Dreams

I’ve got another nice, long streak going that started on June 10th, even though a couple of the diary entries from the streak were just basically one-liners. It’s still better than nothing remembered, though.

Jun 20 2022

• I ran to catch a double decker bus from the University — it was bus number 38 I believe, and the bus stop had two of them, heading in opposite directions. I made sure I queued for the right one. There were a good number of students getting onto the bus too but they were all younger than me and my juniors at the Uni — they were largely 1st and 2nd years and I was in my 3rd year.
• When we clambered on the bus, the seats were arranged around the outside of a large, square amphitheatre-like area, in a horseshoe pattern that was 3 rows deep, with the back rows slightly elevated so everyone could see the stage in front. The seats were all coloured one of four colours (red, yellow, blue, green) and randomly mixed together. We were all assigned a colour, mine was red, so I had to pick a red seat and I picked one in the back row on the right side of the bus. The bus was very packed so nearly every seat was taken by the time all the students settled on board.
• This then apparently turned into some sort of elementary Japanese course, though the teacher was late as the classroom door wouldn’t close, and she had to go find a doorknob and install it on her way in before she could start the class. In the meantime, the students chatted, and the person beside me asked how to spell the formal past tense of the Japanese to-do verb (shimashita), and I and a few others around him spelled it out for him both in English (Romaji) and Japanese characters.
• Ronnie and Shelley came into the class to help maintain order as the teacher fixed the door. Shelley asked the class for a raise of hands as to who was not technically registered, using a certain terminology I don’t remember but that apparently meant a first or second year student here, and I raised my hand but no one else did. Shelley scanned the room, ignoring me, while Ronnie, addressing me as Jess, told me that they meant besides me as they knew my case and that I was basically an employee here anyway.
• One of the people next to me said that he wasn’t sure but he had another friend in the class that was technically waiting for grades for a previous class to find out if she was eligible for this one so she might actually fall into the “unregistered” criteria that Shelley was looking for, but I said I didn’t think that was what she meant.
• Snippet: I don’t remember the context but I remember a specific scene where a rich girl was tied to her chair in class by her strict parents in such a way that her left hand was always raised or something like that, but due to the way that she was tied, she was unable to keep her balance, and toppled over to the floor on her left as the concerned teacher and someone else rushed over to try to catch her.

Jun 21 2022

• I dreamt that I was travelling around Canada with Kel and someone else, and for whatever reason we were detained and temporarily “imprisoned” in a classroom by two police officers. It was mid-afternoon and expected that we would be free by sunset. We were partially restrained, our feet were bound to something so that we couldn’t all escape, but our hands were kept free.
• Kel was allowed to use the cellphone while in there, and she called up a female friend who knew a newspaper reporter and described our predicament to the friend. She also used the phone camera to show the friend pictures of the room we were kept in. Just in case we weren’t released by when the police said they’d release us.
• We could also take turns leaving the room if needed, as long as we did it one at a time, so they allowed me to leave the room to visit the toilet, which was in a separate room in the building, and I opened the door only to find several boys outside trying to peek in through the tinted glass to look into the room. I quickly darted inside again, reported them to the police officers, and waited until most of them had disappeared before I opened the door again and left. I was not cuffed, but I was wearing something with red straps around my mouth that I could not remove and that made me stand out a little, either a small ball gag or a weird, bulky face mask or something like that.
• I checked my Discord program on my phone while in the toilet, and saw that Neichus and Benny from my anime writing club server had invited me to play AMQ an hour or so ago. But then due to my lack of answer, they had figured out what had happened to me. I reassured them that we were fine and would be out soon, but that I wouldn’t be playing since we were on vacation anyway.
• Justin from Dunman High was also in the room, and he commented something about how we had already made the news because all three of us were Oilers season ticket holders and that was a rare sight in Singapore and had raised our profile, and people had watched for our arrival and subsequently saw our arrest, so that made local news.
• I took my own sweet time going back into the detainment room, even visiting a second washroom along the way. I noticed that there were about a dozen little curly wires pasted to the wall just outside the detainment room and realized that they were from Kel‘s shorts, I resolved to tell her that so that she could retrieve them once I returned and it was her turn to leave the room.
• There were a couple other snippets somehow tied into this. One was some sort of brewery or food-producing machine that we or someone had and operated, but I don’t remember the context behind it. It looked like a large stove or distillery or something though, complete with little bouncing pipes that let off white steam occasionally.
• Another was some sort of a device, accessed via a screen, that constantly ran a program that created a long strip of white, flat noodles or roll of cloth or something, and it was slowly and endlessly trundling by on a conveyor belt from left to right on the screen. It would endlessly auto-create whatever it was creating at a slower pace if we left it alone, but it was faster when we could define a regular interval for a blade to swing down and chop off the white strip, so that it created smaller strips that were about as long as the width of the screen without going over that maximum limit. We could set the blade to do this every few seconds, but it would only really work when we were going to be in one location for some time in the “real world”, so our movements didn’t throw off the speed of the conveyor belt, as the device was very sensitive. We turned that feature on while we were being detained.
• Editor: Well, this was certainly inspired by my adventure at the Singapore border last month.

Jun 22 2022

• I was part of something similar to an MMO-style adventuring guild, but framed more like a school club, that met at a rich member’s house every now and then, the house had many rooms to walk through and a large garden and walking area around it as well.
• In here, we reviewed and/or got ready for zones that would open every now and then, as there wre several zones strawn around the “game world” that we had to travel to and enter once they opened. But even when closed, there were things we could and did practice, and we could pull the zone up to look at its information blurb or talk to each other to trade tricks and information about the zones, I remember standing by a window with a friend and a couple other people nearby as we tried to connect wirelessly to a zone and only managed to get a frozen picture of its splash screen or a screenshot of the UI from the last time we had connected to the zone.
• At one point, battles in three or four zones all opened up at once. One of them was a dwarf zone and a large contingent of our guild went to enlist for that as they were dwarves and their leader had a roleplay backstory where his father had died in a war in that zone long ago. Everyone else was invited, but it felt like we were overrepresented as a guild there anyway. Harvey and a couple Dunman people had also rushed off to another zone, and the rest of us met in a round courtyard garden area in the house from where they had deployed from after a general Call to Arms was issued for the guild members.
• The round courtyard had a horizontal and vertical path running across it that looked like a cross, and in the four quadrants were short, truncated, curved paths that more or less looked like they formed a circle from a bird’s eye view of the garden, but weren’t actually connected to each other or the central cross path. Scattered around the garden were flower trellises, flower beds with butterflies flapping back and forth, and short lawn grass. Around the gardens were also plastic chairs by what looked like floating computers, and right in the center was a plastic chair that was wet for some reason — someone complained that Harvey had left the central chair wet again in his haste to get to his favourite zone.
• The rest of us drew folded slips of paper from an open-top paper box someone had created, in order to decide what zone we were heading to. Trin, I, and Mell drew zone 43 and grouped up together, whereas someone else that was with us drew a 70-something, and I playfully and lightly pushed them out of our huddle once I saw that to indicate that they had to go find their own group.
• There were various other characters in the guild that I sort of knew or recognized as well. There was a girl who was madly in love with one of the adult guild officers who did not reciprocate her love, but she always tried to join whatever map he was on or going to be on. My parents and siblings were also apparently somewhere there, and I delivered a bag of requested groceries to their room (within the larger mansion, I suppose) at one point.

Jun 23 2022

• I was travelling alone and had just arrived at my hotel late in the night or early in the morning, and visited the front desk to order some food — the front desk had two ladies tending a reception desk, and right next to it was a food stall that was usually staffed by some Indian woman and selling nasi briyani. However, she was in the back area or something and I had to ring a bell to try to get her attention. The two ladies at the reception desk muttered something nasty about how the Indian woman was back there slacking off and waiting for customers to call her, instead of staffing the stall like the two of them were staffing her desk.
• I took my food and wandered off to eat it, before eventually coming back again with my luggage bag in tow to actually check in. I took a lift up to my room and put my things there, with visions of flopping down in the bed and sleeping dancing through my subconscious head. However, I ended up walking around the place instead, starting with the large lobby area outside my room. Instead of the elevator leading to a number of branching corridors like in most hotels, the elevator led to a huge square room with latched doors leading to the hotel rooms set all around three of the four walls of the room. The elevators weren’t set into the wall too, they were set slightly off-center near the middle of the room so that the elevator shafts worked as structural support, so I could even walk behind them and see people wandering down some sort of service corridor passage behind it.
• The rest of the dream was a blur, though at one point I remember needing to wait for three things to grow and finding the optimal time to combine them together into one thing.
• Snippet: In an earlier dream, I was walking up and down a HDB apartment block with a friend to throw off some curious followers who were trailing us. It was implied that we were all students living there but that the two of us were famous in some way. We exited the elevator, walked over to the stairs, went up a couple levels, crossed the corridor and went down another flight of stairs, then ducked into one of the apartments to shake off the people trailing us. At some point when the coast was clear, we also ducked into a minimart that was somehow embedded in the corner unit of one of the levels of the building instead of down on the ground floor, and we saw a young girl there, about 4 or 5 years old, struggling with trying to buy or carry something on an errand. We helped her out on her task.

Jun 24 2022

• I was exploring a small school campus and talking to some friends who were students there. I am not sure if I was a student there as well, as it felt like I was just a visitor, even though I knew several people there. Zixiang was there, as were Yaoxiang and Yucheng, the former of whom was chasing the latter around in some form of horseplay.
• I was trying to help some friends find a daily secret message hidden in the school, it took the form of a small braided talisman made of red strings and with four letters embroidered onto the talisman. The talisman itself was hidden in plain sight in a different location each morning, and once someone explained to me what the game was and showed me a picture of what it looked like on a previous day, I wandered around the canteen and buildings and fields looking for it. We eventually found it in a plastic box set up high against a pillar, exactly where it was in the picture that my friend had shown me, so apparently they reused locations every now and then, which was a bit disappointing.
• While exploring, I had seen a screen which listed different “school servers” and their weekly PvP results, it was set up like how Guild Wars 2 used to do their weekly PvP rankings, where every server was ranked in a giant list and then the top 3 would fight against each other on one map, the 4th-6th ranked servers would fight against each other on another map, etc, and try to get points against each other, which would then affect their rankings next week. Apparently our server, Tampines, used to be a high-ranking PvP server, but after many server merges where many other school servers were added, and after the novelty of the game wore off, no one really cared anymore and we languished near the bottom. We were in the 3rd last group of 3 out of about 10-12 or so of them, but we were apparently actually winning this round against our two opponents.
• At one point, Dad came by on his motorcycle to drop something off for me, I forget the context behind that though. At another point I think he was actually driving me around some roads to get to the school, but there were several one-way roads that flummoxed us and we weren’t sure how to get to the school while still obeying local traffic laws. I eventually found a road that involved driving all the way to the end of the main road past the school we wanted to go to, and then doubling back along the side roads to it.
• At another point, Uncle Wilson and Auntie Esther (relatives from my Mom‘s side) were getting married and were temporarily staying with my Dad‘s brothers and mother in a rather dirty apartment, though something happened that then forced them to move to a couple smaller but cleaner apartments. I mused that the two of them were only now getting married when they already had several grown up kids, and how there were still other pairings among my Dad‘s relatives that were probably still not married despite having been together for years and having children.
• There was also an RPG scene that took place in a school field where I controlled party members represented by tokens from a birds’ eye view, two of them were a blacksmith and cook and four were probably regular adventurers, and I had a mobile base that I could move around and places of interest that I could send party members to explore. I sent the blacksmith to tap a nearby node, for example, which spawned four resource nodes around it that I then sent the four adventurers to collect and bring back to my base.

Jun 25 2022

• I don’t remember anything from the night except, oddly, that at some point I was looking for clothes to put on, and there was a pair of panties in front of me where the front part of the fabric was wet and the back wasn’t. But there was some sort of benefit from putting it on, so I was contemplating doing so anyway together with the rest of my outfit, which I hadn’t gathered together yet but that which would hide it.

Jun 26 2022

• I was in Singapore and had two school essays to write, one for the current semester and a very similar one for the previous semester that I had gotten an extension for, and had pretty much written up already but had to do some formatting on, as the papers had to be divided into several pieces before being submitted — a main paper with the 1st, 3rd and 5th paragraphs, and then two side “sticky notes” with the 2nd and 4th paragraphs which were pasted onto the sheet (if handing in a physical copy) or attached in the email (if sending the instructor a digital copy).
• I had to go to specific location to write these, so I got off a couple bus stops south of Khatib MRT station in Singapore on the west side of the north-south road (Lentor Avenue), and started walking north toward it. I passed another bus stop where students from a primary school were alighting from a different bus, and they also walked northwards behind me. I was ahead of them and I felt as though I were leading them so they wouldn’t get lost.
• I came across an overhead bridge and I knew that most of them would be going up the stairs and crossing the road to the east, whereas my train station required that I stay on the west side of the road and was actually just past the overhead bridge. I still could have “led” them up the southwestern stairs of the overhead bridge and then come down again myself on the northwestern side myself, but I saw a small ramp to the left of the overhead bridge that led right to the train station itself, so I decided that they would figure out how to use an overhead bridge themselves, and hurried my pace to put some distance between the little kids before taking that left path.
• I remember deciding not to take a picture of the station if I found it lacking in some way, but it had an attached outdoor covered hawker center on the west side of the station so I did end up taking a phone picture of it and then wondering if I could find out which of the open stalls had the best ratings to eat at.
• Instead of doing that in the end though, I walked through the hawker centre and saw a building on the other side that was a covered restaurant with barely anyone inside and a helper person carrying a box and struggling with the door. I walked up to him asking to use the toilets and he seemed happy to have a customer, inviting me inside to use the toilets, and I settled down on a toilet bowl which was musty and old but not dirty. I could hear voices outside as he excitedly mentioned to an older couple who evidently also helped out with the store that they finally had a customer.
• When I came out, I was in a darkened apartment whose front door still led out to the hawker centre area, and whose interior had a main room with an open door leading to another room. I could see Dad inside the other room, sleeping on a bed and breathing gently. I turned on a light so that the front room was flooded in a warm, incandescent, yellow-red light, and I settled down on a dining table outside the room, with my back to the wall and my front facing the open doorway to Dad‘s room, trying my best not to make any noise but worried about how loud my mouse clicks might be as I assembled my laptop setup and started working on my essay.
• He didn’t wake up though, and I was able to finish both essays and turn them in, though writing them involved an odd sensation that felt like I was chewing on some old and dry nori seaweed flakes. I then handed the papers in digitally, although I had the vague feeling that my first paper would not be graded as well as it deserved due to the time extension I had gotten even though I really shouldn’t have been penalized for it.
• Snippet: Back when I first was trying to fall asleep, I had a weird segment where I was on my bed in my Edmonton 4012 bedroom and staring up at a hole in the wall next to the ceiling, where I could see insulation foam sticking out of the hole. This wasn’t supposed to happen, and as I had the vague sense that I was still awake at the time, I stared at it and pondered whether it was a dream or not until I noticed that the hole had disappeared. Later on, I was practicing basketball throws with a young Jon, using Toodles as the rather tiny ball and taking turns tossing him into a basketball net located across the room, and I described this dream to him.