Dreams

Jul 21 2025

• Snippet: I was in charge of a grid, and hiding items that were shipped to me inside that grid for other players to find. The squares on the grid took some sort of energy point system to open and unearth the treasure within, but there was a pity mechanic that either upgraded an item sometimes or made certain squares cause less energy to open sometimes, depending on some circumstances or criteria that I’ve forgotten.

Jul 22 2025

• I was helping Mom troubleshoot or do something with a stack of phones, and when I finished that job the bottom phone had a ticket on its screen for a concert that I had been thinking of going to, Mom had gotten me the ticket as a reward and had hidden it in the pile for me to find at the end of the job and I was happy for that.
• This concert was being held in the evening, and I rode a bicycle there, meeting up with two friends who were happy to accompany me to the concert, but the concert itself was underwhelming. It was being held by a tree in a meadow next to a rushing river, and only a dozen fans or so came. The music wasn’t very good either.
• I did appreciate the company though, and the concert was spread out over a couple of nights so we planned to meet up again the next day. We actually met up on the way home from school or work instead, and took the bus towards my house together, but I overslept on the bus and my two friends did not realize that they had left me behind until they got off, at which point they only had enough time to hop back on before the bus started moving off again.
• Eventually I woke up, but the bus was already well on its way to the other end of its route at the northern end of the city. We contemplated getting off and grabbing a taxi to the concert location, but I pointed out that I wouldn’t be able to get home anyway without my bicycle, which was at home, since it was in such a remote location.
• I suggested that we just went to have dinner somewhere else together instead and the other two agreed. We were almost at the northern terminal by now and I asked if we wanted to take the bus back again to a more central location and invite other people too, but Jianwei, who was one of the other two people with me, said that he would rather just hang out with the two of us, so we didn’t do that.
• So instead, we got off at the northern terminal, although I dropped a couple of empty bottles that I was carrying while I was putting on my bag, and had to flag the bus driver down and ask him to stop the bus so that I could get off before I missed my stop again.
• I dumped those bottles off in a marked cardboard box for recycling in front of a store that we passed by, grateful for the presence of a recycling box here and happy to give them the bottle deposit so that I wouldn’t have to carry the two bottles around.
• Jianwei led us into a storefront which initially consisted of a small area to take our shoes off at and a set of flights leading up to the second level. I found two mismatched slippers of slightly different sizes and made my way up a little ahead of my two friends, one of them who didn’t find any slippers at all and thus just ascended in his socks instead, and a little behind about a dozen other people who had taken most of the slippers.
• At the top of the stairs, the shop owner greeted us and gestured around the store, which was filled with sporting goods. He said that his collection of goods here were much cheaper than at other stores because they were offbrand, and that he did repairs too for cheap if needed. I quipped to Jianwei that I thought I was following him into a restaurant and he said that he had decided that he wanted to see what the store was offering as we passed by it.

Jul 23 2025

• I was walking around the streets of a Japanese city, and I went past a street-level mall while heading to a second one a block away from the first one while looking for a specific agency shop to register something at.
• Upon going into the second mall, I saw that they were having a concert on the ground floor, and I could not find the shop type that I was looking for on that level, but it looked like there were some more shops in the basement, so I went down the stairs behind two Caucasian men who were obviously tourists of some kind as well.
• However, when we reached the bottom of the stairs, we found that all that awaited us was a small, dank carpark area with dim lighting, and no shops at all. This was surprising to all three of us so it obviously was the fault of the signage upstairs being misleading or easy to misinterpret, rather than any single person’s momentary lapse of judgement.
• While I was preparing to go back upstairs, I heard the other two men talking, and to my surprise one of them mentioned Simon from work. I looked back at them and asked the taller man, who had a thin white beard, if his name was Teddy. He looked surprised and said that yes he was, his name was Theodore, or Teddy for short, and he inquired how I knew that.
• I was elated and said that I knew Simon as well due to my participation in school-run math competitions, and that he had often talked about Teddy as the two of them were math professors and colleagues together. I had never actually met Teddy in person though but I had a hunch that it was him based on his build and topic choice. I said that it was an incredible coincidence to meet here in the basement of a shopping mall in a city across the world from Edmonton. I gave him both my dead name as well as my new post-transition name.
• We ascended the stairs again while chatting about our respective trips here, with the other man that was with him kindly assisting me up the stairs a third of the way at a time before taking a quick break each time, in order to make sure that I didn’t stumble and fall.
• At the top of the stairs, a set of card readers or ticket machines like at a train station were set up in order to make sure that people coming into the concert had a ticket. We were going out though, not coming in, and I had a train pass card anyway so I put it into the reader and it zipped through the machine and out the other side. There was an attendant standing on the other side, mostly to guide the incoming people, and he caught my card as it flew out of the machine before handing it back to me in surprise and allowing me out through the gate.

Jul 24 2025

• I was at a carnival zone in a game and making my way through each part of the zone along with other players. The name of the carnival was Joy Park Water Park. The zone had no rides or anything like that in it, despite being a carnival zone, however there were little puzzles to solve and hidden stuff to find.
• I was ahead of my group in the puzzle solving, since we were all doing it individually, but the zone was divided into four parts and each part was gated by a Sunset Kitchen key that needed to be found to progress on to the next part. This key only spawned in each subzone for me at the start of a brand new day after I got access to it, although this was only represented by a few minutes of actual time, so there was a short period of time after I managed to enter this part where I was just wandering around and doing the new puzzles.
• Someone told me that there were no fights in the zone, so I didn’t pack any attack skills in my loadout, but there was actually one fight in each zone, except that the enemies were weak and did not fight back. One of the fights was against two super weak monsters that stood together side by side, and my default attack summoned a thing that looked like a small pasta-like item that was shaped like a curved bridge and that lasted for one second each time before disappearing. It was also very hot, so I summoned it over and over on top of the monsters to kill them both.

Jul 25 2025

• Snippet: I remember a dream that involved some friends from Dunman High, and in that dream I was holding a key and walking around an area with doors or other things that I could unlock. That had something to do with people’s race aptitudes, a concept from the Uma Musume game, but I do not remember exactly how the different pieces fit together into a coherent story.

Jul 26 2025

• I had a grid of squares, about 20 horizontal and 10 vertical, and the entire thing was about the size of a large scratchcard that I could hold in my hands while walking around. I was fitting blocks into it, with each block taking up several squares and granting a buff that helped me in some way move through some rooms that I was in. The buffs could not be repeated even if I triggered them more than once, so there was an optimization element to the puzzle as well.
• Later on, Kel was also playing this game and I looked at the board and found that she was doing well even though she was new to it. We talked briefly and I told her about mimics while she told me about an idea she had regarding tying two kites together.
• In a separate dream even further on, I entered a canteen area in a shopping mall and saw Mom and Kel standing on top of a platform that would lower down like an elevator without walls or a ceiling into another level of the building which they were going to explore. Kel saw me and asked if I wanted to come along as well, but I was with Quintopia and I said sure but that I would catch up in a little bit.
• I went to a large control panel and tried to access an interesting-looking article on the Internet from there, but it was paywalled and the site said that I had already reached my monthly limit of free articles, so I couldn’t reach it. Kel was still around at that point and came up to try to access it too but to no avail. While fiddling around with it, I deleted my entire account on that site and then re-created it, but that made things even worse as I couldn’t even get back to the free articles section without first paying 40 cents for access. Eventually I just gave up and left.
• Quintopia and I went to a counter to get something, and the man at the counter told us we could take another elevator in the room next to him down to the basement to get more free stuff. We decided to oblige and go there before parting ways. This one was a fully enclosed elevator, and when we went in, the doors closed behind us. There was no button to press, and the digital sign above the door just said that it was automatically alternating between the main floor and the basement level 3 floors beneath it.
• Instead of free items though, the door open into a cafe we were greeted by a sprightly waitress there who then bounded off to serve a customer. We looked around and I said it seemed expensive but maybe we’d have a meal there if it wasn’t too expensive — say under $10 or so. But we looked at the menu and all the dishes were $20 or higher, so I blanched and said no thanks.
• Quintopia found a pot of soup sitting on a counter though, with a sign that said that each bowl was $1.80. I said that that was fine but I didn’t want to essentially just pay for an appetizer at the cashier later, but he pointed out that they accepted online payments too so we could just have this and then pay online and leave without actually talking to any of the waitresses here, so I agreed to that.

Jul 27 2025

• Snippet: My dream had something to do with Uma Musume training, particularly with Rice Shower and Grass Wonder, where before races they were in a warehouse-like building picking how well they thought they themselves would do in the race. There was a need to vary their own picks and results too, in a way similar to the Team Trials mode in the game, so they couldn’t just pick themselves to win all the races since they needed a combination of 1st place, 2nd place, 3rd place etc results for optimal scores. Also, every 20,000 fans they gained opened up a new training option, and 100,000 fans were needed for the top option, although there was a swivelling bookcase in the warehouse that led to a secret room with a special training option hidden in it.