Dreams

As mentioned, this week is also the anniversary of my dream diary! My first entry in the journal is from Aug 25 2016, and I am happy to report that despite several long gaps in the interceding years, the diary is still going strong overall. And my entries are still as weird and wacky as ever, with lots of double recalled dreams in a night to boot. The highlight of the week’s dreams for me was the 2nd dream on Aug 27th, with the ping pong balls and cool special powers and the rabbit ears that forced me into cute anime poses. Really now, subconscious. What are you trying to tell the world about me?

Aug 23 2021

• I was walking through an MMO zone that was a desolate industrial wasteland. I was the leader of a party of 5, made up of my school friends, and there were also two God characters accompanying us that were played by teachers acting as game mentors to us. When we reached the zone with the final boss fight, it was delineated by a chain link fence surrounding the zone that was only broken by the start of the only entrance, a long white road. When the two God characters tried to cross the threshold of the zone, they just got teleported away, whereas the five of us could pass it with no problem at all. So it looked like they were not able to come along to help us even though they had helped us through the rest of the game thus far.
• It looked like we had 22 minutes left in the game to defeat the final boss and save the world, so I said we probably had one shot to defeat the boss ourselves. We picked up items on the way in to strengthen ourselves — every set of 3 items we found on the ground gave us an XP bonus, and there were also fishbones lying around, and every set of 5 of those gave us bonus damage vs the final boss. While strengthening ourselves, I checked the time again and noticed that we were wrong in our estimation and we actually had 1.5 days left before we would fail the game, not 22 minutes, so we actually had plenty of attempts in which to learn and defeat the boss.
• Snippet: A teacher was giving out exam results in a closed-off room that we had to visit and enter for some reason.
• Snippet: We met a girl who had access to some sort of firewall skill. This was somehow related to us keeping inventory in a room, moving blocks around so that as many of them were on display as possible. Some blocks represented items like laptops, others represented people, and we hoped that two of the people blocks in particular would get along after we placed them by each other.
• Snippet: I have a note that just reads “Spicy foods question on sign in the middle of a backyard field”. I don’t remember the context of this one.
• Snippet: Similarly, I have a note hastily scribbled down that reads “Pales compared to 2 hen/nincompoop, boss wouldn’t have had us. Lots at work. 5342 over inventory.” It was badly scribbled so I think some words are wrong there.
• Snippet: There was an outdoor exhibition going on. Everyone had to build a skill by combining 5 letters on a handheld signboard to form a word, then hold the sign up above their head. Most people’s were things like “white” or “black”. Whatever mine was, my effect was really strong, and I was told to help others to make theirs stronger as well.
• Snippet: I was flying a helicopter, and the controls of the helicopter allowed me to raise or lower its nose to control the direction, and propel the helicopter forward, and that was it. I had a couple other people on the helicopter and had to drive them somewhere, and I thankfully had a save game from just after we lifted off as well, as I crashed a couple of times trying to figure out how to fly the thing. Once I learned how though, we flew over some mountains and got to Russia.
• Snippet: We were exploring a basement when a little anime girl with pigtails that looked like a ghost or a mage of some kind appeared behind us, holding up a sign that said “Where is Makin”. But that was her name, apparently, and it felt like she was showing off rather than trying to scare us, so there were no scary vibes at all. We found something in the basement to do with Makin’s Assorted MP3 summonings, which was obviously whatever the ghost was referring to, then we held up some signs in return to talk to the ghost girl, before putting down a block to act as makeshift stairs, and climbed out through the basement window into the sunlight.

Aug 24 2021

• My dream took place at an arcade with several machines in it, where two machines rotated out on a weekly basis and the other machines remained the same. I was there over a long period of time and at one point tried to complain to the management that some of the rotating machine were defective and not giving good scores to a friend playing it elsewhere in the city, but they threatened to ban me instead of fixing the problem due to a lack of budget. This was very reminiscent of my University workplace.
• At another point I was leading people through the arcade and we were upgrading random machines using wood as we went. They didn’t enjoy the arcade at first but really enjoyed the upgrading part, and had a great experience overall by the time they had to leave.
• At another point, a wild horse, white with shades of purple, wandered by the field outside of the arcade and then wandered into the arcade itself. I called Mom to tell her to come see the horse, while I also went to the fridge and pulled out some raw carrots to feed it. I asked the horse if it liked the raw carrots and it nodded yes.
• I don’t remember what most of the arcade looked like but there were several other events that took place in there, and there was a feeling of travel between different areas, or biomes, when going from one end to the other.

Aug 25 2021

• Satinel and I were playing a versus game on a large football field-like map with lots of different terrain, divided into two halves by some barrier that both of us could nonetheless cross. She was the pursuer, I was the pursued, and her goal was to try to defeat me or make me surrender or something like that while my goal was to evade her and survive for a time. She had a small motorbike she could ride and chase me with, and a bomb that she could throw down to summon 8 green-clad ninjas. There were also zombies on the map kind of shambling around uselessly.
• At one point, I was lying on the ground while she was charging at me on a motorbike. She skidded to a halt and accused me of not trying my best. I said that even though I looked lazy, I was feigning and was actually laying a trap for her and was going to scissor the front wheel of the motorbike with my two legs when it got close, and flip her off of it. I told her go back and to try charging at me again. She did. I scissored it just as planned. I then stole the bike and rode it away into a corner of the field, leaving it there without destroying it.
• I think I ended up winning the game, and we hung out a little after the game as well. There were lots of weird snippets surrounding the world just outside the game.
• For example, we spoke to some of the spectators in between the games, and one of them was a college girl who was living for the first time on her own. But she complained that her computer was always really slow from about 9am to 6pm or so. Upon investigation, we found that although her parents had given her the computer, her father had installed some sort of program on it (it had a five letter proper noun name) that restricted the Internet access on it during the day to encourage her to concentrate more on other things. I tried to google up a fix for it (this involved Googling its name, and then the phrase “tap water” after it) but there were no hits on it, so it must have been a very obscure/new program.
• She said it was fine, but I was mad on her behalf because I learnt that the money for the computer came from her winning a youkai stage recital competition, and so her parents had taken the money and then bought the computer but then bought something to hinder it without her knowledge too. Justin from work was here too and said something in support of the parents, so I ignored him and promptly forgot whatever it was he said.
• Her father was also eventually present and fell in love with one of the coordinators of the game, and there was a side romance between the two of them.
• Also, there was some sort of a meeting at a restaurant that was the 2nd shop from the left of a row of shops lined up against a street. The meeting was for the members of the society that ran the game, but most of the people there for the meeting were middle-aged men with beer bellies. I wasn’t comfortable joining them as a girl (and they didn’t seem to recognize me) so I pretended to be a regular customer and sat down at another table to order some food.
• There were other snippets like a tiny, floating jellyfish that slowly propelled itself through the air by contracting and kicking its tentacles like a swimmer, something about chicken karaage, and something about a rope and someone’s attempts to hang themselves, but I’m not sure how they all tied in to the overall plotline of the game.

Aug 26 2021

Dream 1

• This dream involved an outdoor arena area belonging to a circus, where children were running along wooden block platforms. Tasks needed to be done to machines on the ground along those platforms, so they’d occasionally run to a part that curved down toward the ground, and tend to the machine there without actually touching the ground.
• Another part of the dream took place within a HDB apartment in a flat, the latter of which was really high-class. The former owner of the apartment where we lived in, which for some reason was there hanging out with us, was pointing out to a TV program that he was being interviewed for how neighbouring units had things like fancy-coloured, ornate front doors, statues standing outside front doors, and bay windows that jut out of the walls.
• We had just moved on but were short on resources at some point so I figured we didn’t actually need a functional front door for now and could use the resources for that elsewhere instead, until we had more things to work with.
• Editor: The first bit definitely was a mix between our current group anime, Michiko to Hatchin, and our current group game, 7 Days to Die.

Dream 2

• This dream took place around a shopping centre area, where inside, a 2nd year University math lecture was about to take place in a lecture hall to go over answers from a test that I had also apparently done but understood nothing of when I looked at my paper and another student’s paper.
• Outside the shopping centre, a couple friends I was with, Harvey and Jonathan from high school, were supposed to follow me into the shopping centre and into the lecture hall, but they were distracted outside playing with a bear. I yelled at them to come in, because bears were dangerous and couldn’t be communicated with.
• But Jon remained outside and seemed to be having lots of fun, while Harvey came in and said that they could totally sort of communicate with the bear, and if I didn’t believe them but was interested, he’d give me a piggyback ride during class break so I could get up close to the bear too. I said no thanks.
• The professor entered and started the class around here, and Harvey and I went into a corridor at the back of the lecture hall, just out of sight of the professor and class. Harvey decided he was going to skip class, and waved me to follow as well as he stepped out the corridor to the right side (in full view of the class and the talking professor) and headed for the door. I shook my head and instead left the corridor on the left side to settle down in a seat at the back of the class next to a Muslim girl in a headdress.
• Near the end or just after class, I talked with a female friend who was from Singapore but was an international student in whatever location the dream was taking place in. She talked about how the Geylang neighbourhood in Singapore was usually really pretty at night with lights and all, although thanks to COVID-19 and the lack of tourists, they had switched off all the pretty lights for over a year now.
• I said that I had visited the area before my grandma passed away when she lived near there and also asked if she knew what other pretty night areas like that there were in Singapore. She thought a bit but didn’t give me an answer.
• Snippet: At some point, I remember helping a group of people prepare some food. In particular, I filled a pot with some item, and then filled it with water, in a methodology similar to washing rice, but the water turned green due to the food inside the pot instead. I did this a couple times at a sink to get rid of the particulates in the pot while a girl waited her turn behind me to use the sink.

Aug 27 2021

Dream 1

• My memories of this dream started out with me and some friends in a house, reinforcing it against a horde of really slow zombies ambling up to it 7 Days to Die style. This was part of “work”, and everyone at work had the ability to repair and build, but our team specifically occasionally got work tickets from a newly hired person from some other team who had no idea how to use their ability to build or repair, and we apparently had to train them each time.
• Connected to this dream world somehow was a train system with 3 stations and train tracks leading out from each one to meet in the middle, together forming the shape of a 人. The first station was the one we were at, the second one was a Goblin station (henceforth referred to as Gobstation), where they only spoke Korean and Japanese, and the third one was also another Gobstation where they did speak English. Part of the story had us making $20 payments to the goblins at various intervals, which could be done at either station. The English Gobstation also contained a museum we could visit.
• Each train that ran between these three stations would also slow down and stop at the junction where the three tracks meet, in order to manually adjust which track it was going on to next. Therefore, people also used this as a makeshift fourth stop, where they could jump down or board the train.
• People could even make their $20 payments at the junction instead of heading to either Gobstation. The $20 payments we made were part of a quest, and doing it at one or the other station would trigger some sort of effect, possibly similar to favour with the Gobstation. However, making the payment at the junction had a different effect altogether, that involved not alerting either Gobstation that the payment was made, and this was sometimes beneficial depending on the payee’s ultimate goals.
• At one point, I headed over to the English Gobstation, paid my $20 there, and then entered the museum. Because I had paid there that time, the goblins were friendly, and the goblin children wandering around the museum smiled and waved at us as we wandered past a room full of artifact display cases into a second room, where we were about to try to steal some specific artifact from.
• At another point, I headed to the Korean/Japanese Gobstation and got to hang out with Kana Hanazawa on the train there, who proceeded to softly sing me a nice song in Japanese. We were both on the train, and we were each holding on to the same vertical pole on the train with a hand, and those hands were basically touching up against each other, Because we had the same birthdays, people on the train whispered and pointed at us and wondered if we were going to cause a black hole to form. We paid our $20 at the Gobstation and left without any metaphysical incident though.
• There were also events that took place back at our home station. For example, at one point, just like in real life, Johannes, Sandy and Ronnie (but not Matt!) started a D&D 5th Edition game and started prepping for a game session. I was not interested in joining them but did watch them prep. As the DM, Johannes suggested that during play breaks, the three of them could all go to the train junction to volunteer.
• We also hired a new person at some point to our team, and taught him the trick to pay at the train junction, and told him that for now until he understood the system better, he should start with that.
• Editor: Kana Hanazawa is indeed a Japanese singer and my favourite voice actress, partly because we do indeed share the same birthday (and so I consider her my spirit animal of sorts), though she’s five years younger than me.

Dream 2

• This one took place in a shopping centre. I was seated there at a round table in the middle of one of the side corridors, eating lunch and doing some work or something while waiting for classes to start. Mom and Jon were there too, but each was at a different table.
• The two of them got up to walk across the mall to buy some snacks, and although I wasn’t explicitly invited, I also got up a little bit afterwards and trailed them, about 10-15 metres behind them. They reached a KFC and ordered some potato as a dessert snack, while I sat down on a high-backed chair nearby to partially conceal myself from them, although I was wearing a bright pink shirt and so felt really noticeable anyway. Indeed, once they were done the order and were heading back, Jon waved to me on the way.
• I waved back and let them return without disturbing them because no one was tending to our laptops, especially Jon‘s, and the faster they got back, the less likely that it would be stolen. Once they were gone, I myself joined the queue to the store.
• There was a rotund male cook and a female attendant or two in the cramped stall, and one of them was trying to wave the line of people into two lines. She waved at me to ask me what I wanted but I said I was still looking at the menu. She tsked at me. They had a potato dish as well as several types of meat dishes, and I eventually settled on the potato dish. The male cook took my order and started openly flirting with me as well, and I politely laughed at his jokes.
• On the way back, I somehow ended up with someone else and we both peeked into a room where a club of female students were playing ping pong, and they saw us and invited us in. I was reluctant but followed the other person in because they were interested, and I was accompanying him because I had either some sort of power to safeguard him or some sort of responsibility to take care of him.
• The club was obviously trying to recruit me though, and the leader stood on the other side of the room and fired ten ping pong balls toward my way and the open front door without any explanation. Without even really trying, I caught eight of them with my bare hands or between my fingers, deflected the other two, and also found a ninth ping pong ball sitting on the floor somewhere that I added to the 8. She said it was perfect and begged us to play a game or two.
• We had to wear cosplay outfits to play though, even though all of the other club members were just in their PE uniforms. The person I was with was given a nice animal outfit or mask of some kind, possibly a lion, but I was given a pair of long, pink ears attached to a double-layered cloth strap that was meant to be placed on the top of my head, with the cloth straps trailing down over both ears and tied off below my chin. This partially obscured my field of view, and I could also smell a very faint, but not unpleasant, sweaty scent from the previous user of the ears.
• This was obviously meant to be some sort of handicap and yet also a training device at the same time that would make me much stronger. Also, as punishment, whenever a point was scored against me by my opponent, the tips of the long bunny ears would crinkle and fold over to point forwards, and the magical ears would then force my fingers to bend like claws and my hands to act like paws, and I would then be made to say Meow in a cute anime girl sort of pose. This was embarrassing, but I also found this strangely liberating. And due to this last feature, the club called this headband/mask Nekomimi, or cat ears in Japanese, even though the actual ears were shaped like rabbit ears.
• After I untangled myself from that club room, the world outside had shifted to a side-scroller platformer, though one where I could only really see half the room at once at most. My game character had transformed into a unique bonus character which had two special passive abilities — the first was that if I was ever in the room with someone else, there would be a 4 second countdown timer, after which I (and possibly the other person, that part was unclear) would have the lower half of my body pixellate and crumble into a mass of small, overlapping black boxes, slowing my speed until I moved out of the room. The second was that the game would also automatically roll a 6-sided dice for me against the person I was in the room with, and if I won the dice roll, I passively stole an item from them. This happened several times even though I was largely trying to avoid people, though many people simply had no items to steal.
• I “left” the immediate zone that the shopping centre was in, and headed out to some NPCs that I had been to earlier in the dream. I ended up outdoors on a hillside with wide-open meadows all around, although the outside world was also still vaguely partitioned into “rooms” that one had to travel between, computer game style. There was an anthropomorphic bunny there living in a burrow house carved into the hillside, plus a mole and three other characters there in the room as well. The house had a cute little circular porthole window with a cross over the hole set next to the door — or rather, where the door should have been, as it had been stolen earlier in the game and I had skipped it at that point because I had no way of finding out what happened to it.
• Now, however, I figured I could help him, and for some reason I did not pixellate in the room even though there were five other characters there. Possibly because they were NPCs, although I thought some of those I pixellated and stole against earlier were, too. It turned out that a crow had stolen the door and was flying somewhere up in the top part of this zone, and the crow had also stolen a bunch of research notes that the rabbit had made about the stars. He was really upset about the notes, more so than the door.
• Amidst cries of how tragic and how much of a setback it was for all the star data to be stolen away, I discovered that I had apparently been stealing passive abilities as well, perhaps from the creatures that had no items, and one of the abilities that I could toggle on was the ability to fly. So I flew up into the top half of the zone, past some odd rafters that held up what must have been an invisible “ceiling” to this room (despite the room being an outdoor, open-air room with a clear view of the stars), and looked around for the crow. I didn’t see it, so I figured it flew off into one of the adjoining “rooms”.

Aug 28 2021

Dream 1

• I had boarded a train with two friends, but even though we all got on on the same time, somehow I got separated from them into a different train after some time, even though the trains were running basically parallel to each other toward the same destination. Instead, I sat down next to an old woman, and began talking to her.
• She was around 100 years old, and I had a vague sense of her presence being similar to my grandma, even though she was a completely different person in the dream. She said that she had no ID card, and had long forgotten the details of her birth, and I told her that she should get an ID card and that no one was ever too old for that. I told her I would help with the process, and looked out the window as the train crested through the sky over a grand building, the Raffles Hotel in Singapore. I pointed to it and said that it was a sign, and she could use that as an approximate birthplacec when signing up for her ID card since she didn’t remember exactly where she was born.
• We were taking the train to a fair as well and she wondered why we were coming today, Wednesday, instead of tomorrow, since the fair had a free admittance day on Thursday. I said that that was true, but that also meant that it would be a lot more crowded on Thursday. She ahhh’d. We looked out of the window at the fairgrounds down below and saw lots of people walking around like ants, but also plenty of empty space between them, that would allow for social distancing.

Dream 2

• I returned from a faraway place to an outdoor fair where I was living, and one of the things that I could do/needed to do in the fair was to buy a new smartphone. There was a new iPhone model or something premiering at the fair, however it was too pricey for me and after shopping around for alternatives, I found a Sanyo phone that I had never heard of before, that looked new but cost only half the price, about $400 or so. I suspected it wasn’t actually new though, and this was reinforced when I noticed that the phone not only could play MP3s, but also had an ejectable cover in front to insert a cassette tape into.
• At one point, I found a removable floor tile in the fairgrounds and open it, slipping down into a secret room below where there were a bunch of paintings by famous celebrities who were not actually painters. A couple people I knew also found their way into that room through different means, and we stayed there a bit until we were rescued and brought out by a passing staff member on a vehicle.
• At another point, someone I was with needed to get his COVID-19 vaccine at the fair, and he ended up getting it from a rather sketchy store in order to skip the lineup or something. We questioned the validity of the jab but he said that there was a legitimate doctor there and he had received the jab after asking about the vaccine even though it wasn’t the official booth.
• Snippet: There was something about a job involving bedframes, there was only one worker required a day this week and I was only given one shift in the week. The next week I was scheduled three times, on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, but next week’s jobs were considered “weaker” or less strenuous jobs.
• Snippet: We had to pick a door out of several doors with different types of defend quests tied to each one. A mage girl in our party, jumping the gun a little, picked the most difficult one without enough discussion on our part, but we forgave her as she was still just a child. The quest still turned out to be very much doable anyway.

Aug 29 2021

• I was following a group of five workmates or friends being led by Jeremy around a building as we completed daily work tasks, but I didn’t like how he was either not wanting to do something or just plain lost at one point, so I somewhat forcefully took over the group leadership and brought everyone down some corridor to a room where we were supposed to do some sort of test, explaining out loud where I was going and what we were going to do as we went.
• This test was Part 2 of one that we had done earlier in the dream, and the sheets of paper from the first part were still sitting in a folder in a side room attached to the classroom. They were unmarked, but the folder itself was seated on some sort of strange white panel and screen on a desk. I couldn’t find the test sheets for Part 2 of the test and asked Jeremy if he knew where it was. He smiled and said he’d tell me for $5, I smiled back and told him that we would all get $5 tomorrow morning after we finished both tests and submitted all our daily tasks, and I couldn’t give him an advance on that fee.
• An attendant of some kind appeared to break the tension between us, pressing a button on the panel that the folder was on, which caused a piece of paper to appear on top of it. This was the Part 2 test, and she showed me the sheet and asked me, as the leader, to quickly vet the questions to see if they looked correct before she took it off to the printers.
• She was apparently from an organization that helped teachers generate tests based on a syllabus that the teachers provided them, and what we had provided them was some sort of general science curriculum. They had generated a test with a bunch of true/false and short answer questions, and although I couldn’t actually understand any of the questions, they felt right so I nodded to her and she took away the test.
• I noticed from the answer key she left behind that the answers for the true/false segment were TTFFTTFFF, but that answer key was rapidly disintegrating on its own since the attendant had now left, so that’s as far as I saw.
• In another part of the dream in the same world, I led the group to a darkened rooftop where there were a bunch of storage chests with items that hadn’t been brought over to our “main base”. We had set up here once long ago, and had thought about moving all these items over to our main base at first to consolidate our rseources, but decided to leave them here so that we would still have some resources and items we could use if our main base got wiped out or became inaccessible somehow.
• While on that darkened rooftop, I also saw a lone student that we had met elsewhere earlier in the dream cycle up to the rooftop and place his bicycle and an item in a personal chest of his that was set slightly further away than all our other chests. While he hadn’t touched our chests, he was using them as a protection in numbers thing to help protect his own chest.
• Snippet: My family, particularly Jon, were involved in one part of the dream that also had something to do with baths, and waiting for something or someone, I think. I don’t remember the details though.
• Snippet: In another part of the dream, a woman had a giant hippo stuck in a vertical pipe in her house, and was illegally feeding that hippo something to create a white liquid of some sort that trickled out of the pipe for her to collect. It was very tasty and was prized by other people as it was supposed to be no longer producible.