Dreams

Dreams this week varied wildly between the extremely long and the extremely short! And the first dream, involving me actually writing my dream diary in my dream, was weird. It didn’t go lucid though, unfortunately. Although the lion in that dream was probably symbolic anyway because Aug 09 is Singapore’s National Day and the lion is Singapore’s national symbol (Singapore actually means Lion City (local)). I really liked my August 12 megadream too, and the third dream from August 15. And it’s odd that I basically dreamt about food and drink 6 times this week, including back to back dreams about working in a cafe.

Aug 09 2021

• I recall various disjointed parts of a dream. One where the mafia owned a school building and there were two floors in the basement that housed casinos, one a comparatively safe wagers floor and one a dangerous wagers floor. I was with Yucheng in an elevator going down to the ground floor at one point when someone on his way to the first basement level with 600k stepped in to chat with us. It was mentioned that the mafia had the building for sale for those interested, but it cost something like 100 million with a 2 million dollar extra fee each month, and you’d basically have to win that money on the dangerous wagers floro and risk your life to do so.
• In another part, not long afterwards, I was walking through downtown with my parents and a very young (~6 year old) Jon, but Dad was forced to leave us to take care of something. Mom and Jon and I continued on our way, we stopped at a traffic light along with a bunch of other people, then crossed it, then went down into an underground train station.
• As we descended, Jon was ahead of me and I was ahead of Mom, he seemed to know the way to the ticket booths so I followed him even as I glanced down a passage he didn’t take and thought I saw an escalator down to the train area in the other direction too. The direction he picked was right though. While we were waiting for Mom, I used a water fountain to wet my lips but refused to actually drink from it because the water was “old” and lukewarm.
• The scene shifted a little so that we were at home and I was asleep in the same room as Jon, Mom was asleep in another bedroom, and Dad hadn’t returned yet. I woke up and saw Jon was still asleep, but recalled those earlier dreams and wanted to write them down, so I got up and sat down at the computer. I opened this very Notepad file and noticed that I had given a title to yesterday’s dream journal entry, something I don’t usually do (I usually only start off with a date and then the dream itself). I erased that, added today’s date, and then prepared to start typing.
• I then heard a commotion and glanced out the balcony window, where the view overlooked the Main Quad and the Central Academic Building area of my University. There was a herd of cats running confusedly around the area, and the reason for that was that there was a larger and more malformed lion (it looked like a horizontal bolster with legs and a maned head) running around the quad as well. Mom yelled “Lion!” from her room as I saw it too, this woke up Jon as well and he ran to the window to watch too.
• There were a lot of humans, likely University students, still blissfully sitting around the grassy fields of the Quad, until the lion came up and started to attack a group. Everyone basically screamed and stood up and tried to flee into the building. As we watched, two guys pulled out pepper sprays and started spraying the lion with it relentlessly, this seemed to work as the lion let go of whoever it was chewing, then pranced around threateningly around the group of people running away, but was unable to bite into anyone due to the ongoing application of pepper spray. I could very vividly hear the pattering feet of the lion (though this was likely linked to the noises of my computer IRL).
• Editor: I feel like I might have lost a couple dream events because I recalled and recited them for writing down in the part of the dream where I was going to do my journaling, and the shock of the lion then wiped it from my short-term memory, grr.

Aug 10 2021

• All I remember is a very brief snippet about living at my 723 house, having people over (4-5 people in all), and then something about a meal and a decision between feeding oneself and being fed by someone else, which somehow tied into a map of a wilderness area and the ability to do something related to it.

Aug 11 2021

• Jon was driving Kel and I around town on a weekend evening. We stopped next to a school, and Kel and I got out, leaving our schoolbags in the car, and pressed our noses against the front window of one of the school buildings to admire the ocean out the back window across from it.
• While the school was closed, I asked Kel if she would be interested in going inside to look at the ocean better, as one of the back windows seemed to be open and we could just look through that. She said yes, so we clambered in through an open window and admired the ocean from a much better view.
• Once we were done, we tried to climb back out the way we came, but the window we came through, and the blinds over it, had been shut! I opened both and we clambered out, where we were confronted by the school principal, who was about 10 feet away drilling a hole in the ground as part of a construction team. He ran over to us, told us we were in trouble for breaking and entering, and then told us to wait there, as he then quickly ran back to the drill to continue his roadwork renovations.
• I looked at Kel and suggested we run. Jon was still safely in the car so he could drive away with our school bags just fine and meet us at home. I pulled Kel‘s hand and we jumped up onto the roof of the building, clambering along it and crossing to the neighbouring building’s roof, before dropping down out of sight of the principal. We then ran off from there.
• Later on in the same dream, I was alone by myself in Southgate Mall. The mall, the outside of the mall, and my nearby apartment, all basically had the same layout as real life, except that I lived with Mom (and possibly others) in the apartment. However, no one was at home in this specific case, Mom had gone out somewhere and was going to buy food on the way back, and I was probably supposed to watch the house, but I had also gone out to Southgate Mall to get some ice cream.
• I got ice cream from basically where the food court was, and started making my way home, but I could not walk and eat at the same time (I basically took a 90% speed penalty for a few seconds after each lick) so progress was really slow as I slowly licked at the little cup of ice cream. In fact, Mom would definitely have caught me if she didn’t already send me a message saying that she had been delayed and would be back on a much later train instead. I didn’t have the feeling that I would be in trouble if she did catch me though, it instead felt like the danger level of something happening to the apartment would be higher if she did.
• On the way out of the mall, I vaulted over a table next to a retractable belt barrier. As I vaulted over it, my phone’s Shazam IDed an unidentified song that was lying on the table like a piece of paper, revealing its title and artist. Its owner was very happy at this, as he apparently had been looking for info on the song for weeks.
• Once I was outside Southgate Mall, my phone rang and I picked it up, although the receiver I picked up was that of an old corded house phone. Mom was on the other end, and I had a conversation with her while trying to clasp my hands over the microphone part of the phone receiver as much as possible so she hopefully wouldn’t hear the occasional car going by. If she did hear it she didn’t make a comment about it. She asked if I was hungry and I didn’t want to tell her about the ice cream, so I said yes. I crossed the road as we spoke and made it most of the way home before she hung up.
• Once I was home, the entire apartment was dark, but seemed safe. Just to be certain though, I secured the house and started to form a mini barricade at the front door from the inside, to set up defences against whatever danger might come. I also cast some spells, which were somehow based off of certain anime that I had watched or was watching — most anime didn’t grant me a spell but a couple did, although the spells (or lack thereof) had nothing to do with the contents of the actual shows. One show that I remembered granted me some sort of spell was I’m Standing on a Million Lives.
• Editor: Season 2 of I’m Standing on a Million Lives is airing this season, which might be partially why that show appeared. I think the entire mechanic of a show granting me a spell might have also been lifted from me watching gameplay videos of Library of Ruina, where apparently (I haven’t actually played it to know) you can burn (consume) books to create skill pages that can then be given to characters.

Aug 12 2021

• I was playing a game with shades of Civilization 3 and Heroes of Might and Magic 3, but with a grid map that was larger and more intimate. I was basically on a freshly uncharted continent, made up of lots of natural bone-white stone structures as well as a bit of flora. There was a large coliseum building that was marked by a white arena building from Heroes 3 on the map, which provided me a huge (50-100+) tile visibility range even though it was abandoned and I didn’t own it either. As long as it remained abandoned/unclaimed or I didn’t own it, I would keep that visibility. There was also a gold mine, marked by a Heroes 3 gold mine picture, next to it on the right, so I settled down about 20 tiles south of the coliseum and set up three small cities there in a small triangle, with a 3-way road in the shape of an inverted-T connecting the three cities, and began to secure the territory.
• I also sent someone up to claim the gold mine for income production even though it was somewhat far off, since there were no enemies around and I had all that visibility. But there was a vague sense that outside of the tile visibility range were devils or enemies of some sort that would eventually come through and attack, and I needed to secure the coliseum and the mine and my cities before then.
• Later on, once the area was secured, I shifted into first person mode and was actually exploring the two-storey stone structure. There were other visitors there at that point too, and some Olympic Games style event that was going to be held there shortly. The architecture felt like it was from the Roman era, and the building was very wide-open with tall, marble pillar structures. I remember at one point ending up in a women’s bathroom, and finding (and using) a urinal made specially for women. It was shorter (height-wise) and longer (depth-wise) than a typical men’s urinal, suspended off the ground, and with a hand tap in front and on top of the urinal, for sanitation purposes and to clean up after use. I used it and it worked quite well. A little girl then came out of a cubicle at the back of the washroom and said that she was jealous; she was too short and couldn’t reach the tap so she couldn’t use that urinal and had to use a regular washroom stall instead.
• The scene eventually shifted, and I was with Dad on the second level of the coliseum along with a crowd of other people, seated on tiered spectator stands and watching the Olympics going on below. Specifically, we were watching an athletics race, with people running on a modern, red running track that looped around a grass field. Later on there was going to be a soccer match, where the US men’s team was ranked #1 in the world but I had a feeling there were going to be stymied by a weaker defensive team and then lose to a fluke goal.
• However, in the present, I began to feel dizzy. We were located on the lowest and front row of the second level, but there were no guardrails between us and the edge of the level, so there was a large drop down to the first level right in front of us. I had a feeling like I was slowly nodding off and jerked upright when my body caught itself, except it wasn’t due to tiredness, but instead the wooziness from being dizzy. I clutched on to Dad, who was next to me, and he took my school bag from me so he could carry it, and said that we should leave and go to the canteen to get some food or drinks. We did so.
• The canteen in question was down on a different part of the first floor, and was structured like a corner of a hawker center or a canteen at a Singapore school. I did not recognize any of the stalls there. Dad went off to another stall to get something for himself, while I remained at a Chinese food stall that was being staffed by two young Indian girls. I didn’t pick anything from the trays that were laid out, but instead inquired about some smoothies that Dad had pointed out before he left. There were three flavours — mushroom, watermelon, and strawberry, and as I like to do in real life, I told them to give me whatever flavour was their favourite one.
• They asked if I would be okay with the mushroom one, and asked me how much I wanted. I thought that was a strange question, but I did see that there were two cup sizes, so I said I wanted a large. They looked at me strangely and asked if I was sure — It was $10 for a large watermelon or strawberry smoothie, but the mushroom one was special and was $15 per thimble; a large cup would cost me about $1500. I gulped and said I’d go for a watermelon smoothie instead. They looked disappointed.
• Not long after, Dad and I were on our way home and he was going to drop me back at my dorm, as he wanted to see the room too. He drove me and parked next to what was basically the Health Science LRT station, which had a stalled train in it. The Health Sciences building, next to the LRT station, was on fire, and the fire was slowly spreading toward the largely unconcerned citizens on the train, though some of them were beginning to get worried. The doors were fine and they could have left anytime they wanted though, but they actually wanted the train to just get a move on, which it didn’t because it wasn’t receiving a Go signal from whoever was overseeing the regional train system.
• My dorm house was across the busy two-way road, and I crossed it along with Dad. Around here I saw Kaiting at the train station and also crossing the road not too far away from us, but I didn’t call out to her. Instead, I arrived at the front door of the dorm house, and fumbled with my two sets of keys, trying to find the right one to fit the front door.
• I lived in Pinecrest House, a two-storey dorm share house with individual dorm rooms and a bunch of extra rooms in it like meeting rooms, open garden/sand rooms, lounges, and stuff. My room was up on the second level, and could be gotten to using the third flight of stairs clockwise from the main entrance of the house, which on the floor plan had it vaguely across the bottom of the main floor from the main entrance. But there were four or five flights of stairs in the house, and all of them led to different parts of the second floor, though there was some overlap in common areas, so there was always a danger of being lost. Some people I vaguely knew lived there as well, I think Stephanie from McNally was one of them, but I didn’t really meet any of them.
• Once I opened the front door, I tried to navigate my way from memory to my room. There was a matron in the kitchen cooking dinner and noises of different students in various rooms or open play areas, but we didn’t meet any of them as we went upstairs. However, once I got to the second floor, I knew something was wrong — the room names were different, some of them were even meeting rooms with lots of office chairs in them and stuff, and when I got to where I thought my room was, it was either someone else’s room entirely or possibly just empty.
• I took Dad back to the stairs and told him to wait there while I looked around to try to find the right stairs. I asked him to try to keep quiet and pretend he wasn’t here, so people wouldn’t question why he was here alone when he obviously wasn’t a student and wasn’t in the company of one once I wandered off. He stood by the top of the stairwell and said that he’d wait there with my school bag.
• I then went down again and tried the other stairs, to no avail, I couldn’t find the stairs that led up to the portion of the house that my room was at. I then had a hunch, and went outside the house — I discovered that this indeed wasn’t my specific share house, just one that was identical in layout. We were instead in Hawhurst House, which was a neighbouring one to Pinecrest House. However, I looked to the left and right of the building and couldn’t actually find Pinecrest, it should have been to the left of Hawhurst and the right of a larger building that I used as a landmark, and the reason why I assumed that this was my dorm share house to begin with. However, there was only a little path leading away into the darkness from the main road where I thought Pinecrest would be.
• I also realized that since the two dorm houses were basically sister houses, that that’s why my front door key also worked on this front door, however I should have known something was up because even though it worked, it didn’t really fit correctly and had gone in at a diagonal angle to signify that something was wrong.
• Editor: Pinecrest House is an actual dorm house (local) at my University. Hawhurst is not, though.

Aug 13 2021

• All I remember is that I was working in two separate cafes, or possibly the same cafe under two different teams of girls, both of which hated each other and also had trouble communicating with each other for whatever reason. Like, one team only spoke Chinese and broken English, while the other only spoke Japanese and broken English, or something like that. I was accepted even though I was on both teams, though. I’m pretty sure both teams could cast magic too, though I don’t remember any examples. The only event I can remember happening is that the shop was held up by a gunman at some point and I was crouched behind some seats and huddling with another girl.

Aug 14 2021

• Another cafe dream, but just one team this time. The dream was very disjointed, and was largely about day to day regular life and interactions between the members, although at one point two of the large monsters from Back 4 Blood attacked and were quickly put down. I don’t remember much about the actual dreams besides the events being really surreal, although at one point I think we helped either resolve or accuse one of the girls of lying about something.
• Editor: We played Back 4 Blood before bed for Jah Stream Night, so naturally the monsters showed up in my dream this night too.

Aug 15 2021

Dream 1

• This dream took place in an area that I thought of as a weird “in-between place” where several things melded together.
• One of the events that happened here was a scene where two boarding school students were in between school semesters, but they weren’t allowed to go home to see their relatives. However, they discovered that by using a machine there a certain way, they could leave a message behind that would persist after they left, and would eventually reach their relatives when they next came to this in-between place.
• Another event that took place was a scene outside a supermarket where several people I knew were waiting for a bus, and in this in-between scene afte they had left the supermarket and before they got onto the bus, a security guard suspected one of them of being a shoplifter and was arguing with him about his receipts and the items he had. But with the advent of new technology, the security guard was given a device that could summon holograms of receipts from the supermarket, and he used that to discover that the accused shoplifter was actually innocent.
• A third in-between scene here involved a tile-based MMO of some kind that was between seasons. The players were relaxing in some lobby, and there was a push to fix the portal mechanic in the game. Portals linked different places in the game, and always had a length of 3 tiles and a width of 1 tile, and stretched east to west and could not be rotated, even though a large portion of the world map stretched north-south and was as thin as 5 east-west tiles across in some places. Furthermore, the two tiles on either end of the central portal tile were always grass tiles, even if it didn’t match the terrain where the portal was placed or where the portal led to. This irritated a lot of players.
• The game devs were basically run by the AMQ database admins, which to me explained a lot of the uncaring attitudes around fixing the game. The game devs did recruit a new dev who asked for a summary of the bug, and this new dev was an online friend named Bodhi who I remembered. Someone went onto a forum thread where the details were already posted in 2018, and bumped it using a certain set of commands in his post that triggered a script which brought the contents of the post into the game lobby for the new dev to see. The new post was labelled 2020, which implied that that was when this dream was taking place.
• The new dev eventually fixed the portal tiles to properly show terrain, but that was all he managed to do before the new season started. He did also cause a minor explosion at some point.
• I also made a note about birthday wishes but I am not sure what that involved or how that connected to the rest of the story if at all.
• Editor: The first part with the boarding school students definitely reflected our current group watch anime — Gakuen Alice.

Dream 2

• This took place in a shopping center and “hotel” that a group of friends and I were on vacation at, though the hotel was more like dorms, with many individual rooms in a very cramped floor. We initially took the bus to the building but planned to stay here for two nights, although at some point halfway through the dream I also had to return to the bus terminal as though to travel on a bus.
• The entire shopping center was really crowded too, with narrow passages and lots of people. The building also had lots of doors and lots of hotel attendants standing around and doing one specific job each. The stairs were also very narrow, and at one point the banisters were so close together that we couldn’t fit between them and had to sit on both of them and slide down to the floor below.
• There were washrooms but they were a bit difficult to locate, my dorm room had two single-cubicle male washrooms right outside of it, across the hall from each other, but getting to the female one involved me going out of the dorm area and crossing a tight hallway out into the open shopping area.
• During that segment of the dream where we had to return to the bus, I overheard an old man asking an attendant whether the bus rides would allow his glasses to stay on while he was on them. I found that funny and told my in-dream friends about it when I got to them.
• Between the dorm and the bus terminal were was a wide open stair segment that I had to climb up, and there were a number of immaculate, blond Korean or Japanese girls (I recognized them in-dream as gyarus (local)), done up in heavy makeup, seated on the stairs and hanging out at each other. A couple of them stared at me as I went by. At the top of these stairs was a pathway to a different wing of the mall that I had not noticed, but for some reason I thought of the shops on the second floor of the Japanese/Korean mall (see my July 20 2021 dream) and wondered if I could get to that tea shop from this passage.
• Outside the washroom in the main mall area was a popcorn shop, and a couple of attendants were standing outside giving out free samples. Instead of a bag of popcorn, these popcorn kernels were basically stuck together to form a big structure that looked like a complex chemistry structure of molecules stuck together. I circled around them, but another lady had a slightly eaten one and offered hers to me because she had to leave somewhere. I said that I was going into the washroom and couldn’t take it along with me, but she insisted and forced it into my hands anyway before hurrying off.
• There was also a plotline about borrowing shirts from the shopping center staff — they had a booth that was lending out shirts, and I picked out two white school uniform blouses that buttoned down the front and were emblazoned with the Wake Up, Girls! idol group name on them.
• Lastly, I had a note about a plotline involving 3 of my friends and accusers of some sort that we apparently managed to fend off, but I don’t remember the details of it.

Dream 3

• This time I was with Singapore Dunman High friends in a different hotel. We had decided to meet up there as a reunion and stay there overnight for one night. We were in our 20s age-wise, although my mental picture of the people I knew were still exactly the same.
• Dad drove me there on a motorcycle. While we were parking outside the building, I saw Antonia just outside the hotel heading inside and on the way up, and I also saw a couple of people I knew from McNally, but didn’t know their names, walk by along the street as well.
• Once we took the elevator up, I found that we had booked off an entire floor and there were three conference rooms as well as a number of sleeping rooms. The event was already in full swing, with plenty of people chatting to each other in groups, and I was one of the last ones to arrive. I first went to my sleeping room, and found that I shared the same large room as Allen, Eugene, Zixiang, a guy from McNally whom I also didn’t know by name, and Satinel. Everyone was lying down on futons laid out on the far side of the room except the McNally guy who was on the only bed. I was a bit nervous about meeting Allen and Eugene but they seemed to have no problems with my transition. Satinel had also waited for me to arrive before picking out the spot for her futon, and we both took our futons and placed them side by side near the door, next to each other. Since it was an overnight stay, our room had a brief chat on whether to stay up all night or not. The McNally guy with the bed said that he was probably going to sleep, but I said I’d try to stay up since it was a special occasion.
• I then went out to look at the three conference rooms. From “left to right”, the first room had food vendor stalls in them, who were holding 1 on 1 consultations with customers and selling them cheap food. Satinel or Allen said they had already looked over them and there was nothing interesting. The second room was the only one actually labelled food, but I don’t remember what was in it exactly, except it was most certainly not food. It might have been arcade machines. The last room was a buffet room, and a lot of the Dunman teachers were in there eating. Mr Ng, my Chinese teacher, entered the room as I stood by the hallway, and looked at me as he passed.
• Dad was busy talking to teachers and asking me for introductions to friends, which I found a bit annoying. I told him that I wanted to get my pink shoulder bag and something else from the motorcycle box before he left later, and to let me know before he left. He said ok. I had brought along a hovering bicycle-like machine powered by a bag of ice and a touch of a magic wand to a certain panel on the device in order to start it. I wanted to show the others the machine. Part of the device, possibly the bag of ice, was still in the motorcycle box, though.
• When it was time for him to go, we went down separately, as I think he had the idea to bring the items up for me but I wanted to go down and help him anyway. The hotel had only one elevator and it was in use, the door closed as I arrived and there was someone waiting outside the elevator door as the elevator was going up from our floor and he wanted to go down. Another group of three people came just as the door was closing and asked him to try to hold the door open, but he didn’t react in time. Instead, he tried to claw at the door, then spider climb up the closed elevator door awkwardly until he reached the ceiling, as the elevator rose up to the floor above. The group of three people told him he didn’t have to go that far for them.
• I knew Dad wasn’t on that elevator since it was on the way up, and that it would be a while before he could enter that elevator on the ground floor, so I headed for the stairs instead as we were only on the 5th floor and I could just slide down and hop over the banisters to get to the ground floor pretty quickly.
• As I left, I heard that group of four people chatting with each other. The conversation shifted to how the one person who had tried to spider climb up was interested in construction work, but the owner of the company he wanted to join or help lead hadn’t started the company yet. One of the other three pulled out a phone and did some research, and figured out this was because the person who was going to be the owner was put in jail two years ago according to a news story he found, so it would probably be a bit longer before he could start the company.
• At some point in this dream there was also something about an argument that came down to comparing internet logs and Reddit access timestamps to prove who was “right”. In the end the victor still offered to trust the person who was proven wrong and gave him control over something that could hurt or destroy the rest of the group if used inappropriately. The other person appreciated the gesture and nothing bad happened, though.