Dreams

I had a series of really long dream diary entries this week, following a couple weeks of poor dream retention. It was an interesting week. On top of that, a couple of the dreams, on the 14th and the 16th, were thematically similar in that they both involved a me with a group of children and sniper rifles. I wonder why.

Sep 12 2022

• Dad was driving me to some University buildings near a train station on his old motorcycle, but to get there he needed to drive down some odd footpath and we weren’t even sure if he was allowed to drive down that as it wasn’t a real road. An old man seated nearby waved us on though, and although I squinted at the signboards that we passed and noted that it only mentioned that bicycles were okay, I decided that as long as he didn’t actually park anywhere there it would be fine. So he drove off and I alighted from the motorcycle without issue.
• I went into one of the lecture theatres and sat down on a seat amidst a number of other students. This was a Japanese 101 class, happening every Mon, Wed, and Fri afternoons, and this particular class was the first one of the year. The room went dark and an introduction video started to play on the projector screen.
• This video showed another fictitious Japanese 101 class that was starting up, featuring a number of students that included a tall, blonde girl, as well as a a jovial female Chinese teacher who was also our actual class’s teacher, and a man who was acting as a sort of assistant principal and substitute teacher before the female teacher arrived.
• The plotline was about how the man was trying to tell the class that the class could not be retaken for credit if you had already passed it before, and that they had gotten wind of someone in the class who was trying to fly under the radar and cheat, and the audience were given clues to know that this someone was the tall, blonde girl. But every time the man tried to get his message across to the class, a distraction popped up between other students and the blonde girl helped to resolve it in a really suspicious manner.
• One of these distractions involved two students in class that suddenly started fighting. The blonde girl immediately “changed sides” and pretended to be the teacher, peacefully breaking up the sides and making both sides shake hands and tearfully smile at each other. She then switched back to pretending to be a student as the real teacher stepped in, said something, and left the classroom again. It was shown that the man, for some reason, was unable to tell (or unwilling to point out) that the blonde girl wasn’t the real teacher.
• Another distraction involved a waif-like girl returning from the whiteboard at the front of the class after writing something on it, and a taller girl approaching her with her hand outstretched, wanting to shake the shorter girl’s hand. Upon shaking, the shorter girl realized that the taller girl’s hand had some sticky gum on it, and it had now gotten all over her hand as well. She was upset, but the blonde girl switched sides again and brought the waif-like girl up to the front of the class, pulling out four pieces of tissue from a tissue box and letting her clean her hand with it. The female teacher reappeared at this point, so the blonde quickly flipped back to student mode, pretending that she didn’t know what the tissue papers were for and saying that they were bandages that could be applied to the hand that would fix the issue when used four at a time.
• The teacher took another four pieces of tissue paper and applied it to her own hand, and said in surprise that a little text message telling her that the bandage application was successful had popped up on one of the pieces of tissue after she had applied it to her palm. The blonde girl was surprised and confused as she knew that this was a lie, and the audience knew that the teacher was trying to catch her out. I believe there was a third distraction attempt as well that involved the man and one of the students, but I forget the actual details, only that the blonde had stepped in to save the day again with what was shown to be “insider knowledge”, in order to distract him from being able to deliver his message.
• In the end, the female teacher sat everyone down and gave out handouts with the class syllabus on it, before both she and the assistant principal moved toward the blonde girl’s seat and accused her of being the person secretly trying to retake the class. Their proof was that the blonde had circled a blank spot on the first page of the syllabus, and when the camera zoomed in to that spot, the audience could see that what was typed out on the second page was faintly visible through the thin first page. The girl had made a circle on the first page that overlaid some text on the second page — a name, Scott Selland, as well as his score, 438/500, which was apparently a previous student in the class that had set the high score record for Japanese 101. This proved that her true reason for taking the class was to try to beat his score. But she had revealed herself over the past few incidents because she “knew too much” on how to resolve those incidents too quickly, and that plus this incriminating circle meant that they caught her and tossed her out of the classroom.
• The class laughed at this as the lights came on again, and I did as well, noting that I actually knew who Scott Selland was, he was in my class when I first took Japanese 101 a couple years ago — I -was- retaking the class sort of in the manner of the blonde girl, but I wasn’t actually signed up for the class like she had. We looked down at this point and noticed that we all had also received a two-page copy of the class syllabus that the students in the video had received at the end of the video, and that our teacher, the jovial Chinese woman from the video, was dismissing us because it was the introduction class of the semester which was now over.
• One of the guys next to me mentioned that he was auditing the class, or at least the front part of each class, because he worked in the same department as I did in the University and our building was nearby and so it was easy for him to step away for an hour and stop by when classes were in session. He said that his plan was to avoid doing the actual homework assignments and turning in the essays so as to not inconvenience the teacher or overwhelm the students who were actually at a Japanese 101 level, as he had actually already completed Japanese 201 and perhaps 202 at that point. There was another female student nearby who was listening in, and she also nodded and said she was auditing the class.
• I said that I was doing the same thing — I had not actually formally registered in this class, but was sitting in because I was also working for the University and had completed up to Japanese 301, but wanted to brush up on my Japanese before I went overseas to study in Japan because I hadn’t studied Japanese in about two and a half years, basically since the pandemic had started. I also learnt that the male student’s office was located on the second floor of the same building where my office was located, except mine used to be on the third floor but had recently been shifted to the first floor. Due to that, I only faintly recognized him at best as we were on different teams.
• I asked him if he had reached out to the teacher about this to tell her his plans to audit the class, as I had not and had just waltzed in as there were spare seats. He said he had, and that she was very receptive and welcome to the idea of more students being interested in the language, so I resolved to do so when I got home as well. For now though, I packed up my bag and left the lecture hall.
• Somewhere along the way, there was an additional note as well that I could do writeups about the class with Seren, /r/anime Writing Club style, and post them somewhere, if I wanted to.
• I went over to the nearby train station, passing by a blob of people that I recognized as my actual work team, who were headed through an automatic door to a room where the main up escalator of the station was located. I yelled out to Ronnie and waved at the rear of the group as I passed by them toward a side room with a different escalator leading up, and Ronnie turned back to look at me and yelled at me to join them, implying that he had something to tell me. I was already moving into the side room at this point though and hurried to the escalator because the paths eventually did meet up on the second level of the train station and I could probably meet him there still and probably even beat the group of workmates if I walked or ran up the escalator.
• Along the way there, I passed by a closed escalator that led to platforms that served the train lines 6 and 8, which apparently had been split off into a separate wing of the station with its own external entrance room and escalator after recent renovations. The old doors leading to lines 6 and 8 were in the side room that I entered, except it was now sealed, and that was why most people no longer used this side room. But I liked that, as that added to the room’s allure — this side room with its old escalator that used to connect lines 6 and 8 to the rest of the station was now kind of a hidden secret that only the astute who knew about the history of the station knew about, and I liked the room for this.
• Editor: I’m pretty sure that Scott Selland was an actual person that was in my Japanese 101, 102, and 201 class. The detail about taking up to Japanese 301 is correct as well, although the timeline is slightly off, it hasn’t quite been two and a half years since I last took 301. Seren and I were also indeed Writing Club partners in the past.

Sep 14 2022

• I was playing a new MMO set in a slightly pre-modernistic city, around the 1990s or so, our main weapons were rifles and bows and we had lots of skills to pick from too, but only a set number of skill points to assign to them. The main plotline of the dream was that a bunch of people were just hitting max level, so the community wanted to start a public group to take on the first raid of the game, and we were meeting up in a HDB apartment where we could pick our weapon and allot our skill points and would then be put into groups depending on what the raid leaders, who were adults and thus could not actually participate in the combat as only us children characters were allowed to carry guns but were very much a presence in game and could order us around, would decide what our role in the upcoming raid would be.
• This gathering part of the dream played out twice for some reason. The first time, there were only really 6 of us or so that showed up, and I spent the time crunching numbers on my skills in some test zone, There were 6 DPS skill trees of 5 skills each that were displayed horizontally from left to right, and for each skill in those trees you had to buy the previous skill in order to be able to access the next one, and the first tree was really popular because while most of the trees had the first skill do the least DPS and the rest of the skills gradually increase DPS as you went to the right until the top tier/rightmost one which did the most damage, the first tree had it in reverse, with the leftmost first skill doing the most DPS and the rest of them gradually doing less and less. This was really popular because you didn’t have to invest heavily in the skill tree to do a decent amount of damage.
• I realized that this was a newbie trap however, as that first skill of the tree only did about 200 DPS in my testing, whereas the fourth and fifth tree’s final skill did 240 and 250 DPS or so each. In addition, the mechanics of the game allowed for one trick — if I didn’t care about the fourth skill in the tree and only wanted the fifth skill, I could just skip the first three skills and buy the fourth and fifth skills anyway — the fourth skill would be deactivated because I hadn’t bought the third one, but the fifth skill would still be activated because I had bought the fourth one. So I did that. I also bought some skills in a vertical-aligned six-item purple skill tree that helped with sniping damage, in particular the first two skills, and then the very last one that allowed me to shoot up to 6 bullets without drawing aggro, with this number resetting every time I moved forward. So it allowed me to snipe things from afar without pulling a ridiculous amount of aggro (and possibly none at all, depending on how accurately I could follow the rhythm).
• I had skill points left over at this point, and I noticed Tigey in the room as a striped white tiger cat who was bawling for his parents, so I adopted him for two skill points and two cats, a calico mother and its child, from just outside the apartment front door, they also cost two skill points each. I also found a few hidden skills in a cupboard in the apartment and learnt them, applying points to them as well. It was a pretty decent build, and while waiting for people to convene, I spent my time practising my shot in a scene that involved some train stations and multiple trains.
• Anyway, this scene reset at some point and reverted to the setup stage in the apartment again. More people were coming this time, as more of the community had hit max level. I was the fourth or fifth person to arrive and introductions were made for the other people that were already there — I had already met them before in the other attempt so I knew their names though, even though they didn’t seem to know mine, so I just nodded at them. The adult that was overseeing us was blunt and surly but apparently not altogether a bad person, and he took one look at me and told a mousy guy sitting down on a chair by the wall that he was free to go home now, we would definitely have enough people much better than he was. He was convinced by either me or someone else who laughed and told him that he could stay for now though, as we probably didn’t even have enough people to fill out the raid, which required upwards of 36 people, but the mousy guy did not look too happy at this.
• I assigned my skill points in the horizontal and vertical skill trees the same way as before, and had the same number of skill points left over after that. The bawling Tigey was there again, and although Ronnie appeared and told me not to play with the cats before disappearing for the rest of the dream, I invested two skill points into him anyway and went outside to adopt the two cats that I knew were there as well. However, even though the baby cat was still a calico, the mother cat was also a striped white tiger cat that looked like Mew this time. I adopted both of them anyway and brought them in, and then played with the three cats while watching others file in, filling in a couple other secondary skills in my skill chart and wondering why I had so many extra points this time.
• Once a bunch of people were there and they were collecting parental consent forms for the raid and about to assign us to groups, Eisen reminded me that I had forgotten to take the bonus skills from the cupboard that I had the last time, before he, too, disappeared for the rest of the dream, and I quickly ran over to take a copy of a rather powerful skill from the bottom shelf of the cupboard. There were also a few stat-increasing skills on the top shelf that were supposed to be for extra dump stats, but I couldn’t actually reach it since I was such a short child, so I left them alone. I unassigned the points from Tigey and the other cats as well as the secondary skill trees, as they were now happily curled up in the apartment and I couldn’t take them along with me anyway, and assigned it to the powerful bonus skill tree. The remaining number of skill points went back into the secondary skill trees with utility and movement skills, just less filled out than before.
• I also found out at this point that I was in some sort of gifted class — they hadn’t actually asked my parents for permission so I was a bit confused at the parental consent part, but that was because they apparently had a blanket approval from my mother that they had printed out like a small newspaper article and then laminated, and one of the adults showed it to me and said I was good to go. I also remember noting that neither a bow nor a sniper rifle would really bring out my DPS with the skill tree I had, due to the windup time needed for the bow and the scope needed for the sniper rifle. I considered a crossbow and a regular rifle, both of which used sight aiming instead, and I opted for the rifle in the end.
• There were six groups of six, and based on my skill tree, I was assigned to group 3, which was designated as the high dps, scout/advance team. A couple of them were specced similar to how I was — with crawling DPS that wouldn’t aggro things as long as they moved every 4 shots or so, and could snipe things from afar. Mine was that much better since I could shoot 6 times without moving. One of the other guys on the team boasted that he was specced to AOE, and could do 140 damage in a small radius around his target and could hit up to 100 targets at once with his skill. He seemed to lack that crawling DPS skill that we had, though, but he was with us anyway. I wasn’t certain I would be dealing much damage in this set up comparatively, but the adults seemed to approve of my setup anyway.
• Not all the other groups were bad, there was a near DPS or tank team in Group 1 too for starters, but the adults eventually got frustrated with the rest of the community and the surly adult from earlier split up Groups 4-6, putting most of the children into Group 2 and calling it the junk group because they didn’t have enough proper gear or weren’t specced properly, and saying that their only strength was as a swarm group. He assigned a couple more people to Groups 1 and 3 as well but that was it, we just had the three groups left. He said to Group 2 that this first public raid would likely be the highlight of their game anyway so they should just be satisfied with the bit role that they were going to have.
• We then finally started the actual raid, which led us through some outdoor streets and then into a school with multiple floors and indoor/outdoor corridors. Our sniping group was a bit cheesy but actually worked quite well, since the enemy mobs had tons of hit points and did a ton of damage. We would coordinate in group chat and weaken things down, and when they finally aggroed, the AOE guy would try to get them down before they reached our raid group and Groups 1 and 2 would engaged them if not. It wasn’t always coordinated, but it didn’t really matter at points since things wouldn’t aggro if we just kept moving — at one point we were outside some mad scientist lab and took turns plinking away to destroy some pipes and apparatus that were emitting green smoke instead of shooting the scientists, for additional objective points, much to the mild irritation of the adults.
• At some point, one of the girls from Group 2 managed to coordinate that group through group chat, which the adults apparently could not see or monitor, and rush ahead to aggro a few things. We tore them down anyway, and then the adults scolded them for aggroing things and told them to stay back. However, this also caused the Group 2 members to be mixed up with our group, since we were positioned behind Group 1 but ahead of them, and so when the rest of Group 2 were told to separate from Group 3 and move off to the side, I and one other person didn’t see that happen. I was yelled at by the surly adult as I was in front of the other person and nearer to him, while the person behind me scurried over to where the rest of Group 2 was.
• I was told by the surly man that if I liked being with Group 2 so much, I could just stay with them instead. I was irritated with him but decided not to push matters, instead I bowed my head and politely apologized, and he seemed very mollified by this, harumphing a “Well… we’ll see.” I also checked and pointed out my DPS numbers at this point and said that I was third or fourth highest (in Group 3’s group of 6) and so it would be much harder if I couldn’t use Group 2’s chat to coordinate with the others. The surly man walked away as he was too proud to say that he had relented, and a couple of the other people in Group 2 quickly pulled me back to them. We continued on without incident.
• There was another scene I remember in the raid, which was when we entered a lecture theatre and there were a whole number of young students, probably about Primary/Grade 1 age, seated in the theatre chairs that were all facing the entrance that we entered the hall from. The boys were dressed in shirts and shorts and the girls had pinafores and blouses on, so it sort of looked like the Rosyth School uniform, and they all started singing and waving their arms around in a coordinated manner in welcome. We watched as they all serenaded us with the school anthem or something before standing up and filing out a side door, and we were told to ready our weapons and keep alert just in case. Nothing else happened in that room though and we moved on.

Sep 15 2022

• I took a trip to Japan and stopped by a train museum located next to a small train station. The museum itself was just a really small room crammed with artifacts about the station, and one small corner, partitioned off by curtains, for the caretaker of the museum to live in. Barely anyone ever visited it these days, the caretaker said. I found a copy of a certain book there whose pages were falling off, but which Jeremy had talked to me about in the past — he had received a copy of it as a gift at some point and both he and Amy had signed their names on the first inner page of the book, before getting rid of the book at some point. Lo and behold, that exact copy that they had signed was now here at the museum, signatures and all. I pulled out my phone and took several photographs and scans of the book and the signature page.
• After returning home, I apparently lived and worked in a three-storey apartment complex that was shaped as a hollow square, with the apartments all lined up along the rim of the square. My apartment was on the northwest side of the second or third level, and faced inwards. There was someone living on the southeast side somewhere, facing outwards, who was trying to both harass and impress me — I approached the apartment complex via the southeast side when returning home and he tried to plink me with sniper bullets. Ronnie and I went to his apartment at some point to complain but he was hiding somewhere and we couldn’t find him. Once I was in the actual building I was safe though, since he didn’t have any windows pointing inwards.
• Relating to this was a small flashback snippet about some characters escaping from some sort of enemy conscription thing when they were young kids being sent out on a mission by whatever group or army they were forced to work for, by hiding where they couldn’t be found. One kid climbed into a tank-like vehicle, opened a latch in the vehicle to reveal a compartment meant for oil canisters to be put into, and squeezed into there, before shutting it with a click. Someone else did the same but inside a home, in a gas canister or washing machine or something. I remarked that all that was really risky because you didn’t know which hideyholes already had kittens hiding in them before you went into them, and that I was glad they were all now okay and had made it to adulthood.
• There was also a cafeteria-like break room in the apartment building. I hung out there to do work with some workmates — Ronnie, Jeremy, and one or two other people. I showed Jeremy the pictures of the book and the signatures from the train station, he was mildly amused. I noticed that the pictures of the signatures were unrecognizable for some reason — the blue ink they had used didn’t manifest well in photographs or something. I had also used a scanner phone app to take some backup pictures of the page though and those turned out really well.
• The four or five of us sat around a table in the middle of the cafeteria to do our work and hang out. This was apparently “our usual table”. There was some sort of video game scene or quest that happened here as well. We then wanted to eat and I remembered that another team had sent us a fireplace to cook food with at some point in the past, but I was away overseas when it arrived, so they had left an email telling us that they put it outside the cafeteria door. Looking at security cameras, I found that they had indeed left it there, but that another work team had “borrowed” the fire portion of the fireplace, which was a little sconce or cup which could produce fire when turned on.
• We then decided to go to a nearby fast food place to have a meal instead. Jeremy invited me along and I accepted, but I was a bit behind in packing up my stuff so Ronnie said that they would get a move on first, as they were going to take the elevator down one floor and then walk along the corridor to the other end to leave the complex. I hurried up my packing and left the cafeteria after they did, and managed to catch up to them when they had entered the elevator but before the doors closed.

Sep 16 2022

• I was part of a group of kids that was equipped with weapons and slowly clearing a zone of difficult enemies, either zombies or other humans. I had two snipers, one with a scope that could be zoomed in to a 4.0 magnification level and did shock damage, and the other one that could zoom in to 5.0 and did fire damage.
• We were out in a darkened shopping street and headed toward some sort of outdoor strip mall area to try to clear it. The enemies had lots of health and were very dangerous, and most of the other kids had regular closer-range weapons, but the hope was that with a couple of us using snipers like I was, we could weaken the enemies before they got to us via headshots before the main group cleared them out. My sniper rifles did about 10 damage a shot.
• This didn’t work so well in reality though, as the monsters aggroed and ran over in small groups, up to 3 or 4 at a time. I had one particularly powerful enemy aggro on me and run around trying to hit me as I ended up abandoning trying to do damage to it and simply concentrated on weaving in and out between other kids, trying to dodge its attacks while the kids attacked the other enemies that ran up to us in the same group as this powerful enemy.

Sep 17 2022

• I dreamt that I was a police officer cadet involved in a variety of cases. There were both male and female police officers and when I was hanging out with the male ones, I was in my male form, whereas when I was hanging out with the female ones, I was in female form. Among other things, there was an outdoor warehouse shed where evidence had been hidden by criminals, and I was aware of this because I had watched them do so earlier in the dream.
• The male officers combed the area first and I pointed it out to them eventually, even though at first I was reluctant to betray the criminals. The officers weren’t finding it on their own however — to me it was super obvious because the warehouse contained a bunch of suspicious cardboard boxes, graffiti and an explosion scorch mark on a wall, and a long park bench, but the officers skipped the warehouse when searching the neighbourhood because it didn’t really look like a real building. I eventually sat on the bench until one of them came over to me and then pointed out the graffiti on the wall and wondered out loud if that was a sign that something was nearby.
• The two cadets I was with realized they had stumbled upon the criminals’ evidence once I pointed it out, but they wanted to keep the find a secret, so that they could milk it for maximum benefit and gain by slowly revealing evidence from the stash to their superiors. They marked it and went home for the night.
• I then hung out with some female officers and also pointed it out to them. They were more eager to turn the criminals in, but didn’t want to do so until the next day since it was already late at night. I also had the feeling that if they did so, one of the male officers would accidentally lock them into the warehouse (even though not all the walls were present as it was partially open to the elements) and they would be trapped in there for days.
• A young female cadet a couple years our junior left in a huff because we wouldn’t turn it in right then and there however, stating that she had other cadet groups that she needed to attend. Each group/team had two-words-long names and some sort of keychain or feather trinket as their identifier, and the dream camera followed her for a bit, showing her returning to her dark-shrouded classroom on the top floor of a school building, dumping her two keychains on a desk, and then leaving for the night.
• I also left the area soon after to go home, as Mom had made dinner for me and my family was waiting for me. It was snowing, and as I crossed the traffic light at some bustling downtown city streets, the snow began to turn into sleet and came pouring down on everyone, who scurried for cover. I ran toward a nearby train station, and climbed down the narrow and eerie looking stairwell toward the platform, watching out for homeless drug-addled people on the stairs as I went down. There were none, though I passed one man who was cussing as he climbed up the stairs. As I continued downward, I found that the stairs ended abruptly at a two meter drop or so to the ground below. About 16 steps were missing. Another man behind me paused, and then said that this station was a temporary station that led to a small hole in the tunnel where the train would stop for people to get on, when the station was in operation, but that it would be unlikely that the train would stop right now since the station was closed, and so going down would probably trap me there with no way to get back up.
• Turning around, I went up to the surface again. At the very top of the stairs, there was another door in the building that I was going to enter. A man standing there told her that Satinel wouldn’t like the game mechanics past that door though, so I backed away from it and went out into the snow again. I forget what the mechanics were, but I think it was something to do with the Re:Zero anime. Outside, I then saw the train station sign — it was a dull golden shade but was glimmering in the light, and it said that this was built as a heritage station that showed what train stations used to be like in the city in the olden times. It was indeed closed as well.
• I headed on toward another proper nearby train station, passing an outdoor grocery store as I went. The store itself was closed, but the proprietress was out front sweeping away the snow, and remarking that the snowfall today had been crazy — she had never seen a day in all her time living in the city where she had to clear 17 inches of snow from her storefront twice in one day.
• Entering the shopping center that adjoined the proper train station, I then headed toward the escalators leading down to the train station in the basement. I passed some food stalls along the way, but decided not to get anything since Mom had made dinner for me. Checking Discord on my phone, I saw Kynji post a picture of some strawberry ice cream that she was eating, and complain that she had never seen strawberry ice cream run out of strawberry so quickly. I quipped back and asked if she also was implying that the strawberry ice cream had also run out of ice cream that quickly or not.

Sep 18 2022

• Snippet: I dreamt that I was romantically linked with Debbie, which entailed the two of us sitting together on chairs near the front left of a room as we watched a show on TV with mutual friends. This show was a Christmas Muppets show by Jim Henson, except that it started off as a horror movie. We both sat crosslegged on our chairs and had our knees and feet basically touching each other, with my left knee touching her right one since I was on her right, and we stacked cushions between us and on top of our knees so we basically shared those cushions as well. She had impossibly thin toes, and I grabbed one of them between two of my toes at some point, which made her pout and say that she wanted to do that to me first. I said my feet were ticklish and that that wasn’t going to work out well.
• Snippet: This second snippet took place in a school, where I dreamt that I had a black drawstring backpack stolen from under the cubicle door in a previous dream while I was using a toilet cubicle. I had apparently panicked at this but was unable to locate the backpack again, as it took place after school and all the teachers were gone. I even contemplated pulling the fire alarm to try to get help, but did not. I’m unclear as to whether this was an actual dream in the past or not though. But for whatever reason this time I got to replay that dream as though following a walkthrough, and three gangster girls appeared near me to mock me when I offered some sort of reward. However, following the guide, I then “noticed” that they smelled really bad, and that was a clue to go upstairs to look at their classroom seats. Doing so, I found my missing drawstring backpack on one of their seats. They got in trouble for this but one of the girls murmured that they had taken it at the behest of the female principal of the school. Whether this was actually real or just her trying to wriggle her way out of responsibility was uncertain.