Dreams

Mar 15 2022

• At one point I remember flipping through a print copy of a school-published magazine, and seeing one page dedicated to J-Pop, with a picture of a young man sitting at a desk in his office next to a large window with a good view of the city, and a caption showing his name, his age (25), his job title, and that he peddled J-Pop to his friends as well as a side gig as well. It had interviews with him and several other students and adults on campus on how J-Pop had affected their life.
• I flipped a few more pages and found a page dedicated to buses as well, specifically with a note that this was the last day that an East Coast bus was operational before the route was shut down. It had a picture of a big blue bus (Edmonton Transit Service style) and a picture of a female rider.
• In another part of the dream, I was playing a bird’s-eye view game which had a big castle that I was supposed to invade, and I had a number of troops I could see massed up just outside the castle. I could click and drag to select a number of them, and then click on the map somewhere to get them to all converge on that spot, just like an RTS game. My troops were dressed in the blue, while the enemy’s troops were red, and there was a sense of “Finally I’ve reached the castle!” going through my mind as I prepared for a siege. I remember the castle wall on the south side, where I was, was white and really high as though we were in a valley. But the amount of wall we had to climb would be lower on the west side where the front gate and portcullis were, and we could walk up a slope from where we were to reach that area. So I instructed my troops to do so. A couple of my troops tried to throw up a ladder and climb into the castle themselves but I caught them and got them to move back as that would have been suicide. I then caught a large battalion of red troops just outside the castle, patrolling, and destroyed them with my blue army, before starting the siege with catapults.

Mar 16 2022

• It was the weekend, but for some reason, Dad, Kel, and I were hiding in a Dunman High 1L classroom. The weather outside was bright and hot, and there were students on campus doing extracurricular activities, but we were there mostly to look for a quiet spot, and even though we weren’t really allowed to be in the classrooms, we found that they were unlocked so we secreted away in my old classroom.
• Dad was alternating between calling someone on the phone and teaching me photography tricks based on us watching some video of me taking a series of photographs with a camera in the past. He mentioned various pitfalls on things to watch out for that could cause washed-out colours or weird shadows. Kel was hanging out with me, chatting about things between Dad‘s talking, as all three of us sat around the teacher’s desk at the front of the class, with us two occasionally wandering around the classroom itself.
• Later, it started raining, and so there was a higher chance of students coming by now since we were a ground floor classroom. Even though the room also turned darker, we closed the front doors and shuttered the windows and left the lights off, pretending that there was no one in class in order to maintain our peace and sanctity. I figured that even though there’d be a chance that the attendant would come by and lock us in without realizing that there were people inside at 6pm when he did his rounds, we could always unscrew or dismantle a window or door from the inside and escape that way.
• Dad called Auntie Doris to chat, who gave some photography pointers as well — he had run out of tips to tell me so he used one of her ideas and said that if I had any questions about particular photos, or particular moments in the video, it was easier if I brought that up to him and he told me what he would have changed for each photo instead.
• He also took an old booklet I had with phone numbers of people that I had apparently made in the distant past, as many of the numbers were likely not working anymore. Still, he tried calling them one by one. Several attempts errored out because the recipient was in another country and the phone either wouldn’t connect or it would require a fee up front since it was now a very expensive overseas call to reach the person, who was overseas. One attempt worked though, and Dad connected with someone whom he apparently used to know, who now worked as a policewoman at an airport. She was delighted to talk to him again and told him all about her work, including a current ongoing long-term crisis where bombs were often found in cargo containers on wooden palettes, so much so you could even leave an empty palette in the middle of the airport and people would take a wide berth around it in fear.
• Eventually, a group of girls came by and opened the door and found us. THey were all dressed like prefects, in the Dunman uniform complete with tie, and they wanted to speak to whoever was here since the start of the day. I thought we were in trouble so I stood up and went to the door, expecting to get chewed up, but instead I noticed a couple girls in the group that I knew, including Debbie and Rachel, and the latter in particular stepped out from the group and offered us a catalog of Valentine’s Day chocolate that they had spent the last few hours making and were now selling.
• I noticed that Rachel had a yellow, frilly, checkered pattern material around the bottom edges of her blouse sleeves, as though she belonged to or strongly supported some sort of idol band and had their uniform on underneath or had modified her actual school uniform. She handed us a request form that we could fill out with our desired chocolates and submit to their group, though she told us that one flavour of chocolate, the one listed with bugs in it, was reserved for government officials that were visiting the school and thus not open for general orders.
• All the girls left except one, though not before turning on the room lights, while a few other girls began to trickle in through the classroom’s back door and take up seats near the back to do their own things, apparently glad for the company of other people. Dad was still on the phone in the meantime, but was trying to keep his voice down and speaking in hushed tones, and using his hand to cup the receiver so as to minimize noise on the receiving person’s end.
• The one remaining girl finally asked me why the three of us were cooped up in here like this. She said she understood because it was now raining, but that we should have kept the lights on. I tried to change the subject by asking her where the form should be submitted once we were done filling it in, and she said she wasn’t sure — the table their club was using had also moved somewhere indoors since it started raining, but it shouldn’t be too difficult to find.
• My lower lip then began swelling up in a way very reminiscent of what sometimes happens to me during eczema episodes, except it was a lot larger, and I tried to cover my swollen lip with a hand as my words to the girl started to slur. I did manage to get out that this was a reason why, because these swelling episodes happen and I wanted to hide it. She was apologetic and it was implied that she would soon start moving the other students out to give us privacy again.

Mar 17 2022

• I remember at one point sliding down (on a sloping ramp) from the third floor of a shopping centre where there were classrooms, to the second floor where there was a food court among other things. This is a shopping centre area that I had apparently visited in my dreams before, as I had a sense of recognition associated with it. The food court was nearly deserted, but there were a couple Chinese food stalls still open. There was also a large, square side room with seats and potted plants, and little booths surrounding that side room that sold drinks, popcorn, and so on.
• There was one exit from that side room that led to a swimming pool, and a glass door that led to another side room with an arena that was sponsored by and named after the Wake Up, Girls! Japanese idol group, although it was shuttered since the group had long since disbanded. Apparently they used to perform there in the past. I wanted to take a picture of it for my blog but the food staff were waiting for me impatiently as they had identified me as a likely customer, and there was someone sitting in that side room near the glass door that would have gotten in the way of any pictures, so I decided to come back later. There was also an admin exit on the other side of that arena that led back into the main food court, but it was sealed off by the shopping centre admin.

Mar 18 2022

• I was waiting just inside the doorway of a shared house for a public bus that would be coming to take me, my two siblings, and a few other people to school. I was helping everyone else get ready so I myself wasn’t quite ready by the time I saw the bus coming through a side window overlooking a street that was perpendicular to the main road with the bus stop outside our front door.
• I ran off to quickly throw on my clothes and grab my bag while everyone else shuffled outside — I happily had on my socks already so I ould just slip on my shoes, but then I realized my keys were still in a box on the table so I had to go in for those again, then come out — just in time to see the bus leaving, as the schedules were really strict. I was hoping the other kids would stall the bus by boarding slowly, but no such luck. I waved and hollered at the bus but it didn’t stop. There was a second bus at the bus stop but it was a 74 (instead of the 25 or something that would take us to school) and so I couldn’t board that.
• I was pretty miffed by that, so I decided to not go to school that day. I went back into the house and then later went out to a market, where I won a lottery of some sort buying meat at a meat store where you bought items before they were revealed, like a gacha. I won a 4-star consumable piece of large meat, and a 3-star piece of equipment (possibly something that regenerated and produced a bunch of meat over time), and the owner of the stall (or perhaps another customer in line) was mad at me because he said he had never won anything good like that himself.
• In a separate part of the same dream, I was on another bus headed home from somewhere when the bus was stopped by protesters or rebels. Everyone alighted from the bus and the people who had stopped the bus handed out flyers with a request to help march on a nearby TV station with a bunch of requests. To my surprise, most of the people on the bus were more than happy to oblige and streamed away down the road toward the building. Someone else next to me who didn’t care for it said that it was remarkable how quickly everyone else was swayed. I had other dream objectives though so I walked away.

Mar 19 2022

Dream 1

• Dad and I were seated around the kitchen table in Tampines 294. I was playing some sort of handheld game with a really large and realistic screen that I could dip in and out of, and involved a spaceship and exploring several different planets lined up in vertical columns. I remember leaving and re-entering the atmosphere of different planets while searching for something. Dad was reading the newspaper while worrying about a bag of things that he had lost recently in the vicinity of my University.
• Kel came into the kitchen and told Dad that they had received a phone call that someone had found a CD of Chinese music that was in the bag and that belonged to him, and he checked and saw that he indeed also had just received an email about it. He asked if they had found anything else with it as well, but the reply was unclear, although assumedly they did since the CD alone would not have been enough to identify the owner.
• I told Mom that I had decided not to hand in some homework for a particular class I was taking that semester because I disagreed with something or other that the class was doing, but that I should still be able to pass the class because homework was only about 20-25% or so of the class’s grade and so I should still be able to get a final score of 70%+ in that class.
• Snippet: At one point in this dream, I distinctly remember laughing heartily about something.
• Snippet: At another point in the dream, I remember either Mom or Jon coming over to my house with an opened bag of uncooked white rice for me.

Dream 2

• Even further on in a separate dream, I was in school and our teacher was dividing up our class into four groups to perform reenactment plays of some hero that we had learnt about, that might also have been a character I was earlier on in another dream. At least, I “knew” the story and what was going on in the hero’s mind in the particular play that my group ended up doing even when he and his group were off-screen, because I had the nagging feeling that I had played through the scene earlier.
• Anyway, while in class, we were gathered around the teacher’s table at the front of the class. The teacher allowed us to pick our groups but people were indecisive, so I produced a bunch of small cards with the numbers 1-4 on them, and some people clued in and started picking them randomly. Valerie, who was normally seated next to me in class, picked group 4, whereas Eileen picked group 3. Huihan searched through my hand and plucked a 3 card as well instead of picking one at random, because she wanted to be with Eileen. I eventually also ended up with a group 3 card at the end of the selection process.
• The teacher gave us group cards that included our roles, and my group 3 card told me I was to be a nameless soldier in an army that formed a semicircle around, and was defending, some people against another slightly larger enemy army long enough for the hero and his group to arrive and save the day. I was glad, because that meant I could more or less blend in and even slack off, as I needed to multitask and take care of something else as well, since my strength was optimization and organization and either some other project or group or some other dream plot or something also needed my attention at the same time. As such, when it came time to do the rehearsal, I just left my soldier character standing in the field without actually fighting and that worked out fine.
• On the second rehearsal or possibly actual presentation, however, this didn’t work out so well — the fight was a lot more equal and I looked back just in time to see my last ally drop, with only one enemy soldier left, and the hero rapidly approaching but not quite there yet, as he had to loop around a northerly path which then took a sharp turn back south toward us, and then cross a large bridge to actually get to us. I ended up having to kill that last enemy soldier, and then kind of wait around for the hero to arrive and rescue the civilians to continue his story, which made me stand out in a heroic way I didn’t expect to or like.

Mar 20 2022

• Our work team was part of a half-class half-meeting thing that was moved from our usual office in the University to a small classroom on the third floor of a shopping mall downtown, so getting there involved a train ride and some walking. In addition, the exact location was not publicized until the morning of the move itself, when one of the admin staff was near the original work building giving out pamphlets letting us know exactly where to go. I picked up one of these pamphlets, then expressed a concern that most people would not be able to find their way over. I was told by the admin woman not to worry and that people would surely find their way there, but to help my teammates if possible.
• We took a train and made our way over to the classroom. It was indeed small and cramped too, there were no windows, though there was a doorway leading to an outdoor balcony in addition to the door leading out to the hallway, and there were six tables in the classroom, each one seemingly able to fit two or three people. I was with two other people from my team, so we picked the front right table. As people filtered in, I noticed that it was largely people from the other half of the work team that was recently merged together with us, and since they were developers who needed space to put down their laptop and do some programming, they basically took up the other five tables, seated one or two per table.
• I figured that would be fine until the rest of my team came, although I noted to the person at the table behind us, Semyon, that he would probably have to move so we could have that table eventually. He said ok. But our first “class” or meeting started without anyone else showing up, and I started using my phone to monitor the locations of anyone else nearby.
• It seemed like I was expecting the rest of our half of the team to be filled up by some old Dunman High friends, rather than actual workmates. During the first class/meeting, I texted Gillian our class location, and she turned up and took a seat next to the three of us at the short edge of the table we were at, exclaiming that it was very cool inside the classroom and whether we felt the sun outside was too hot. I told her we had been in the class since morning so we couldn’t tell — we hadn’t seen the sun! She made an oh noise.
• I also saw that Debbie had arrived in the shopping centre but obviously had no idea where the classroom was, so I texted her and went down to fetch her to the classroom, hopefully before the next class started. Among other things, because this was a makeshift classroom, we were also not told when the next class would start, so I imagined that in theory we could also go have lunch from one of the food stalls before coming up to class again if we wanted, but if we were unlucky then we might miss a class and be yelled at for that.