Dreams

If I ever built a list of top 10 or top 20 dreams that I’ve ever remembered, my 2nd dream on December 22 would probably be in that list no matter what criteria I used for it. It was so strong and so vivid. Like all dreams, I just wish I remembered more of it.

Dec 19 2022

• Snippet: All I remember from today’s dream is exploring a rural part of a city and coming across a large fenced tower that belonged to Gandalf. I thought it was a unique find and thus went in to explore, but I found that there were quite a few random strangers already inside exploring the lobby of the tower.

Dec 20 2022

• There was a school portion of my dream, where I was lined up with everyone in a school because Elon Musk had taken over the school and was demanding that every 4th student, chosen randomly as we all strolled by him, would get an ugly tattoo on their right shoulder. The school was big so the student line was really long, stretching down several hallways, and as I queued up with other students, I took off my outer blouse so that I was only wearing a vest as my top.
• A girl next to me took a liking to me, saying that I was cute, and then bringing out a blue pen and asking permission to give me an inked tattoo of her own. I accepted, and she drew a nice, intricate tattoo on my right shoulder. I then decided to put my blouse back on to hide it.
• The queue got all the way to the front and I greeted Elon and his lackey with a cheery good morning. He was counting off every 4th student in the line, and I was a 2 while the girl behind me was a 3, so neither of us got selected for the tattoos. We filed past without incident.
• Later on, back in the classroom, Zixiang was asking if anyone got a tattoo and how they looked like. I said that I didn’t get the regular one from the egomaniac, but I did get a special one from a nice girl. The feeling here was like they were collectibles, similar to goshuin, or temple stamps, from Japan. He oohed and requested to see it and I rolled up my sleeve to show it to him.
• The dream also had an adventure portion, where among other things, we formed groups and wandered the school hallway, using weird guns and weapons to defeat enemies coming by. The main thing I remember from this is having an ability which summoned a special gun that fired out something that looked like a brick, but was black in colour. Once the projectile landed on the ground, it did AOE damage to enemies around it, to the tune of 8x 140 damage or so, so around 140 damage to up to 8 targets in a disc-shaped area around it, with the chance of targetting the same enemy more than once. It had two alt-fire modes as well, with the first one being a regular bullet firing mode, and the second alternate mode being a more powerful version of the gun’s special ability, doing 240 damage x8.
• One of the other people in my team of four was Zixiang or Jonathan from Dunman High, I forget who exactly. I summoned the gun to destroy some zombies coming through a door, and then swapped back to my regular gun, which caused the special gun to drop to the floor. I wasn’t concerned about this since I could summon it back at any time, but my friend picked up the gun. I realized that I could basically summon it for one other person to use as well, and I taught him how to use it and how the AOE projectile worked.
• Editor: Goshuin is the Japanese word for temple seals or paper stamps that I collected while in Japan.

Dec 22 2022

Dream 1

• I dreamt that I joined an orientation meeting in a school a month before the first day of National Service army training in Singapore, even though I had been excused for it for the actual period of the mandatory military service. The people I was with were divided into 6 groups, like in my Scouts troupe. I was in the 5th group, with Zixiang in the 6th group to my right, Xuanjie in the 4th group to my left, and Kelvin from McNally next to me in the 5th group.
• A female drill instructor came out of a nearby staff room and attended to us, she briefed us on some stuff regarding what the National Service was about, and the expectations she had of us, as we all sat down on the floor and looked up at her as she stood and spoke. She then told all of us to do 1 swift pushup, so we all got to our knees, put our hands on the ground, and did one pushup with varying success. Kelvin next to me had trouble, and I advised him that I tried to go down and then up again as quickly as possible to try to use my momentum to “bounce” off the ground.
• The drill instructor told us that we would have to do more when we met up for the first day of training in a month. She told us to come see her if we had any questions. I saw Justin Yip, wearing a rosary necklace around his neck, come up to the instructor and ask her in Japanese, “Eigo dekita?”, which I knew in my dream meant “Can you speak English?”. She nodded and he gave her some information about his own approval for opting out of the mandatory service.
• I also raised my hand, but did not want to give my reason in public because it had to do with my upcoming gender transition. I used Japanese and asked her if I could meet her afterwards to talk and she said yes, there was a staff room nearby and I could come see her there after.
• She then dismissed the gathering one group at a time, starting from Group 1 on the left all the way to Group 6 on the right, staggered a minute or so apart for each group to give people time to leave. She then left for the staff room first, as the first group was leaving, as she had a prior appointment she needed to attend to right away.
• Since she was busy, I knew that I couldn’t immediately see her but I could hang around until she was ready. While waiting, I wandered around the school, meeting up with Kel and Jon briefly as we watched two low health troll-like creatures (which I identified as “tanks”) as well as a number of other dark fantasy monsters, like two gleaming black pegasi and a number of orcs, run by on the road past an atheletics racetrack and grass field that were part of the school facilities. They had came in from the zone to our left and left the current school zone on the right, heading into the next city block over toward whatever target they had in mind. Kel noted that this was the reason that most people had to do mandatory National Service, to protect Singapore against those creatures. There was also some feeling here like it was a game and I was a commander that I could assign numbers to in order to defeat the invaders while using as little resources as possible.
• Leaving them be, I headed toward the nearby staff room. I had a map, but it was difficult to read for some reason, and I ended up in an Audio-Visual theatre classroom. A school boy was in there holding a stick attached to a projector screen, and using buttons on the stick to scroll through a number of hidden cameras located around the school. The cameras were in labs, other classrooms, and even the staff room, and recorded both snippets of video as well as sound. I could not only see but also hear students and teachers talking and having fun in those places, and I wondered about privacy issues to do with these hidden cameras, and whether anyone had ever been caught masturbating and then gotten blackmailed afterwards.
• The boy looked nervously at me but didn’t really seem to mind me hanging around and watching him and the video feed. Eventually he left the room, and I took the URL link of the room, the camera, and the staff room area where I thought one of the cameras were, and reported it via Reddit to the school admins there. I wondered if they were in league with the errant students and if they would just end up banning me to keep it quiet instead, but I didn’t think too much about it.
• I had seen from the staff room feed that the drill instructor was now unoccupied, so I tried to flip through a guidebook that I had to find the staff room and the nearest path there, but I was unable to do so. Instead, I had to locate the large grass field as a reference point and then figure out a path from there. Somehow, once I did so, I was able to teleport right to the staff room itself. The instructor was in her seat and speaking with another male teacher standing next to her, but he soon left and I came up to her and asked her if we could talk outside.
• She said that was fine, but that I had taken too long to get there and did I get lost on the way? She tried to give me a square paper map of the school, but I said I already had one, I just made mistakes trying to get to the staff room. We went outside into a large square room that I knew was safe, and I told her about both my exemption from joining the service as well as all the hidden cameras around.

Dream 2

• As a passive observer, I came to a town hall area and saw a round bench with a bunch of plants in the middle of it. Set above the backrest of the round bench was a badly handwritten sign saying that a Voice Actors’ Pass was on sale for $200, and that to qualify for buying it, I had to play a ring toss game where I needed to toss a small rubberband onto a small target about a foot away.
• Intrigued at how weird it looked, I inquired at the town hall desk behind the benches and was told that a group of four young girls hung out around here a lot and that was one of the things, or delusions, that they did, one of their invented endeavours while playing around. The use of the word delusions here had only positive connotations. The town hall liked them and supported them in their endeavours to encourage their creativity and allow them to be kids.
• From here, the dream shifted to the point of view of these four kids, who were all around 8 or 9 years old. The ringleader was a girl with short hair and tank top who was a little bit more outgoing than the others, and they were all good friends and played a lot together in the town hall, around the adults working there and the guests coming in to visit. I don’t remember much about specific things that they did here, just a general feeling that they felt like the three girls in the Mitsuboshi Colors anime.
• One particular story did stand out near the end, where there was an association who wanted representation from the town hall to drive out another association (or possibly another encroaching town). The dream went to an overhead view of the town hall and its carpark, which was then represented as a Go board with a bunch of white pieces, severely outgunned against the black pieces, but managing to encircle part of the opposing army in the top left, and just needed a few more white pieces lined up horizontally across the middle left in order to flip all those pieces.
• To do this, they would need to beat the other association in a wushu tournament, but these were all middle-aged to old people and they did not have the energy to get up and dance, so they appealed to the town hall and somehow or other, the four girls were chosen as the representatives, possibly because they were the only ones who applied for the role.
• There was to be a demonstration of their skills for the association in the carpark, and the four girls turned up with badminton rackets and started to toss and smack shuttlecocks, trying to get them into little floating panels for cameras that were set up above and behind the chairs where the association reps were seated. The cameras spun forwards in a 360 degree circle whenever they were hit, creating a comedic effect on the broadcast.
• The association head, an old woman who could barely stand by herself, was horrified by this, and collapsed off the chair, causing a number of the other association reps to hurriedly stand up and assist her.
• The camera then cut to a scene after that, with the four girls back in the town hall, standing in a little alcove behind a notice board on wheels, with the ringleader looking down at the ground in embarrassment because she was the one who had done the research and thought that that was wushu. But in a pre-internet or early internet world, it was very easy to get details wrong, especially when they were still young and learning how to read and comprehend things.
• The other three girls tried to cheer her up. One of the others, a girl with spectacles who looked like a younger Takumin from the Do It Yourself!! anime, pointed out to her that if they pooled their funds together, they could still buy two swords, and they could find two sticks of similar length for the other two swords, so all was not lost yet and they could still practice and represent the association.
• There was one other scene after this where the ringleader, who was still a little sullen, went up to the snacks counter in the city hall together with another of the girls. The ringleader pointed at a small slice of orange, and the Muslim woman behind the counter smiled at her and peeled off the orange peel from the slice before giving both of them to the girl, who started chewing on the orange. She also pocketed the orange peel as she needed it for something or other. The Muslim woman wordlessly offered another orange slice to the other girl as the two of them began to walk off, but the other girl shook her head and smiled. There was then a brief conversation by another female store attendant who asked the Muslim woman what happened, and she replied to her that they were always like this around this time of year, and to do their best to support them (and their delusions).
• Editor: This dream was so vivid and colourful that when I woke up and remembered it, I thought it was a real anime episode that I remembered and wondered why I didn’t have an actual dream. It took about 20 seconds to convince myself that it wasn’t an anime episode and they weren’t real anime characters from a show that I had forgotten the title of.

Dec 24 2022

• My dream involved “buses” that were basically elevators and went up the outsides of two tall and narrow buildings, both of which were at least 12 storeys tall. Both of them were shopping complexes, with each floor containing only a couple shops. Each floor had walls on only three sides as well — the fourth side was left open to the elements and was basically like the storefront or entranceway of that level. The open sides of both buildings faced each other as well, and on some levels there were walkways connecting the two buildings over mid-air, although there were also parts where you had to jump to reach the other side. It was very haphazard but it felt chic, and many teenagers and random people hung out here, milling between the two buildings.
• I don’t actually remember what happened in this place other than random snippets though. I remember taking the bus-lift up several times, and in one of them I was seated with a girl who I knew was from Vernon Barford, and some guys and girls who I knew were from McNally, and they were talking to each other about Lee, from Vernon Barford, who was apparently a mutual acquaintance of all of them even though it had been 3 or so years since we all had moved on from junior high.
• At another point, I was helping Paul from Dunman High clean up some nets that were left dangling in midair between the two buildings, attached to the building ledges on either side, that we had used for some sort of rehearsal in preparation for an event the next day. He suggested we take turns jumping into the nets, which were held suspended far above the ground, before we took them down, and I readily agreed.
• Another snippet involved me visiting a restaurant where the menu was in Japanese, but they also had pictures which helped a lot. The restaurant was crowded but an old man walked away from a back table for four as I approached the restaurant, freeing up that table, and the waitress led me there. I thanked her and indicated that I didn’t mind if a stranger took one of the other three seats as well since I knew that they were crowded.
• I was trying to hide that I couldn’t read the entire menu quickly, and I ordered a couple things when the waitress came up to my table, but was then looking for a specific vegetable dish that I thought this restaurant had, but I couldn’t find it. The waitress noticed that I was stuck and suggested a specific dish made out of small, round, succulent-looking orange chicken bits that looked really good, so I agreed to that, but realized that this would leave me without any actual vegetable dish. Also, while my first two dishes cost $13 in total, this dish cost $20, pushing my total for my meal to $33, much higher than I usually cared to spend on a meal. Oh well.
• There were more segments involving going up and down the elevator buses as well, and how they were some sort of social tool which I usually felt left out of, but I don’t remember any further details on those events.