Dreams

I finished the last page of my dream journal.. I mean scribble pad this week, the physical one next to my bed, and had to look around for a new journal to use. This week I had many long dreams, although there was a day where I couldn’t recall anything at all and it bugged me through the entire day because bits and pieces of it felt like they were on the tip of my tongue the entire day.

Sep 27 2021

• I was seated on a bus on the way to University, next to a girl from the large Japanese idol group AKB48 who was on her way to a variety show shoot. A couple of her groupmates were in front of me but largely ignored us in favour of talking to each other, and I think they were all in light disguises so the public wouldn’t easily recognize them. I did recognize her, and I liked the group, but I had no idea about, nor did I follow, the individual members.
• She got off a phone call with her children and sighed a bit, and she asked if I wanted some pancakes that she had. I shook my head and said I don’t eat sweet things, and the rejection (and lack of fangirling or fanboying — not sure what gender I was here) seemed to win some points in her book as she opened up and we got to chatting.
• She said she had to make some sort of folded pancake dish for her children tomorrow morning but had no time to get the ingredients do so, so I offered to take her shopping and/or buy the ingredients for her after my classes and her recording were over. She looked relieved by that and accepted, but asked if I would mind also making the pancakes and the ingredients. I said that I could make the ingredients, but I could not make the pancake part of it. She had said that they were made in a toaster, and I didn’t own a toaster. We puzzled over it a while and figured out that we could probably do it if she made the pancake part of it and I made the ingredients and we brought it all over somewhere to combine them after.
• We exchanged friendly goodbyes as the bus arrived at the University, and I got off on the stop before her, by a bus stop that was fashioned after the Health Sciences LRT one. It was actually slightly further than taking the bus to the next stop where she was going to get off, but it would give her more space and less chance of being discovered if I left earlier, so I did.
• I crossed the road, then headed up some long bridge toward my classroom building. The bridge had a left half which was a gentle, inclining ramp leading up, and a right half that consisted of actual stairs, and I used the right half as most people were using the left half, making it a lot more crowded. I was about 1 hour ahead of schedule (it was 8 am and my classes started at 9) but I had to pass through airport customs at the top with my passport, and wanted to get through as quickly as possible.
• The top of the right half, as expected, was pretty clear and I had no issues getting through. The checkpoint was a two way checkpoint and I noticed that the door leading in the other direction, from the side I was heading to to the side I was coming from, was swivelled around entirely so that the door wouldn’t work without someone on my side first swivelling it back, as the handle ended up on our side. This was apparently because too many people used this door inappropriately when leaving, and so it was only open for specific hours during the day.
• I also heard two people, stuck in the queue on the left ramp, talking about why Trudeau’s passports didn’t contain a sticker in them like other countries but only an ink stamp to show its validity. I don’t remember the exact answer but it had to do with a petition that a sports team that had to cross the US-Canada border many times did at some point in the past that simplified the process greatly to what it was today.
• Once past the checkpoint, I went to class, but first ended up in a room with a ledge that oversaw a stage, where several members of AKB, including the friend that I had made, were rehearsing on. Settling on the edge of the ledge to read a book, I looked down encouragingly at my friend, who seemed a bit nervous at first but calmed down and waved once she noticed me above. We didn’t otherwise interact and the group eventually left through the far side of the stage to the variety show set to start their TV recording.
• There were a few TV segments in my dream but I don’t remember the details, except for one segment where the host of the TV show held up an opened can of tuna and said that they were going to randomly draw one of the idol girls, out of the 30 of them or so on stage, to have to drink a cup full of the water/oil residue from a number of these tuna cans, extracted and poured into a cup. The oil had been cooked until sizzling too, and was currently cooling down on the table behind him. The girls and audience ewww’d a bit, and he suggested that the poor girl who was chosen should probably also down her mug of beer (apparently all of them had one..) in between gulps to help with the taste, but then she’d have to hold in her urge to go to the toilet until the studio’s mandated break in 2 hours. I never saw who “won” that random selection, not that I would have been able to recognize any of them besides my friend.
• On the school side of things, I don’t remember much happening but I do remember a large lecture theatre that I went to attend a math lecture in. I was seated on the front left far side of the room, whereas the doors to the lecture theatre were on the right and the door would occasionally creak open as a student arrived late.
• There was also something going on by a student group on campus somewhere that involved maintaining and compiling some sort of list for environmental reasons, and then submitting an updated copy to a central database which was a glowing, holographic book that was floating in a room somewhere. This kept spawning a duplicate entry of the page in the book though, instead of replacing the old page, which perplexed the administrators until they figured out what was wrong.

Sep 28 2021

• One of the earlier and mostly forgotten segments of my dream involved meeting people in my Multicultural Learning Pod in my dreams as well, though they were different people from the girls I knew in real life.
• Another early segment involved me following a Youtuber or Twitch streamer who was streaming on his phone as he walked around the neighbourhood. It was past midnight and everything was closed, and we had no real way to return home for the night. He wanted to show his viewers a trick, however, and transformed into a girl before entering a 24 hour gym and community center, and saying that if you ever had to rough it out overnight, you could take a shower in one of the toilets or locker rooms in this building if you were a girl. I did want to do that, as I had been walking around town all day and was lugging a big backpack with me, I just needed him to leave the area first since he was streaming on a phone camera.
• I did this by heading to a somewhat crowded (for midnight) train station and casually waiting for a train there until I saw him approaching the station as well. I really didn’t plan on leaving the area yet but didn’t want to make him suspicious of my true intentions. I decided to take the train one station south, disembark there and wait for the second train heading back north, and catch that train back to the original station.
• A bit later on, I was looking through old newspaper clippings to try to dig up family history and childhood memories. I found some clippings from when Dad worked as a real estate agent and helped sell apartments in buildings. He had circled buildings on maps in old newspaper clippings and talked about the prices of apartments in them. Or the lack of good housing deals in an area.
• I then found a newspaper clipping that jogged up an old memory of a trip that we took when we were young, where our low-flying plane caught in a tree and crashed on an island of some kind, with my Mom hugging and protecting me while my Dad cussed and tried to protect the two of us.
• Everyone was fine, but we were stuck on the island until a bunch of famous sports personalities, including Wayne Gretzky, came to us together with some army soldiers on a large navy ship, and rescued all of us back to the mainland. And I even saw a picture of Dad, Mom, my 6 year old (or so) self, and my 1-2 year old sister on a motorboat along with some soldiers in the newspapers.
• There was an ice hockey tripleheader being played at this point on TV too, complete with colour commentators. 3 matches back to back to back, all featuring the Edmonton Oilers in their arena. They won the first two games in OT, and the commentators were saying how they were finally turning things around after losing 4 games in a row. I knew it was thanks to me that they were winning now because I was watching them and giving them good luck.
• The airplane crash felt like a very trivial event in the “now” state of my dream though, but I decided I was going to write about it in my blog.
• The dream meandered on, and at some point the topic of going overseas came up. We were gathered around the upstairs living room table in our 4012 house, and Dad said he was going to go to South Korea once the COVID-19 restrictions lifted, and had a spare ticket for someone else in the family to come along. I wanted to go but said I could pay my own way and he could give Mom or one of my siblings the ticket instead.
• A bit further on, and I was involved in a fight with someone else, we had a bunch of tables in the basement between the two of us and we had both collected magical allies and created magical potions and things for the fight. There were a bunch of onlookers too. Before the fight, I examined a table that contained an alchemical alembic-like structure and some orange liquid in it and joked that I should smash that as soon as possible once the fight started as that was obviously some sort of emergency buff/juice that would prolong the fight later on.
• One of the tables in the middle of the room, the one my opponent was “starting at”, was also emanating a noisy humming noise, though I never found out what that was about. I was confident I’d win, though.
• When the fight started, I remember my first ally being something that looked like a cross between the Hulk from the Marvel universe, with a neck bolt through his head. He was beating up my opponent’s first ally before suddenly doubling over as the opponent did something to him. My Hulk began to shrink and shrivel up while the opponent became bigger and bigger, as though not only sucking out the life force from my ally but also his form. My Hulk then died, but his disembodied head floated out of the corpse and over to a table that I owned, consuming a nebulous green liquid from a bowl there, which resurrected him and re-formed his body as well. The fight then continued on for some time.
• Even further on in the dream, I was on a bus watching an X-Men/Marvel variety show of some kind where the actors playing the characters were standing at quiz buzzer tables and interacting with each other. There was a compatibility test sort of thing going on, where they answered questions and supported/disagreed with each other’s opinions and by doing so, drifted along a scale that ranked how close they were to all the other cast members in terms of both ideology and friendship. Some of them were really close together, while a couple were really far out and kind of standing alone in the studio.
• I was then contacted by some work mates who said that Shelley needed help transcribing that show and specifically figuring out some of the references that she had no idea about. I helped her with that, and there were several references to do with Vietnam, one to do with Black Widow’s dual pistols, and either their name or the name of a signature move that she did with them, and several references to the actors and actresses themselves that required Googling to figure out.
• Editor: I had indeed just had my first MLP meeting with my podmates that ended an hour or so before bed, so in hindsight I’m not surprised they show up, though they weren’t the same people as those from my RL pod. Also, that plane trip and crash was an entirely fabricated memory even though I “recalled” it from a previous dream or childhood memory.

Sep 29 2021

• Nak had just learnt to drive a small pedalling car and Jah and I were both following him in our own little pedal cars as he tested out the car. I was telling him about the timing — for example, at a traffic light or 3/4-way stop, it was customary to stop and count to 3 before starting up the car again. As we were driving around, we could see that Nak‘s timing was way off since it was his first day, but Jah agreed that with a bit of experience he would be a pro at driving.
• The road we were driving on was suddenly going through HUB Mall, the long and thin single-aisle mall at our University, with a one way road down each side of the aisle and divided by tables and signs and various other mall objects in the middle. Nak went ahead of us and we lost him, but we started checking out the various stores because we figured that we might be able to get a clue as to what Nak‘s real day job was if we just could find him.
• Eventually, Jah found Nak in the lobby of a hotel, and Jah had some sort of a companion with him, who came out to flag me by as I went by in my car to tell me where the two of them were.
• I’m not sure what the resolution to that scene was, but the scene soon shifted to me joining a courier company for work. I found out that a girl from class that I really admired was in the same company as well. She had a nickname that was about 12 letters or so long, and was three English words or names joined together, all lowercase.
• Anyway, my first “job” was from a client whose name started with C and was 7 or 8 characters long, but someone thought his name was Clint at some point so that nickname stuck internally for us. He had a somewhat dubious/illegal package that he wanted us to pick up, and gave us a meeting place near the other end of the mall as well as a phone number to call him at with a codeword if we could not make it.
• But soon after that, just before the pickup time, we received a phone call from a woman who also knew the codeword. Once she confirmed I knew the codeword, she jammed my phone remotely, rendering me unable to make any phone calls. I had a colleague with me though and we tried to rush to the location, but we found that the description of the location was bad and it was nowhere to be found.
• We saw a news report that there had been a gunfight nearby involving the man and a young boy bystander had been shot, but the man and his package had completely disappeared.
• We were really suspicious about this though and met up in our office again, and called the police who sent policemen and one detective over. We told them the story, then explained about the phone call and noted that everyone in our office had heard my call and also had strong alibis, including me. The police agreed that it was likely that the client was trying to fake his own kidnapping or death and use us, and the meeting information he gave us, as someone to pin the blame of his disapperance on. But that he had gone too far now since a bystander had been injured or killed.
• Snippet: Earlier on, there was a scene involving Jon in his 6-8 years old form and I, as well as possibly my mother. We were going to attend some sort of big event and there were several locations that you could see it from, we had tickets to the largest venue (which might also have been inside HUB Mall, or a place very similar to it..) but Jon was going to see if he could find/exchange for tickets at one of the smaller venues located somewhere else instead.
• Snippet: At some point, there was also a shower scene where I was showing a girl friend that you could take two shower heads, adjust their nozzles a certain way and point both downwards at a certain angle, and the water jet streams would collide with each other and form a third column of water that gushed up as high as the first two showerheads. The three streams together would form a sort of W shape, except the two bottom ends of the W were virtually touching, and the third stream was gushing up from there.

Sep 30 2021

• I was part of a group of students doing some sort of onboarding/welcome greeting event for new incoming students at the University. This involved maybe 4 or 5 student representatives at a time, and there was a table surrounded by cubicle walls in the middle of a quad area that we were seated at. It started about a week before school and ended on the actual first day of school itself, but we knew somehow that the last day would be the quietest day by far. We talked about bringing along books to reach or TV or anime to watch that day.
• On the last day, I was chatting to one of the male student reps whom I had befriended and he invited us to ski and snowboard at a hill by his house after the volunteering event. I think this was the culmination of a series of events where we had ended up with skis but had nowhere nearby to use them, but I don’t remember clear details on that part.
• He described his house as an apartment in a little three-storey apartment block stuck behind three large factories between the block and the main road, so no one in the block had a nice view at all, all they saw when looking out of the windows was largely the back of the factory. However, on the left side of the building was a small hill that was covered in snow and children used to clamber to the top of and slide down on sleds, and that helped made up for the bad location and view.
• It wasn’t a very well-formed hill and didn’t have much snow on it, but it was also right next to a much taller mountain, about three times or more the height of the hill. I asked why that mountain couldn’t be used, and he said (and showed me on a map) that there there many brown splotches on the mountain itself that were rare earth (or hard earth) deposits that were hard and painful if you fell on them, and they didn’t hold snow well and most snow that landed on the deposits melted, so there were dangerous “holes” everywhere in the snow if you tried to sled or ski down it.
• While describing the home and the hill, he absent-mindedly boarded a bus at the bus stop that would lead home. I had to step onto the bus as well and pull him off the bus, jerking him back to his senses. He apologized to the bus door and a bemused passenger next to it, and said he’d board it again in a few hours once school was over.
• In another part of the dream, Satinel and Jah were on e-sports teams, Satinel representing Unicorn Gaming while Jah representing SK Gaming. But they were still friends and were playing some sort of League of Legends type game with each other, one on one, as solo practice. A few people saw the TV stream of it and thought it was a full on SK vs Unicorn match, but I corrected them on that.
• The game involved a map and the two players splitting up from the start to go kill things in “the jungle” to level up. There were tons of items and artifacts and powerups lying around too, and no annoying minions or lanes, so it was just the levelling efficiency and gearing up part of League of Legends. In addition, each could have a ball of light helper controlled by another player, and I was Satinel‘s ball of light.
• Several matches were played, but the main one I remember involved a map that everyone agreed was really terrible. Both players started in the middle of a long, horizontal, white platform that was bereft of any mobs/items/powerups, and at the left and right ends of the horizontal platforms were short vertical platforms that led north and south, and then an additional horizontal platform on either end of the vertical platforms, four in total, that ran parallel to the main central platform but stretched back toward the center. Basically take an “E”-shaped piece, and a “Ǝ”-shaped piece, and join the two pieces together in the middle by the second horizontal line in both shapes, and that was the approximate shape of the arena.
• You could kind of see the edges of the northern and southern platforms while walking along the middle walkway, but not much more than that, due to fog of war. People hated the map for this because there were basically four different, separate levelling areas instead of one giant one where you could run into each other, and you had to traverse the entire length of the horizontal platform to get to the other half for PvP, and disadvantage yourself by giving up some measure of levelling to do so, since the horizontal platform had nothing on it that you could level off of while walking down it.
• Satinel and I went left and up to start, whereas Jah and his companion went right. About halfway through the levelling process, Jah and his companion quietly snuck left anyway to try to find Satinel and attack her. But instead of going left and up, they went left and down instead, because I had gone down and cleared the starting area of the bottom left platform for a few extra levels even though the helper companion was basically a healer, buffer and sentry that always lagged a few levels behind the main player. Jah mistook this cleared out area to the south as a sign that Satinel had gone that way, since she had skipped the very first powerup on the left and up side to try to conceal her presence.
• This trickery caused Jah to lose his main weapon, the element of surprise, and so he was easily defeated once Satinel and I realized that he was there, due to the level discrepancy from him travelling over here.
• Snippet: At some point, possibly during the orientation, there was an electronic tablet playing a Youtube montage video of a bunch of 15-second political ads joined together. The first video showed a number of right-wing/conservative ads, and the second video showed a number of left-wing/liberal ads.
• Snippet: At another point, there was a vase of flowers that I was arranging. Nearly all the flowers came in pairs, and I put all the paired flowers next to each other, but there was one single bright yellow flower that had no partner. I put it in the middle of the vase, as the centerpiece.
• Snippet: Part of the dream also involved the AKB0048 and Symphogear animes somehow, but I am not sure in what context.
• Editor: SK was modelled after SK Gaming, and Unicorn was probably modelled after Unicorns of Love, both of them European-based professional esports teams that were around when I was watching League of Legends LCS tournaments many years ago. Also, the timing and setting of the volunteering event was definitely influenced by the International Students Campus Check-in event that I volunteered for a month ago, since that also took place a week before school started, ending on the first day of classes, and featured us at tables in a building lobby.

Oct 02 2021

• I remember visiting a large communal mixed-gender washroom in my University — it was a huge square room with at least 20 urinals and five or six bathroom stalls. However, only about four or five urinals were open, everything else had do not use signs on them and this literally pissed people off, because University students being students, the ones that were open weren’t managed very well, a couple were clogged or very dirty, etc.
• The custodian who was in charge of the toilet came walking by in a janitor uniform that looked vaguely like a police uniform. He was asked by a classroom of students just outside the washroom if he could open more urinals and stalls, and he said no, he didn’t feel like it.
• A couple people raised their voices in protest at first, but I raised my hand in the air and asked him a question. I told him that although I was the only girl there in the class of 20+, I couldn’t actually use the urinals and needed at least one stall open to use. He stopped short in surprise, then grudgingly admitted I was right and went to pull out his keys. He said to the rest to not bother arguing any more as none of their arguments could top mine. All the boys stood up and gave me a thundering round of applause.
• He ended up opening one bathroom stall. I immediately stood up to go use it but several boys rushed ahead of me as well, and I ended up stuck 6th in a queue outside the cubicle that snaked along the walls and into an alcove, forming a bit of a U-shape. There were people who joined the queue after me too.
• Once I reached the front of the queue, it was no longer a queue for the toilet stall — instead, there were two stalls selling meat, each one staffed by a Frenchman (or Spanish?) dressed in white like a baker, complete with a baker’s hat on top of their heads. Each stall served one customer and only one customer at a time — everyone else had to line up — this was something to do with a custom from France (Spain?) where only one person was allowed into a store at a time in order for the shopkeeper to be able to give them their full, undivided attention that they deserve.
• My shopkeeper inquired what kind of meats I wanted to buy, gesturing to trays in front of him that I could see from the other side of the glass counter. There were different types and slices of meat, and I already knew I would be buying some of the things I saw, like a tray of fishballs that I saw since I loved fishballs.
• However, I didn’t know what a lot of the different meats were, and I asked the shopkeeper if he could tell me a bit about what they were. Instead, as part of the service excellence theme, he started giving me samples of the food, starting with a prawn with some sort of pork filling, then a prawn with no pork filling. I noticed there was still a queue outside for the “bathroom stall” but didn’t really care at this point as I tried a lot of samples and finished my shopping.
• Once I left the room and then the building, I saw someone from work rush toward me in the snowy weather from the building across the road where all our offices were. He was dressed in pyjama bottoms and it was apparently his birthday, and he was headed for the large washroom I was at, but once he saw me he seemed to instantly understand the full story, muttered something about needing to find a better washroom instead, and hurried back the way he came from, toward the offices.
• The snow disappeared as I started to walk around campus. There were large paths students could follow, and a corded fence cordoned off the path from the grassy fields that the path wended through. There were some pits and “holes” in the grassy area that were marked off with danger signs and I knew that falling into them would make you fall out of the map. Parts of the grassy area were also inclines that were so steep that they were practically a vertical drop, and that was considered dangerous too.
• However, there were also animals wandering around in the grassy area — rabbits, squirrels and more. I found a black, male squirrel perched on a grassy mound and staring in one direction, with its entire body tense and pointing in that direction like a nocked and extended arrow. I contemplated jumping the fence and trying to capture it because I hadn’t collected that shade of squirrel yet in some sort of game I was evidently playing. I also noticed another black squirrel curled up sleeping nearby, though that was a female variant of the squirrel.
• Snippet: I had to pick a dream to assign to someone and picked one that more or less was identical to a dream that they were having already. We then had to film the dream on a beach and that drew the ire of some beachgoers because 1/3 of the beach was sealed off for our project. They hired the ghost girl from the Drugstore in Another World anime to give me a tin can of sweets with the words “Get Lost” on them, she had no idea that she was sending me a rude gesture when she cheerfully came by to talk to me.

Oct 03 2021

• There was a group of young adventurers, mostly male, being held in some sort of dubious cultist camp. Their role in the camp felt like a mix between recruits and prisoners, but the relationship between them, the cultists, and other factions in the camp was cordial.
• Many of the adventurers also had skills or traits of some kind, and they were “activated” by the leader of the cultists, a high cleric/priest person, in a central, walled room in the camp. I don’t remember the process here, but I do remember some sort of small handheld wheel device with hiragana on it (and its first two characters being き (ki) and ざ (za), and some drama around certain adventurers that disliked their assigned skill or trait and either got into an argument with the high priest, or tried to/managed to get them swapped out for another trait by him.
• They also had people outside the camp who were being brought in as new recruits/prisoners on carts every now and then. In particular, there was one guy who was very important to the plot, and the high priest specifically needed the adventurer’s companion, a catgirl who was already present and held captive in the camp, to be the one to murder him because she had a certain power needed to nullify a skill or trait of his.
• A shadowy priestess in a hooded robe befriended the catgirl and talked to her, finding out that she had a separate goal of trying to look for (and possibly kill) someone else in the camp. She reported back to the high priest and one of his subordinates that the catgirl seemed to be unaware of her power that could save the adventurer faction, and could definitely be influenced to murder her owner, as she wasn’t too attached to him.
• With that said, the high priest began to kill off the adventurer faction by luring them into the central room in the camp and murdering them, one by one. The room was made out of sandstone or mudstone, with yellow brick walls that were a bit misshapen and a door on either end of the room on opposite walls that led out into a corridor that circled the room. While out in that corridor, the “viewer” could hear a soft crunch or death cry noise whenever an adventurer got lured in and finished.
• The adventurers outside in the camp never seemed to notice those noises, however. But they weren’t entirely stupid either, and did notice their dwindling numbers and suspect foul play. They got into a fight with the cleric faction, which ended up with two of them outside the room with swords drawn and facing about seven clerics and guards in a standoff. One of the two adventurers had a sword with a really, really long (and somewhat floppy) rubber blade.
• The high priest, as well as a third adventurer, came along to de-escalate the situation, which succeeded, and he invited the adventurer with the long rubber blade into the room to talk as part of conflict deescalation, since he had started it all. The adventurer agreed, they went into the room, and there was a crunch and death cry soon after.
• While the other two adventurers again did not hear it, they did suspect something was up, and they circled the corridor and found themselves outside the other door to the room, across from the one that the high priest and the rubber sword adventurer took. One of them said that he would knock on the door and then push it open, the other said to not bother with the knock and just push it open, and they ended up doing the latter.
• Opening the door, they caught the high priest in the act — the third adventurer lay on the floor dead and bleeding, while the high priest himself was bloodied, as he was some sort of vampire that attacked by sucking out the life force of his victim. The first adventurer charged him and decapitated him, however his spirit was not connected to the body, and that spirit floated over to the second adventurer to try to suck out his soul and take over his body.
• However, as he was weakened from just having sucked out the spirit of the dead adventurer, and the second adventurer was a young, strapping lad full of vigour and heart, a blue gauge popped up and showed the psychic struggle between the two, and it showed the high priest only managing to get the second adventurer’s life force down to about 80-90% before the adventurer managed to stabilize himself thanks to deep, steady breathing, and then was able to crush the high priest’s spirit and push it back out of the body. This finally killed the high priest.
• Snippet: Earlier on in the camp, when things were a lot more cordial, I feel like my family was in a room there watching television. Specifically, we were watching a recorded concert from the idol group Wake Up, Girls!. It was a two-day concert, so we watched the two days on different days in the dream as well, but on the second day the video that we used had no audio attached to it, so I said I’d download a FLAC version of their album later on instead. Also, talking hamsters might have been somehow involved.