to move to somewhere like NY or Tokyo.
• Friends were staying over at my house and I showed them my scanner and the software on my computer. It turns out that the icons on my computer had been rearranged overnight due to a reset though, and that part was a bit embarrassing to show them. There was also something about there being too many real/official apps that were visible or that appeared on my desktop, and this somehow “broke open” some of my other programs.
• There was either an older teacher character or a master thief (like Laurent from Great Pretender) that we were learning from in this group of people at my house too.
• There was a three-storey school building with many doors that we were in, and a neighbouring school next to us as well, I was a custodian staff of some kind that was in charge of doing something through the building, but we had to largely stay out the way of the students and try not to befriend them because the administration would come down hard on us.
• A large part of this dream involved creative ways to stay out of curious students’ way due to locked doors and such, or by running up a really long flight of stairs with a student in pursuit, and then teleporting home, leaving them stranded far away from me.
• At one point though, I did just chill in a room with three other students and we tried to talk to each other for a bit, but weren’t really able to communicate for whatever reason.