Dreams

We learnt that Thrandor passed away on July 27th, and that had an immediate effect on my dreams, as this event instantly appeared in my dreams that night (July 28th entry) and the following one (July 29th).

Jul 25 2022

• Snippet: I was playing a spaceship game and had two ships, a class 4 and a class 1 ship. I mostly drove the class 4 ship around doing whatever it was that I was doing, but occasionally swapped into the class 1 ship as it was smaller and more able to fit into tight places.
• Snippet: I was playing a top down team deathmatch game with friends where we were defending our half of a map against opponents who also had their half of the map to defend, there was an indoor portion with a two storey house and an outdoor courtyard portion. Most people played ranged characters cause it was easier, but I played a mage character and was really good at sniping ranged players with it from out of their maximum range for whatever reason. We also actually got to sleep in the house later on and although the house was air-conditioned, we found out that leaving one of the downstairs doors open meant that the bottom level of the house was warm and toasty even as the top level of the house was nice and cool.

Jul 27 2022

• I took an old bicycle out for the first time in over a decade or some absurdly long time span like that, and realized that I didn’t have a lock with me so I couldn’t really chain it up anywhere and do things while I had it. I drove into a shop that was a restaurant and bank all rolled into one, picked an empty table, and shoved my bicycle into the bike post that was there, hoping to both reserve the seat and fool any would-be thieves that the bicycle was locked and hoping that no one would try anything funny in broad daylight since there were several patrons and security guards around.
• I hurried out of the bank restaurant, over to a convenience store about one block away to try to pick up some items. There were other people loitering around the shop and asking the proprietress where to get certain items, so I had to impatiently wait around as she sent them on their way after answering each question in turn. Once it was my turn, I asked her if she had a bicycle lock (she said yes but gave me a regular combination lock), and a bicycle pump (she gave me an inflatable pump that looked like a Chinese paper lantern, with a clear tube that had a little protruding thing on either end, where one side could be shoved into the paper lantern pump (I tried this out) and the other side was meant to go into the bicycle wheel. I thanked her, paid her for it and left.
• When I went back to the restaurant bank, I found to my horror that the bicycle was gone and there didn’t seem to be any witnesses. I had no idea what the bicycle model was either so it was hard to report it. I approached one of the wandering security guards, who motioned me over to the front desk where he and a couple other guards heard out my story, then said I should probably have left the bike with them or let them know about it. They were sympathetic but couldn’t help.
• However, I could still “sense” my bike nearby, lying in the dirt somewhere after it was taken and given to a friend of the perpetrator who then used it for a bit and abandoned it, and I left the building to circle around the outside perimeter of it, passing one or two people who were also on their bikes and circling the building in the other direction.

Jul 28 2022

• I dreamt of Thrandor, and how he was represented in the dream world by a sort of power source for a game now that he had passed away, and his family as well as some of his friends were trying to figure out how to use him to power up nearby things in order to spread the news of his passing. The power source had 15 distance pips that could stretch out in any direction and configuration from the central square as long as all the pips were connected to each other, so it could power things that were 14 units east and 1 unit north, or 5 units down and 10 units west, and so on. The one thing that we couldn’t figure out how to do though was to something that was exactly 15 pips in one direction away from the power source, that configuration had been locked to Thrandor himself but he was now not here to arrange it.

Jul 29 2022

• It was the final day of a three day graduation event to mark the end of our Secondary School life, and I had come to Singapore to join my friends in the celebration. It had a very wistful tone through it all. There were speeches and stuff in a hall and various one off events that I remember.
• I went to the school canteen to order food at one point, and the only store open was an Indian food store manned by a short Indian Lady. There were fish heads piled on the front counter and she was at the back of the small stall with her back turned to me, cooking something, and I called out to her with a “Mom” to get her attention. Among the things on offer, I saw Mee Rebus and Mee Siam, and I had the vague feeling that the last time I was here at this stall in a different dream I ordered Mee Rebus, so this time I ordered Mee Siam.
• She poured me a bowl of the dish from a pot, and put the bowl on a serving tray, then asked me if I wanted chopsticks and a spoon. I shook my head. She asked if I would be fine bringing the bowl home then. I said no, I wasn’t bringing it home, I just had my own chopsticks and spoon and so did not need one from them. She asked where I would be sitting, I looked around and said that the second row of tables away from the canteen stall had a lot of empty space on the left side, and a group of my friends on the right side, and it would be at one of those locations depending on how sociable I was feeling.
• Later, I explored a new attraction that had been set up, a different “zone” that was set up as a computer game where there was a house that I could explore. The house was eeriely quiet and each level was small, but I found staircases leading up at least seven stories. From the third storey onwards, there were cameras installed into the ceiling that would rotate in a 360 degree along the hallways and trigger an alarm if it saw me. From the fourth or fifth storey onwards, there were also “evil spirits” roaming the house, slowly doing house things (like using the toilet, brushing their teeth, etc) that I had to avoid while also avoiding the camera. There was a green guide book I had picked up just outside the house that assured me that these were humans and paid actors.
• I eventually triggered a camera on the 5th level or so on accident and the evil spirit on that level came chasing me. I figured I’d test out how far I could go anyway, and sprinted up the stairs, running into rooms and blindly looting things as I went. On the seventh level, there was a bedroom window or door that led out onto a pathway and then a flat, grassy plain with lots of wandering mobs on it, I figured this was a higher level area I shouldn’t be in yet. The evil spirits had stopped chasing me by then though so I paused to catch my breath and then turned around and made my way out.
• Even later, I was sitting at a table by a pathway with Zixiang next to me, and we were watching people go by. Eileen went by at one point with three school ties tucked into the waistband of her skirt, with the school crest part hanging down in front like an extended skirt. She walked around with a prefect’s authority and two boys were following her.
• I got to talking with Zixiang and mentioned that this was the last day of our youth before we became adults and how glad I was to be here. He had a red yearbook with him, and I had the same red yearbook as well as the green guidebook from that house zone still. He said that he wondered if there were any pictures of Singapore from our early school years in that yearbook so that he could show people how the country had developed and expanded since then. He also asked me if I had cleared out a storeroom that we apparently used to use, and also informed me that there was a new room that was built where I could pick up an Adept Ring. It gave +1 to attack/hit chance.
• I asked if he meant the new house zone, and showed him a handful of things that I had pulled out from chests and drawers as loot as I ran through the building, I had seven things with me including a ring but they were all junk. He said no, but he pointed out that the fourth finger of the hand I was holding all that junk in already had a ring around it and that was the very ring. I said that that must have been from Paul‘s Dungeons and Dragons games back before I left Singapore, but maybe that’s why the chests wouldn’t generate a second ring.
• Snippet: I also dreamt that Thrandor came online in Discord, but we very quickly figured out that it was his brother going through his things. He started talking in our main Discord channel and sent me a few virtual things to sell, then mentioned that his brother had always logged his chats and also would just alt-f4 out of his MUD gaming sessions in such a way that those were all logged too, and that those were all now precious to him and he was going to archive all of them. I said I’d send him any logs I had with Thrandor in it as well.
• Snippet: This also reminds me of a snippet where I was in my 4012 living room with my two younger siblings, there was a game they were playing or wanted to finish playing on my computer, so I sat on the floor with my back against the back wall of the room while I watched them play, instead of kicking them off so that I could play my own games.

Jul 30 2022

• I was riding a bus through town with Mom in the wee hours of the morning. I wanted to get off at a couple stops along the way to visit some interesting sounding landmarks (one was named Wave Point and was located in the middle of a bridge, a second was some sort of shrine in the middle of a residential area), but Mom forbade me to do so and threatened to follow along if I stopped at any of those risky places in the middle of the night. So I decided to stay on the bus instead.
• One of the bus’s stops was by a double mall in the southwest side of the city — I described it as two mall spaces side by side next to each other to create a super mall, and I asked Mom if she had been there yet and if she would be interested in stopping there otherwise. She said she hadn’t, and sure. The first rays of light were starting to creep over the horizon at this point and I asked if she wanted to text Kel and Jon to let them know we were heading to a nice mall and they could come over once they woke up if they wanted to. She said no to that.
• Once we got off the bus, I explained that this mall was set up with two narrow three-storey buildings on either side where the anchor stores were, and then a big square building in the middle where all the regular stores were. From the side we approached the mall from, we saw a Safeway and a Zellers store in the bottom two levels of the anchor building we passed, and the top level of the building was empty. Mom commented that that didn’t seem like a shopping mall at all, just a couple of standalone outlets.
• We then entered the mall’s main square building on the ground floor, it was a large and slightly musty building with a wide-open ground floor space, and we could look up and see a second and third level with corridors going around the perimeter of the square. Small stores lined the edges of all three levels. In addition, on the ground floor there were bazaar-like stalls in the open space in the middle. I specifically told Mom that this mall was special to me because it had been used as a basis for a mall that had frequently appeared in my dreams, and I was happy to be able to share it with someone.
• Mom was attracted by and wandered over to a bazaar stall that was selling stickers, she sat down on a stool and picked up a little glittering sticker to place on the lapel of her blouse. I had the feeling at this point that she would be back here and would bring Jon and Kel the next time she did so.
• In the meantime, I wandered away and joined some of my workmates in another part of the ground floor mall level. They were apparently in charge of security, and were in charge of checking guests’ ID before they entered. Ronnie and Shelley were there. Govinda was also there, and he was being onboarded to his new job here — Ronnie was drawing a picture of him on a whiteboard and wrote his name above the caricature. Govinda seemed really amused by this, and said that he was going to make people bow down to that drawing of him as part of his station’s guest check and entry procedure.
• We were in the middle of the mall at this point as the whiteboard had not been wheeled outside to one of the entrance booths yet, but two girls dressed in Rosyth PE uniforms were passing by and he asked them to bow down to the whiteboard. They looked quizzically at him and then at the rest of us, unsure what to do, and I noticed that all my workmates were also in Rosyth PE uniforms at that point.
• Editor: This mall indeed has been featured in my dreams before, although I usually entered from the other end. It’s the Japanese/Korean one from Sep 19 2019, Jul 20 2021, and Aug 15 2021, among others. There are other dream malls that occasionally recur for me, particularly another three-storey one with offices/classrooms on the top floor, a food court in the middle of one of the levels, and a train station underground, but that one is a separate mall.

Jul 31 2022

• I was in a Chinese class that was slightly too advanced for me, but I was actually paying attention to the class whereas the people around me weren’t really. As part of the class, we were given a song that we were going to perform as a class, complete with one or two girls that were playing instruments and singing some main parts. Since I didn’t know much Chinese in the dream, I was just singing some small supporting portions. Our teacher went over the song with us, then said that we were going to practice snippets of it, depending on who she called on she would pick a stanza or so that they were singing in and she wanted them to then solo sing that stanza as practice. The class of about 10 people or so seemed confused or distracted though so she asked people to repeat what she had just said, and no one could do so but me.
• When we were giving feedback on each singer, I noted that one of the other people in class was fine except he had slight mispronunciations on some of his words but that was normal since we were still learning the language. He said he actually wanted to know all those examples too, and that classmates were always too nice to mention it in practice, which wasn’t a good thing since he wouldn’t know what he got wrong and what he could improve on since he’d think that all his pronunciations were correct. I agreed and said I felt the same way in Japanese class and that I would try to give better input from now on. I definitely remembered that there were other examples of this happening in Chinese class and I did actually know Chinese well enough to point out these mistakes sometimes. He asked for specific examples but I couldn’t give any, since I hadn’t written them down and they were from previous classes.
• We had other classes in that classroom as well but what I remember most from the dream are three scenes that happened in the corridor outside that classroom. Firstly, there was a class that I wasn’t really paying attention in, to the point that when the bell rang, I thought it was lunch time and hurried out of the class and toward the stairs on the southern end of the corridor for a break. However, I looked up at the clock and saw that it was actually 4pm, the end of the school day, and I had daydreamed right through lunch and the second half of the day without realizing it. I still was happy at this and went back to class to retrieve my items.
• I confusedly couldn’t find our classroom door though, even though I knew we were in the second classroom from the north end of classrooms. I peeked into the first classroom, which was a large lecture theater with a curved arrangement of seats with little foldable tables attached. I saw a bunch of people in there, including David from Rosyth, but this wasn’t my class, so I moved on. I looked at the second classroom and there were about 15 people in there too, including Harvey, but again no sign of our class or my stuff. I met our teacher at this point who told me that the students there wanted to use our classroom, so he had moved everything left in class to the third classroom, so I went there to retrieve my things instead.
• Secondly, there was a scene where I was walking back to my room from lunch break on another day and passing by a large group of students that were watching a male student’s singing performance out in the middle of the hall. I didn’t care for it and had to squeeze my way past them as they were blocking the path, this confused people who wondered why I didn’t care for such a celebrity. I reached my class and grabbed my bag, then wanted to head to the library, which consisted of a small reading room that the north end of the corridor opened onto, and then some other rooms to the east of that. I realized as I was headed out of my classroom that I didn’t actually know any of these students, and that they were sort of.. imposters, and interested in that music because they were hedonists. Indeed, as I looked around more clearly, I saw some of them embracing and kissing as couples, or making a fool of themselves as foreign students being rowdy and perhaps drunk.
• I reached the reading room and started browsing books that were placed on a metal shelves there, these were books that sampled the collection available in the library, which itself apparently was ever-changing, but today’s books were largely puzzle books aimed for younger children, though I did see a couple books on simple lateral logic puzzles. A couple young children were in the reading room with their parents, clamouring for the books available there.
• Lastly, there was a scene in that corridor that took place at night, when I wasn’t supposed to be there. I came out of my classroom dressed in a brown hooded robe and perhaps carrying my bag as well, and my goal was to reach the northern edge of the corridor where the library room was again, but this time there were policemen or security guards strewn about the place, as well as a concert by a number of young idol girls that was being put on in the hallway itself — the girls that would be singing and dancing would be doing so in the hallway and the audience was standing outside the hallway railing (so this must have been a ground floor hallway). The idol concert was starting shortly, and I had to somehow make it past them before then as where I was was considered out of bounds.
• Of note, I had three pairs of sensors that I could put on the ground, each pair of sensors had two effects, one was that it would mask me and my sound in a small dome area around me, and I could hide within it as long as I stayed crouched. The second sensor was glued on to the first one and its sole role was to hide the first sensor as well as itself so no one could detect it. I found out after a bit of experimentation that I could still see myself when I was inside the dome, but indeed that no one else could see me from outside, but this meant that I wasn’t sure and couldn’t test what the exact radius of the dome was or if it affected other people as well.
• At any rate, I did figure that I could actually get by with just two pairs of sensors, by spacing the second one about a meter further along from the first, and then going back to pick up the first one again, this distance would create enough overlap in the domes to keep me hidden. I crept along the wall on the far side of the audience, past security guards and the girls who were performing their concert right in front of me, and I felt very surprised and a bit awkward that they really couldn’t see me at all.
• I instinctively saved my game at one point when I was near one of the girls, and was very thankful I did so, as the girl accidentally placed her hand on a sensor one second later while sitting down to rest, causing a commotion when she exclaimed that her hand had landed on something gluey, which exposed me to the security guards right away. I loaded the game and immediately swiped the sensors toward me even as her hand was coming down upon it again — this succeeded and didn’t reveal me since this meant the dome (which apparently didn’t affect her or allow her to see me within it) was still entirely over top of me. This did make a slight sound and made her and the guards a bit suspicious, but I quickly placed the next set of sensors down and picked up the current one, and then again, scurrying away even as they looked curiously toward the part of the hallway that I had saved and loaded the game at.
• Snippet: I was playing Chinese Chess with my sister, and was headed toward a checkmate with my cannons before she lost interest and was pulled away by someone else seeking her attention. It was informal, so we basically ended the game right there and let the computer AI take over, but she made an illegal move on her last move, having her cannon jump over 10 tiles to kill my cannon (a cannon piece has to jump over exactly 1 piece, no more and no less, to destroy the second piece in a line in any direction from where it is). And the AI took over from there and played the game out to a draw. I wondered if Kel knew about other special Chinese Chess rules that made it differ from chess, like how the knight always had to move two squares and then one to form its signature L-shaped pattern like in regular chess, except in Chinese Chess the first of the two squares in the 2-square move must be empty, or it would be an illegal move as the knight would be considered blocked.
• Anyway, since I saw the errant move, I reverted the game to just before that illegal move and let the AI take control from there instead. This time it played as expected, to a position where I would basically be victorious, I had the enemy king boxed in in a 1×4 rectangular portion of squares along the edge of the board and had two weird horsemen pieces left over attacking it. These pieces weren’t actually part of the standard Chinese Chess set, especially since I learnt that I could stand them up so that their steed was long enough to cover two squares and thus each horseman could also attack two of the four squares that the king was trapped in from a distance of about 3 squares away. From here it was just a matter of arranging the two pieces so they would attack two different squares each.
• Editor: In a nod to how the blogging project can affect my dreams, I was surprised that David showed up last night — he does not appear in any other entry in my nearly 6 year long dream journal, and even in the Rosyth writeup I did four weeks ago, I wrote that I remembered next to nothing about him. I did recognize his face from the class portrait though, and that must have triggered him appearing in my dream now as well.