Dreams

My dream memory this week was actually kind of weak. I think without a journal at all I definitely would have drew a blank for a couple of the days. I’m not sure why, I guess the ability to remember my dreams comes and goes.

I had an exchange dream this week as well (amidst a usual barrage of regular school dreams), but again, no reaction from my subconscious about the trip being delayed.

Jun 14 2021

• I met Matt in a large school canteen and we briefly talked about something at work that he was in charge of organizing and editing with a secondary login account. He asked me if I thought that something should be done a certain way, and I said it was up to him, but if he wanted that change then I would be happy to help bring it up in our next meeting with Ronnie. I told him I wouldn’t edit it though, he said why, and I said it was because I knew all edits needed to be done through that secondary login that he had. He went oh, right.
• Matt and I also talked about the effect of COVID-19 on the school. He said he hoped that the school would shut down so that we could study from home, and he could use that as an excuse to buy video software for his computer. I told him that my high school in Canada, McNally, had shut down near the end of my grade 12 year due to the pandemic, as less than 20% of students had showed up for school. I showed him statistics on how many students were registered in the school at the time (it was around 836, according to my dream). He asked what happened to the rest of the school year, and I said that there were only 4 weeks left of school before finals at that point so we just completed it from home.
• That school canteen was packed with students and I walked around in a few times prior to meeting Matt. Of note, I remember a table on the southern end where an Indian girl had a large tray of bread products that she was trying to sell to passing students for 35 cents per loaf. She sold some for sure, but the next time I walked by the table, she was gone and her boyfriend was finishing up the leftovers from the tray that didn’t sell.
• Snippet: At one earlier point in the dream, I and someone else were kiting slow shambling monsters around a small square room as we tried to figure out how to defeat them properly. There were over two dozen of the monsters but as long as we kept moving in a large circle they barely couldn’t reach us. This was part of some larger ongoing game or quest.
• Editor: The bread tray was probably from Occult Academy, an anime my main anime groupwatch group was watching at the time of the dream. We did lose a few weeks at the end of our high school grade 12 year, but it was due to a teacher’s strike. And apparently my high school’s enrollment now is 1050 or so, so the dream numbers probably weren’t too far off for 20 years ago.

Jun 15 2021

• School canteen again, but a completely different one this time. Something about me and some others being part of some sort of student leader group that was going around distributing something to the various student groups. The one group that the dream was focused on had a person in a box running backwards in large circles, and by doing that, they were able to maintain a 201/200 count in some metric or other that had to do with the gift or their eligibility to receive it.

Jun 16 2021

• I saw Mom and Dad‘s car roll up to the carpark of the HDB flat we were living in, as well as Ronnie‘s car arriving separately a little bit after. I went down to the carpark to meet Mom and Dad and help Dad carry a large rolled up mat of some sort back home. There were many other people randomly walking about their daily lives.
• We entered an elevator and I tried to hold the door open to wait for Ronnie as I knew he was coming eventually as well, but whatever he was doing was taking too long, and my parents had no idea who he was, so a couple other people came in instead and the elevator door closed as it was at its safe social distancing capacity of 5.
• The elevator was a horizontal elevator instead of a vertical one, and took us in a wide, circular, clockwise arc around the carpark. There was a vague sense of danger on this trip, and about 2/3 through its trip, alarm bells sounded because the elevator sensors detected that one of us had just randomly acquired a contagious fluke disease. A scan started on all five of us, and I put my arms around Mom and Dad and guided them to a corner of the fairly large, rectangular elevator away from the other two.
• It was indeed one of the other two that unluckily acquired the disease, which was revealed to be “8/10 Salmonella”. The other person in the elevator isolated herself from the unlucky person as well. Once the elevator reached the destination, that victim went to see a doctor for medical treatment.
• I formed a group with Mom and Dad and the fourth person, as the plot had turned into a sort of deliver quest by then. We all had horse pieces, two columns of 3 horses or so each leashed together like chariot horses, and everyone else put their horses on follow on me. Navigation was done by an overhead map, and I took a southern road that swung by a cliff and one of the horse pieces fell off the edge. I apologized for being careless and picked up the horse piece from below the cliff, while the owner of the horse, which was the random fourth person from the elevator, apologized for leaving her horses in such a loose formation instead of keeping them tight with the group.
• There were enemies to fight along the way as well, two groups of fierce hellhounds or something that were near the edge of the road. In order to make the roads a little safer, I purposely went slightly off the road in order to bump into them and start a battle, which we won thoroughly. We then reached some sort of central city on the map, where we finished our deliver quest.
• NPCs along the way also had mini quests that they were offering, as well as envelopes beside them that had old, expired quests in them. I looked in a couple envelopes and they had quests from 2013-2014 that we could no longer do.
• Somewhere along the way, we had also picked up a side quest to deliver something to Hobbiton, which was to the west of the town that we were in, for 90 gold. But our next actual deliver quest took us east instead, so I decided with my group to skip that side quest.
• Through the journey, but especially around this town, we saw many other adventuring parties of 3-5 people. And at some point around the town, there was a snippet where I was watching over the entrance of a semi-darkened room, cooled by air-conditioning, where my parents and siblings were all sleeping in.
• Later on, I was in a group of 5, possibly different from the earlier group but definitely on the same map/game. We were defending a castle from its parapets in a game. We did this by assigning tiles that were being automatically and steadily drawn from a bag at random. There were 100 pieces in all, and they came in different shapes — there were at least some tiles that were shaped like 1×1 squares, 2×1 vertical pieces, and 2×2 squares.
• The 2×1 and 2×2 ones were units. The 1×1 ones were resources, though there may have been some units in there too. There were some tiles that could be assigned as units for defence, and others with unknown effects. The resource tiles needed to be spent to actually summon the unit tiles from the board into play, and once used, the resource tiles would go back into the bag to be drawn again. The unit tiles had timers after they were drawn before they could be played, and timers after they were played before they expired and had to go back into the bag as well.
• Anyway, there was a moving army marching onto the tower, and the others took up roles of deciding which units to play or where to assign the units. I sat with my back against the parapet, facing away from the incoming army, and sorted the tiles as they appeared, grouping them by type and size and timer.
• Editor: Horizontal elevators are, for some reason, also a somewhat rare recurring motif in my dreams, considering they don’t exist in real life and are not inspired by anything that I know of. Hobbiton is a town in Lord of the Rings (Online). The way the tiles were drawn from the bag reminded me in-dream of Speed Scrabble, which is a game involving anagrams that my secondary school class used to play.

Jun 17 2021

• Snippet: My work team was going through tickets that had tasks like “Draw a straight line!” and other odd tasks like that, though with some sort of computer-related excuse behind them.
• Snippet: I was hunting for 12 key-like things that were scattered across a zone that some of my friends were in. I found nine of them and when I asked Johannes to check his inventory, he had two more.
• Snippet: I visited a school to look at my secondary school friends. I saw some of them (Eugene, for one) socializing around the school canteen, and knowing they were OK was enough to give me peace. Most of them didn’t recognize me, though a couple seemed to recognize me from a distance when I was taking a crowded train to leave the area.
• Snippet: Two people stowed away on the back of someone else’s van in order to get away from some location to somewhere else. They were eventually caught by the police.
• Snippet: I visited Mom and Dad and Jon, and sat in their TV room as Mom took and played some TV discs from a huge shelf on the wall that surrounded the TV on all sides. I told her I’d like to burn and upload everything on the shelf for backup, discs and books and all. She said that was fine but pointed out three old travel guidebooks about travelling across Europe that they had bought 30+ years ago, and said not to upload those due to copyrights, they were so rare that it wasn’t on the internet at all. I said that it was thus even more important that I back it up but that I would agree not to upload them until my parents passed away or no longer cared about the copyright.
• Editor: The 12 keys probably referenced a zone in Aardwolf, the MUD that Satinel and I had played the night before. We had to do 12 zodiac subzones within a larger zone and it involved finding many keys and unlocking many doors.

Jun 18 2021

• Something about building zones in a somewhat futuristic town populated by humans and robots.
• There were other people building zones as well, and at least one of them was a maid girl. At some point I presented one of my ideas to a group of girls that were standing at attention in a line.
• At another point, I was on a motorcycle travelling beside (and possibly racing) another person on a motorcycle. But right at the start of the race or right after we crossed a traffic junction, I dropped a device that I needed for buffs of some sort. The other person on the motorcycle had one too, and the device gave an AOE buff, so I could in theory stick next to him and still complete the journey/race, but after hesitating for a few seconds I decided to abandon that race/journey and instead stopped my bike, and backpedalled through oncoming traffic until I reached where the device was on the ground to pick it up again.
• I did a lot more travelling on the motorcycle in this part of the dream as well.
• Snippet: A bouquet of flowers was important to the story at some point too, but I don’t remember how or why.

Jun 19 2021

• A chunk of the dream revolved around comparing and judging people’s songs. There was a device that looked like a weighing scale, which was divided by a cross into four equal segments. The two left segments were videos of adult renditions of the selected song, whereas the two right segments were still photo slideshows of children renditions of the selected song. The people holding the device could then judge which rendition of the song they liked the most.
• Somehow, there was also the concept that the scores for the two left adult segments were shown in a clear screen and were unchangeable, whereas the scores for the two right children segments were shown in a translucent screen and were changeable, as though the children could edit their entries over time as they grew or something (except on a much faster time scale).
• Snippets: There were bus, motorcycle, and airplane scenes, a scene involving an airport, as well as one involving renting an AirBNB home. There was also a volcano in the city that never actually played a direct role in the dream but did cast a red sky across some of the scenes.

Jun 20 2021

• I was attending a class that was a mix of Japanese students studying English and English students studying Japanese. Kind of like double exchange students meeting in the middle in a combined class. Students were seated on chairs around long white tables, with each table representing a group.
• The girl on my left was a Japanese girl who had been at University for 15 years. Apparently this was a normal length for Japanese students. I cringed a bit when I Found that out since that was longer than I had spent all the way from Grade 1-12 and through University thus far. The person on my right was a guy that spoke English, but I did not actually know him.
• The current class was a Japanese one and the teacher was asking us questions. I was able to answer the vocabulary questions that the teacher asked the class, so I was proud of that. The boy beside me was asked to stand up and go write something on the chalkboard/whiteboard at the front of the class. After that, the teacher told us to do a piece of group work and we all pulled out worksheets that we had prepared, and started reading them to the rest of our group.
• Later on, the scene shifted to a student who nearly always skipped class. He was a handsome, young guy with short hair, dressed in a school uniform but with the top button undone. We saw him by a picnic table outside his rural house that was set on a grassy plain with no other houses nearby.
• The dream went through several iterations of him and his excuses he used to skip class. They usually involved his girlfriend who would come by every morning to pick him up. But either due to nervousness or due to wanting (and failing) to impress his girlfriend, he usually ended up doing some sort of stunt that made him unable to go to school.
• Examples of stunts included at least two occasions where he tried to eat chalk, one time gnashing the chalk vertically between his teeth while he reached for a cup of hot water, and another time popping the chalk right into his mouth before grabbing the water. Both times, not only did he get sick from the chalk, but the water splashed all over his face and down the front of his shirt too, ruining his uniform. Another time, he instead spread the chalk dust all over his right shoulder, and then grabbed a pitcher of water and poured it over the shoulder, thoroughly ruining the uniform as well. Yet another time, there was no chalk involved, just water, but he again ended up wet. Every day.
• Eventually, there was so much water on the ground that it formed a tiny flowing brook that flowed from the north of the scene down to the south. He dropped the styrofoam cup of his latest attempt at playing hooky into the brook and watched as it started to drift south very slowly.
• A swimmer then came splashing down the brook, even though it was so shallow that he could barely submerge his face in the water if he tried, and he was more kind of crawling on the ground like a worm than actually swimming. The swimmer reached the cup, then elongated himself into a narrow and thin form and tried to swim through the cup, which itself also elongated. The end of the cup broke, but the sides of the cup held firm, allowing him to swim through it, before he continued his way downstream.
• It turns out that he was an adventurer and TV host that was always looking for new ways to traverse the connecting rivers in the country, and would try to swim rare routes from point A to point B. This truant had inadvertently created a tiny new river by his daily actions and the adventurer said on his next TV segment that it was now a shortcut between two hills that saved him a large round trip, so he really liked this new river even though it was difficult to traverse, and he hoped that it would continue to grow in size.