Dreams

Jan 10 2022

• I had dreams partially revolving around being an idol manager, and partially revolving around being on holiday in some overseas hotel, first on a related business trip and then morphing into a version with my family around. The idol manager segments still bled into the trip though so the two basically happened simultaneously.
• The hotel dreams I remember involved a VIP office that we qualified for and used on the 9th and 10th floor, although it was normally reserved for much more expensive clients. There was a regular elevator we could use, but it was always busy and a couple times in the dream the lobby and elevator itself got filled with really weird people that looked like they were here for some filming — at one point there were dozens of identical-looking boys with shaved heads and tanned faces who looked like they had leprosy, as some of them had started breaking out in sores. At another point there were lots of impossibly small children waiting for the lift. In both cases I excused myself from the crowd, walking over top of the waiting crowds as I extricated myself and went to use the VIP elevator instead.
• The VIP elevator started on a different lobby, and didn’t travel along a vertical shaft from the elevator lobby — it swung out from the hotel, circled the hotel on a monorail, and then connected back to the hotel on a vertical elevator shaft on the other side of the building before going up to our desired floor.
• At some point, I had the chance to buy an upgrade to add to our hotel room or something, which was another room that I “bought” and “attached” to the outside of one of the exterior doors. The manager or owner figure we were with cautioned me to make sure to remember to lock the door to that new room so people outside couldn’t come into it. I said that I had left the connecting door unlocked since it was no longer leading to the outside, but had locked the other door leading from the new room, which was now the new exterior door.
• As a manager, I had doors/buttons with training tasks on them, and I could add modifiers to them to challenge the idol girls, of which I believed I had two under my care. One of the girls wanted to do tasks with one of the modifiers but it required me to be level 10 to assign them. However, I found out that even though I was level 9 and change, I seemed to have access to that modifier button, or at least to see its availability on some of the doors.
• At one point during the business trip/VIP segment, I was with a senpai as we travelled up to our hotel room, and that other person got miffed that I didn’t use an honourific in a greeting once I came out of the elevator or came out of the hotel bathroom or something. The honourific in question apparently wasn’t actually a standalone word, but it was the left side radical of the Chinese word 给, and I argued that I had used no other words that I could have attached that radical onto, so I didn’t think I was at fault and that they were overreacting.
• On the family side of things, there was a train station attached one of the bottom floors of the hotel and I travelled by train with my family a couple times. I remember also being on the train platform, which was a square hub with coloured train lines going in all directions on the map, and we saw a train with a yellow nameplate named after my Dad. We weren’t waiting for that train however so we let it rumble on away.
• There was a scene on the train itself where my Dad befriended a couple and was chatting with them while I sat in a nearby seat. I saw a cave-in catastrophe coming though, and used my arms to shield myself and make an air bubble as I curled up into a ball, which saved me from being crushed by all the debris once the catastrophic event actually happened. Once it ended I was able to just shake off all the debris on me and sit up, safe and sound. My family was also safe. However, the couple that my Dad had been chatting to was not so lucky — the guy survived but the girl didn’t. When we left the train, my Dad took the girl’s white sneakers to help dispose of them so that the guy could concentrate on mourning his partner.

Jan 11 2022

• I was recently married to one of my online friends (Quintopia), and the dream largely showcased a number of post-marriage parties that we had, particularly the last one that we had, where we chilled out with some food and drinks that the MC asked us to come to the food cart in the front of the room to get. There were lots of other people in the room, relatives and friends and such, though they seemed to be paying us no mind, and we were glad that the whole process was just about over as I was looking forward to some rest time. It seemed that we weren’t particularly close and were even living apart in different cities with no plans to move in. I was a bit worried about the marriage because we had never really been particularly close. I exchanged a joke with him and made him laugh a little. He said that he had a new bed and was looking forward to using it after the various receptions were finally over.
• Mom was in the room and at one point mentioned something to the effect of how Edmonton had just finished going through a one day heat wave and how nice our weather must have been. I pointed out to her that before that one day heat wave, we had two solid weeks of freezing cold, so she was misrepresenting our weather. The last day of the freezing cold weather came with a cloudless sky though, which then caused the rise in temperature the next day as there were no clouds to block the sun.
• I also looked through a large album she had at some point that was full of little Chinese talismans that she and Dad had collected over the years. I was apparently starting to amass my own collection from travelling though, so even though I seemed to also own the first few pages of the album via inheritance and could take them if I wanted them, I returned them all to her because I would probably soon have too many of my own.
• There was a train station scene as well, with a number of really crowded, packed-shoulder-to-shoulder train stations, and many, many different train lines and connections and optional transfers that I could take on my way home. I ran through a theoretical scenario in my head at some point where I had committed a crime and the police were trying to hunt for me through the train cameras, and pondered what kind of route the detectives would be expecting me to take (i.e., take the first train and transfer after one stop to a different train) and what sort of tricky route I could take (i.e. take the second train going in the opposite direction, alight after two stops and take a different train in another wrong direction) to trick them.

Jan 12 2022

• All I remember is a scene at our 4012 home between our three siblings. We were largely hanging out in our two bedrooms upstairs, and exchanging contact information on our phones through some sort of pet leveling app installed on it. Kel had hers levelled quite high, Jon had a less-levelled one and was complaining a little that Kel made him level it because her pet needed another pet to talk to. But he did seem to be playing the game on his own as well. My pet was new and was just level 4 or so, and I pretended to be not too interested in it and even said I would delete the pet if necessary if both my siblings were satisfied with the status quo, but neither of them were having any of that, and they came over to exchange contact information using the NFC feature in the app down at the large table in the main hall.

Jan 14 2022

• I remember a specific snippet where two people living together, a boy and a girl, were playing a co-ed college football game against each other, with a side bet that the loser would have to pay rent on their joint apartment the following month for the winner. I was watching from the stands, and a television station was covering the game and she mentioned that to the audience. The girl’s team was leading by 8 points or so after the first few minutes of the game.

Jan 15 2022

• I was meeting up with lots of my former Dunman High classmates for a class field trip to some location. I hadn’t met them in years, except for Allen, who I came with. We had pre-formed a group of 5 with 3 other girls, but it would be the first time most of the other girls saw me post-transition, so I was a bit nervous, but besides our group and one other group, none of the other groups were present in the waiting room that we all met in, so I never got to see them. However, when we arrived, the waiting room was full of school bags and shopping bags, lined up against the side of two walls, so it was obvious that nearly everyone else had arrived before us, they were just off somewhere else.
• The only other person in my group I remember was Paulene, though I saw Antonia in the other group as well. I don’t remember who the other two girls in our group were. I called Paulene “Princess” at some point, and she laughed and said that she had always considered me to be in her top 10 friends.
• Part of our prep work for the trip was apparently to play a handheld video game that had to do with a spaceship shoot-em-up that you could upgrade with all sorts of guns and that flew from the bottom of the screen toward the top, kind of like Tyrian, except the aim was to destroy enough meteorites to progress to the end of the level. There were some variations, for example one level near the end, where the player was descending to Earth, just required survival for 10 seconds against a lot of meteorites.
• Anyway, the issue about the game that I did not realize at first was that even from the second level or so, once you completed it you had an option to either end the game with a minor victory or buy upgrades and continue pushing onwards, and both Allen and I had just done the minor victory and thought that that was it for the game. Paulene told us otherwise, and said that we should have pushed on in the game, so he took out his handheld console and proceeded to play through the rest of the game while I watched.
• My game itself was an app on the phone instead of a handheld console. It was apparently possible to play the game on the bus, and the company even had a dedicated support representative for people who wanted to play their game on the phone, with instructions to file a ticket with the company’s help website as soon as possible even before we ran into any problems, so the rep could monitor us and assist if there was any trouble, or give advice as to how to break the game into bite-sized pieces (did we have time to complete the level before the next stop, etc.). There was one known issue though, which was that ship upgrades couldn’t be done due to some sort of error that would pop up, which seemed game-breaking to me.
• I excused myself to visit the washroom at some point, which looked exactly like the downstairs washroom in our 4012 house, except it had two doors in the toilet, one that swung inwards and seemed useless, and one that swung outwards and was the proper door to prevent people from looking/coming in.
• I remember looking at myself in the mirror and noting that I was wearing an ugly tanktop with a thin top half that exposed a lot of the area below my shoulders, and I saw that some of my skin was bright red, as though I was getting suntanned, with little red blotches on them that were never there before. No one else seemed to comment on it though, but I felt really self-conscious before I concluded that no one else was probably paying close attention since there were so many people around.

Jan 16 2022

• There was a section of my usual supermarket/convenience shop, which had a nondescript storefront in my dream shopping mall squeezed between two other large shops, dedicated to support some sort of alternate reality social game craze going on between two “teams”. How it worked was that you bought an item and it would come with a code word and some phone number that represented your chosen team’s HQ you could dial and use the code word at, and that would allow your team to progress in some sort of mock battle against the other team. Anyone could choose to support either team, and it was basically a really successful marketing gimmick, with food, books, music records, and other things located in the section of the supermarket dedicated to this rubbish, half of it being sold with codes belonging to one team while the other half containing codes for the other team.
• While I thought it was rubbish, I did need to buy some items that didn’t seem to be sold without a code. Specifically, I wanted to buy a single slice of bread and a small, but I was angry that this marketing gimmick had both caused many companies to opt into this craze and only sell their products with codes instead of also catering to those who didn’t care about the game, because this allowed them to mark up the price of the items and still have the items sell well. Case in point, the only cake I found was a small, dry cupcake that fit within the palm of my hand and cost over $2.00, and the single slice of bread was an end piece from a loaf and cost over $6.00.
• Still, they were nearly out of stock and I wanted to get home to do something so I grabbed one of each anyway. The slice of bread was the last one left in the shelf and some woman rolled up after me and was disappointed to find that the wooden box I took the last one from was now empty. I noticed some man hanging around too and figured he was trying to find people playing the game and on his team to coordinate with them, as he was talking to customers as they left the area with items with special codes, so I took a wide berth around to avoid him, while thinking up an excuse if he approached me anyway. I decided I would blame it on my elder brother at home and say that he was really into this craze.
• I wandered around the store a little bit more before absently wandering out of the store toward home. I then realized that I had forgotten to pay for these overpriced items but that somehow the security alarm didn’t go off. Still, I retraced my steps and went back into the shop and headed for the cashier at the back right side of the store.
• The line was about 6 or 7 people long so I joined the end of the queue. I saw the man there again, and it turned out this time that he had on an employee’s apron, and was actually just asking the people in line if they had any issues he could help with to help speed up the line. A girl in front of me had some sort of money issue that he promised to help with shortly, and she was happy to hear this. He looked at me, said I was probably fine if I was just here to pay, and I nodded.
• The usual public cashier booth was closed, and the “cashier” was instead being run by his supervisor, a woman operating from behind the closed white door of a side office. She occasionally cracked her door open to take the items from the next person in line, and would close the door again to process the items behind closed doors before reopening it to collect payment and hand the items to the customer. Social distancing, I suppose. But this meant that she couldn’t really also deal with customer escalations, which was why the male employee was doing as he did to try to help her.