Dreams

Oct 04 2022

• I and a couple others visited what was supposedly a former school of mine, although we were there as adults and as part of a larger work team, not as children. Our goal was to go there and run some console commands (basically a localized git pull) on a floating black screen that would update some data files that a client at work had made. This would then run diff checks on the files that she had and convert and update files that the client didn’t have so that she’d have a backup of those files.
• I saw that she had an earlier existing backup of most of the same files and that a comment on it said that they had requested that we run the backup command then because “they wanted a backup”, but this time it was because “they were worried they wouldn’t be able to locally browse the files” or something like that, the reasoning was somewhat different.
• Still, the backup process was the same, so I went there with two others, and then remotely got in touch with Babita to get the command needed to clone and process the files. There were about 10 large files in total.
• There was a larger modern “Singapore” zone that we had to get through to get to the school, but once we reached the school, we stepped into what essentially was an older version of the school. There was a 3 level canteen filled with hawker centre-like shops and NPCs seated at many of the tables, and a store where I could order snacks and supplies.
• I pulled out a 10 cent coin from my purse while digging for a bigger coin and the vendor immediately gave me a pack of cigarettes for the 10 cents, but I declined it and pulled out more coins so I could buy some bananas, 5 of them (out of a bunch of 10) for 50 cents in all, and then a drink on top of that as well.
• We then waited around an outdoor hallway on the ground floor and watched as students in uniform ran by other hallways that surrounded a small grassy courtyard with a Chinese pavilion in the middle of it, toward their next classes. This looked really familiar to me and I got really nostalgic and felt a wave of sadness come over me.

Oct 05 2022

Dream 1

• I remember meeting Mom on the second floor of an MRT station and hugging her, then taking her over to the escalators that led up and down from and to the first floor. There was a long horizontal marble handrest situated a foot or so above where the outer handrail of each escalator went horizontal at the top of the escalator’s path, and I sat on it as though it were a long bench, with my legs dangling over the moving part of the escalator, effectively blocking about half the escalator itself so anyone who was coming up it would have to scoot to the left side. There was no one coming up, though.
• Mom sat next to me and I inched over a bit to give her room. A couple other people seemed to like what we were doing and came over as well, two girls sitting on the “bench” that I was on next to the up escalator, and three boys sitting on the “bench” opposite us, their legs dangling over part of the down escalator. I noticed Kim from my Rosyth School days on my side, next to Mom, dressed in the navy-blue Raffles Girls’ School pinafore.
• I was about to ask her how her new school was, when Justin from Dunman High struck up a conversation as well asking about her courses. Yaoxiang was next to him and pulled out a textbook the size of our Dunman yearbook for a class on Uzbekistan that he was in, and Kim exclaimed in surprise that she had no idea that our Dunman school also had a class on Uzbekistan like theirs did. All four of us came from the same primary school so the conversation seemed natural even though we had all not seen each other in ages. I felt a bit left out because I was taking a different option class, and not the Uzbekistan one, though.
• A little later on in the same dream, I was waiting on the second floor of the same MRT station, where I was seated on a toilet in a small washroom with a flimsy, ajar door leading directly out to the actual station. and listening to the conversation just outside my door. I had to pull the door shut now and again so people couldn’t see in, but I could certainly see out and among other things saw a naked boy changing his clothing in the middle of the walkway, his body bared for the entire world to see.
• There were a bunch of people gathered just outside my toilet, about 50 or so in all, and one tour guide taking attendance for two groups of people that she was about to lead at once on a tour. The crowd consisted of people from Group C and Group E of some larger group, and she said that after drawing lots, this tour would be considered Group E’s tour for records keeping purposes, even though we were both there for the same tour, and it made no functional difference which group the tour “belonged” to. Nonetheless, I was in Group E so that was fine with me.
• She said to keep pace with the two group leaders as she led the way away towards the start of the tour. I wasn’t quite ready yet, but I also knew the rough path the group was going to take anyway, starting with a visit to the signpost just outside the station on the bottom floor, so I was confident about keeping up with them.
• Somewhere around this point, I also looked down at two small envelopes, folded in half and creased along the square outline of some sort of plaque in each one, that I was holding in my two hands. Each plaque contained a poem written by a Canadian author who had passed away a few years ago, and I had sent in two of her poems on plaques to the Government of Canada, beseeching them to allow her poems to be given free postage status when sent to other people through regular snail mail under some sort of application process for a weird cultural heritage promotion that they were doing.
• I had sent the first request in February 2018, and it had been rejected with a note from a minister with a French name that the quota for the time period had already been met. Undeterred, I sent the second plaque and poem in June 2018, only to be rejected again for a different reason. I thought back and determined that I must have given up at that point as I could barely remember the applications any longer, never mind the actual poems.
• Later on, I was at someone’s house with a small group of friends or acquaintances, and we were prepping to try to find something or other as a group. The leader, named Kenichiro Sarasa, held up a piece of A4 paper with a certificate or list or something printed on fancy card stock. I don’t remember much detail about this snippet except the guy’s name.

Dream 2

• This was my second last day of vacation at some place, though I thought it was my last day at first and was hurriedly packing, thinking that I’d miss the last connecting ship or bus or something back to the city from the remote country house that Jon and I were living separately in.
• Downstairs, I could hear Mom talking to Jon and asking him what the hurry was though, as we weren’t leaving until tomorrow, so I realized that we still had one day to go as I was brushing my teeth and wondering how I would have time to pack up all my things and get ready before the 9am bus came to the house. There was now no worry, so I’d just take the 10am one instead.
• Jon had already left somewhere for the day, and I went back to my room to dress up. There was no school that day, but I put on my school uniform anyway, noting the Dunman High school badge on my chest with pride. I started to pack up some of my things as well, there was a little dog plushie on the floor that I didn’t recognize among other things, but I decided to wait until tonight to do so.
• I wondered if I had paid the landlady yet, and was pretty sure that the answer was yes, I did so when I first came here. There was also a computer monitor on the floor next to the wall, it was the secondary monitors of the computer that I had at my Edmonton 205 house, and even though I had left it unplugged after moving it there the day before, it still showed the picture of the last signal that it had received, basically a desktop with a cursor on it, so I reached over and turned off the monitor with the power button.
• Dad came down from the third floor to sit next to me as I sat down at my computer desk, and chided me for not greeting him after a short pause. I apologized and said that I thought I had, but had just realized that I had only actually thought of doing so when I saw him coming down the stairs after standing up from the monitor. I was going to greet both him and Mom together but Mom wasn’t actually there so the thought had slipped from my mind.
• We looked at the computer screen together and saw a webpage which featured a recent chess game. The page took quite a while to load, and featured two tiny videos the size of passport photos focused on the faces of the two men playing each other at the top of the page, and then a large feature section in the middle with the board and all the pieces of a particular position in the game laid out in black and red instead of black and white. Each of the 64 square tiles that made up the board was cut in two, from top left to bottom right, and each triangle had a slightly different pattern on it. On the webpage, this was represented by a new picture file for every triangle.
• The first paragraph of the article below the chess board mentioned that this page took a while to load, and Dad pointed at that and said that he agreed with the newspaper or writer for once. I touched the screen and said that they could certainly have saved a lot of space by making just two red triangles and two black triangles and tiling them that way, since no one reading the newspaper would actually care about the exact intricate carvings that made up each triangle in real life that they were trying to accurately represent.
• Dad mentioned something about how he and Jon had woken up at 6am every day over the past month in order to catch the early morning chess match, and how nostalgic seeing this article made him anyway now that that competition was over, even though it was tiring at the time to do so every morning. I was glad I hadn’t been caught up in that insanity.
• Getting up, I then prepared to leave the house and spend the day at a South Korean/Japanese mall that I knew, although the dream ended before I even left the house.
• Snippet: At an earlier point in the same house, probably on a previous “day”, there was another washroom that Dad said to stay away from because they had found wasps or hornets there and would be calling someone to come fix it. There was a cabinet jutting out through the wall of the bathroom and I saw some clumps of dirt against its side, and when I peeked into the washroom, I couldn’t actually see any of the wasps or hornets but could see a good part of the interior cabinet, floor, and the toilet bowl itself with caked dirt strewn all over it, and figured their nest was somewhere in there. I idly wondered if flushing the toilet and drowning the dirt in the bowl with water would help, but figured it would agitate them, so I left them alone.

Oct 06 2022

• Snippet: I dreamt I was scanning a booklet that Mom had made for me before she passed on in my dreams, it was a financial-themed notebook with handmade coupons (one per page) or something in it that I could also add pages to.
• Snippet: Possibly in the same dream “world” or segment as above, there was a scene where I was stuck with Dad at a petrol station situated near the 4-way intersection below our Yishun 723 home, he had been driving us home on his motorcycle but it had broken down at the station. There was a repairman in residence at the gas station but Dad refused to use him and was going to seek out someone else instead because he had just had that repairman look at his motorcycle a few days earlier, and here it was broken now. He pulled out a vehicle that was literally a bucket on two wheels with a long vertical stick attached to it and a horizontal handlebar attached to the top of that stick, and gave it to me, telling me that I needed to get back home as quickly as possible in the meantime, so I did just that. This vehicle, only large enough for one person to stand on (in the bucket) at a time, was propelled by pushing the handlebar forwards and downwards, and then releasing it to let it return to an upright position, back and forth over and over again.
• Snippet: I met an Indian boy named Sasida who apparently was from Peiying Primary School, where I had spent my Primary 1-3 years, and qualified for the GEP from there four years after me. He was chatting with a mutual friend at first, but once they stopped, I took over and chatted with him for a bit, becoming friends with him. I asked if he was related to Sasidar from my Rosyth class but he said he wasn’t, and I realized that that would have been odd anyway since there was a four year gap between us.
• Snippet: I was working in an office when one of the higher up execs poked their head through the open doorway to greet me and a colleague in the same room as me, while he was on his way to a meeting. He asked us if we had seen a number of young women pass by our doorway dressed in suits, or knew why they were here. I had apparently seen a departmental schedule earlier on and knew the answer, so I told him that they were here for a chemistry grad student presentation in a room on the 6th floor, three or four levels above our office.

Oct 08 2022

• Snippet: All I remember is standing on a glass-enclosed patio on the front deck of a house, with a bunch of potted plants in it so it kind of looked like a greenhouse. There were 5 or so paintings mounted on the glass wall, and I learnt that the owner had not put them there — instead, a burglar had come in and rearranged the house like so so that if he needed to come back on a subsequent day to fulfil a daily quota, he could just grab whichever paintings he wanted to as they were arranged in order of value, from cheapest being nearest the exterior door to the most expensive being furthest away. The owners figured that to prevent this theft, they could not all be in the basement at the same time, so that at least one person had the chance of catching the burglar in action. I idly wondered if there was ever a burglar rummaging through our things too when we were all in the basement during a hot day in our old Edmonton 4012 house.

Oct 09 2022

• Snippet: All I remember about my dream is that it was heavily gamified, with tasks to do and the ability to rewind and redo things. At one point the character I was controlling or watching ran out of a narrow room and fell victim to a bunch of enemies from outside, and at another point we were trying to optimize something to make a rectangular upgrade grid with tetris-shaped pieces on it that represented a dog’s skills as complete as possible.