Dreams

One of the techniques for acquiring lucid dreaming is supposedly to write a reminder to do a reality check now and then to confirm that you are not in a dream, and to paste that somewhere prominent, with the idea that if you get into that habit and it translates over to you doing that while a dream, you will actually realize that you are in a dream at that point and turn lucid. I’m very skeptical about this, but I did write down “Reality Check” on a sticky note and place it by my computer, and poke my right palm with my left index finger every now and then after glancing at it. We’ll see if this ever pays dividends.

Jan 10 2023

• The chunks of the dream that I remembered took part in some sort of MMO. I was in a guild of 6 people or so, and we had recently recruited a new player from another guild. Their guildmaster wasn’t very happy about this, and came to argue with us, and one thing led to another and we promised that a dish that we served at our tavern would become our top seller with the new recruit as the server within a month or so.
• To achieve this, we took the new recruit and went out to kill some monsters as a group to level him. Xuanjie in particular was there and took the newbie under his wing.
• While languishing behind the others, I found two ancient tomes on top of a table. Each tome had a latch that was closed but not locked, and I could see many little booklets slotted inside the tomes. It looked like a whole collection of books on necromancy, and I wondered if it was a trap left behind by someone at first, but when I poked it at bit, the books didn’t give off any smoke, which would have been the telltale sign of a trap, so I took the tomes and brought them to the rest of my team.
• I showed them to my team and the guildmaster exclaimed that some of those books were super rare and he really wanted a couple of them. He said that not many copies of that book existed, and he named a player who was close to retirement and said it probably belonged to them. I said I had never heard of that played.
• I argued that we should stop training for now and head back to the guild HQ and read what we could too, while waiting for rumours to surface of which high-ranking wizard had forgotten those tomes. At that point we could return it to them, but not before absorbing as much knowledge as we collectively could from the books. The rest of the group preferred to continue levelling the newbie though, and the guildmaster estimated that we would be fine holding off for a bit since we would probably have about two weeks before we had to return the books.
• We were all in a narrow alley passage next to an outdoor restaurant at that point, and there was a door at the end of the alley that our front member was picking the lock of. Two humanoid mice-like characters came up to us from behind though and greeted us — this was Satinel and a mutual guy friend, they knew I was there on my alt character and wanted me to log over and play with them, and this was their way of letting me know that they were online. They didn’t actually call out to me though, because they knew the guild didn’t know about my alternate character, so it was a general greeting to my other guildmates.
• They then decided that it was too dangerous to continue levelling here since others had seen them picking the lock, and began to leave the area. I excused myself and logged over to my own mouse character, who was also conveniently logged off right in the same area, and I wandered over to a table next to the alley where Satinel and our mutual friend were seated. I sat down and began to chat with them even as my other guildmates filed out of the alley and went home. I noted that since the lock at the end of the alley had now been picked, but my other guild had left without exploring the area, we could probably explore that area ourselves.
• Later on, for some reason or other, the three of us were caterpillars on the shoulders of a giant (who was probably a regular human, except we were so diminutive). We took turns hopping down onto his front shirt in order to read something or help with something that the giant was reading or doing, and each time we jumped down we were also fed by him.

Jan 12 2023

• I dreamt that I was taking a train into a new city with a couple of friends. On the way in, the train passed through a tunnel and I saw it pass by a large and dangerous fire hound that was sitting there and guarding its territory. The train then left the tunnel and went past quite a wide expanse of open land before reaching the city. I mentioned the hound to my other two friends and said that I guessed that it was probably fine since it was unlikely that any of us would be going that far out of the city, but to be careful just in case.
• Once we reached our station, we split up and I went over by myself to a nearby car rental shop to try to rent a car. I approached the counter and asked in Japanese if they had a car available, but the woman at the counter was Caucasian and answered me in perfect English that they did. She gave me a quick form to fill in, though that form was in Japanese.
• While I was filling it in, another woman came up to the counter next to me and handed a note to the woman behind the counter. I stole a glimpse of the note and saw that it was a robbery note, she demanded money for her and her partner behind me and also said not to make a fuss or to contact the police, or else. The Caucasian woman seemed to be flustered at the note.
• I pretended not to have seen the note, especially since I realized that they were politely waiting for me to finish the transaction and leave with my car before commencing with the robbery, in order to raise as little suspicion as possible. I finished the form and was given a pair of keys for a car outside in the parking lot in exchange, and I hurried out of the shop.
• Once I was safely outside and around a corner, I pulled out my phone and called 911, telling the officer on the other hand that ther was a robbery in progress. I had trouble describing what area I was in, so I said that it was at the car rental shop near the train station, and he seemed to understand what I meant and named a couple buildings nearby. I said that he was correct.
• Having done my civic duty, I hopped into my new rental car and drove off. It was a very small car, and was basically a solo car, with just one driver’s seat in front and a slightly longer seat behind that could hold either some bags or a couple other people if they were willing to squeeze in. It was a very cozy car. At one point, a random woman approached the back seat hoping for a ride, but I noted that it was too cramped with my stuff already in the back seat, and she moved on along.
• One of the places I remember driving by was my Edmonton 4012 house, because for some reason the house was in the city and I knew my parents were out of town, but that they had also bought the house next door to our old home, and somehow there was a chance that they had left the doors unlocked and had left stuff in there for me from a previous dream or previous interaction I had with them. Driving past it, however, all the doors seemed locked, and the car was difficult to handle so I kept on driving. The car was on autorun mode so I couldn’t really change its speed and make it slow down even though it wasn’t moving terribly quickly, but I thankfully managed to make the right and left turns out of the neighbourhood road onto the main road again without crashing into any parked cars.

Jan 13 2023

• I dreamt that Ronnie and I were in a classroom in school and using it as a staging area to keep our team’s bags and stuff while we prepared for a team competition held elsewhere in the school. The classroom was full of tables, some upside down and piled to the side, others the right way up but strewn around the room, and I put my bag down to one side. I also had Tizilla, Tigey, and my red, round thermal food container with lunch in it with me, and I put all of that down and helped him move some desks.
• A student came into the room and waved a card literally in my face, he was trying to get us to give some sort of donation to whatever cause he was supporting. I pretended to play dumb and have no idea what he meant, and Ronnie shook his head at him, saying that we were competitors in the contest that was happening upstairs and we had to go soon. Upon hearing that, he also stopped being pushy and helped us arrange the tables, and we moved two long tables to the rear door and put them so they were parallel to each other with their short edges touching, this made a sort of barrier that would hopefully prevent others from using the room.
• We then left for the venue we had to go to upstairs. The building had changed into a mall by then, and there were various escalators and stairs leading up. I told Ronnie that I’d meet him upstairs, and I stopped off at a long queue outside a co-ed washroom upstairs, and got briefly irritated at a man carrying a baby because as he milled around in my path just outside the washroom, blocking me, eight other people got into the queue in front of me from the side. Whatever, the queue moved really quickly anyway, especially with an attendant woman by the entrance guiding the queue along and making sure it was quick and orderly.

Jan 14 2023

• This dream entry consists of a few different snippets that took place in the same “world” so to speak.
• Firstly, there was an MMO aspect of it that involved an underground world beneath the overworld, the underground world was made up of caverns and sand pits and had lots of castles in it. It was considered a dangerous area that people normally did not venture to, but there was going to be some sort of a guild contest down there in a few days. I had dug a tunnel from my Dad‘s bedroom down to the centre of an area that I called the Catacombs, and was hoping to convince my guildmates, which included Jah, Trin, Satinel, and more, to join the guild contest with our guild, using this tunnel as our secret weapon to get around, as we also had a guild passage that led from the underground region to my room where we stayed, and which was next to Dad‘s room in the overworld. We could basically zip back here to resupply and then zip back down to the underworld.
• This contest involved taking a castle and holding it, and doing some siege warfare against other guilds as well. Normally we would have immediately been overrun by much larger guilds, but there were also little NPC armies running around that would attack the larger guilds, and in fact I learnt during a practice run of the event that it was possible to hang out inside those armies and pretend to be an NPC myself, and heal the other NPCs attacking their castles, without drawing much attention from the defenders, as long as I didn’t jump around as that would immediately flag me as a player. It was apparently hard to resist the urge to jump around, though.
• Anyway, there were lots of castles strewn around the underground map, and many were unoccupied. The underground map was divided into four or five large general regions, and all the castles were one of those regions by default, but I was friends with one of the guilds that owned a region and they said to just claim a small castle somewhere and run a slash command in chat that would set our guild as the liege for the castle and that should get us through the event. We thanked them and did so.
• I also told my guildmates to bring along a couple weapons that had a higher level requirement than our current level, as this was a good way to level up but it would be difficult to leave during the event to gear up before coming back. On the flip side, we didn’t have to bring much in terms of silver for repair costs because we could just discard the gear that we had outlevelled afterwards.
• From here it devolves into a number of snippets. One involves a couple of burly tourist brothers who were walking around in the overworld at some point, indicating that there was some sort of spectator system for the upcoming guild contest too. I don’t remember much about them, just that they existed.
• In fact, there was a semi-covered market area that was usually closed, but that I knew had an entrance to the underworld, and Satinel and I were headed there a bit early on the day of the contest to get ready to go underground. I wanted to use the washroom first while there, and I had figured that the place would mostly be deserted so it would be no problem. But I knew this wasn’t true when, as we approached from a distance, I noticed that the metal shutters guarding the market entrance were pulled open today and some of the stalls inside had lights on and people at the counter — I had apparently passed by this market before but had never seen it manned until now.
• There was a crowd of people, mostly spectators, milling about the market even though it was just a minor entrance to the catacombs below, and the line to the toilets were astonishingly long. We went down a side passage to look for alternates and Satinel found a swivelling bar stool with a hole in the middle of it — she also needed to use the bathroom by this point though so she sat down on it, and an attendant lady came by with a chamberpot to place beneath her chair. She also offered me one, but I couldn’t find a similar seat to use, as all the other seats had no convenient hole in the middle of them. Instead, the attendant lady pointed me toward a small doorway that opened up into what basically was an aircraft toilet, and I used that instead.
• The last snippet involved a class scene that was implied to be set near the end of the contest, where a 30-strong class of primary school students was shuffling back to their classroom in preparation for the next class after watching or perhaps participating in the event. There were only 29 of them there though, as the 30th student was delayed for some reason, and a man that looked like the main teacher character in the Mairimashita! Iruma-kun anime stood outside the classroom and made the entire class clean the classroom from top to bottom until it was spotless. Somehow, the implication was that if he could get this done before the 30th student returned, he would be able to take the place of that student instead. But as the dust settled down from the cleaning and the students all returned to their seats, and the man stood triumphantly outside the classroom door waiting for the teacher to acknowledge him, the back door of the classroom suddenly flew open and the 30th student, with a sullen look on his face, walked in and headed to his seat in the front left corner of the classroom, dismaying the man waiting outside.

Jan 15 2023

• The earlier part of this dream involved a man and his companion going around a medieval town or city looking at houses. He was a vampire, she was a witch or magician, and they could both cast teleport and a few other magical spells. They seemed to be lovers or at least really good friends.
• At one point, an elder magician started following them. When they came out of viewing a castle, he teleported in and moved in to start attacking them. The vampire teleported to the edge of a chasm next to a nearby bridge and the man followed with a scrying spell, and the vampire took the girl in her arms and leapt over the side of the bridge. The man couldn’t follow them that way, and he cursed, before teleporting down to the bottom of the chasm to look for them. However, he couldn’t use scry to follow them because the pair had not teleported down. Instead, the man had changed them both into his vampire bat form (or she had shrunk herself into a form that he could carry even as a bat) and was hiding on the underside of the bridge, and once the elder teleported down into the chasm, the vampire bat flew himself and the girl away.
• At another point, when the pair of them teleported to a church outside the city, a group of crocodile-themed templars ambushed them as well. There were six of them, dressed in checkered outfits that seemed reminiscent of detectives. Three of them clenched their fisted gloves, which glowed yellow, in front of them — they were using some sort of magical item to cast a channeled scrying spell on the pair, and that was how they were going to combat the pair’s teleportation power — teleporting cost pretty much all their magic power for some time, and it took time to regenerate the magical power, so even if they both teleported far away, they could only teleport twice since there were two of them. The triple scry would be able to follow their magical signature through three hops and the templars could follow and defeat them.
• Even though the two of them were surrounded, the man whispered into the shorter woman’s ears, who then chanted something and teleported them about ten metres away, onto the roof of the nearby church. The man then immediately teleported them again, one more metre away and still on the roof, and then the woman teleported them one more time, another one metre away. The man followed up with a proper teleport spell, and the two of them disappeared in a flash.
• The templars were disappointed at this, with one of the younger templars asking their leader what had just happened. The exasperated leader said that they had used short teleports for their first three teleports, which only cost half their total magic power each cast, but which exhausted the triple scrying web that the templars had cast. The man that exhausted his magical reserves and then some to properly teleport the two of them away. They would both be exhausted and have to rest for some time, especially the man, but they had successfully escaped and couldn’t be traced for now.
• There was also a fourth faction of characters, the Argent Dawn, who also consisted of a group of 6 or so vampire hunters who were specifically tracking the male vampire down. They were investigating the earlier scuffle near the bridge, and specifically looking at the bootprints by a footpath next to the bridge. There were a lot of bootprints in the area, as apparently the Crocodile Templars had also already come by earlier to investigate the area, and they had tried to mislead the Argent Dawn group by leaving one particularly clear bootprint very visible, which seemed to implicate one of the younger Argent Dawn members by suggesting that he had been here on his own earlier.
• However, the man, who was of African descent, was cleared by his supervisor, a European noble lady, who said that she could verify that he had been with them all the time earlier and could not have been here earlier during the scuffle as they had been having a tea party, and she noted that he had held his teaspoon the exact same way that he always had and that his teaspoon weighed exactly the same as it should have when he did so, which were things that any decoy spell could not replicate. He thanked her for that, and then also pointed out that the bootprint just before the incriminating one was also “broken”, this indicated somehow that the print was most likely fake. He got accolades from his other group members for being observant for this.
• Suddenly, they heard a sound, and one of the other members looked down over the edge of the hill that the footpath was on, toward a lower part of the footpath beneath them. To their horror, they saw a swarm of large and small crocodiles, about 30 of them or so in all, scampering along the footpath and heading up towards them. They all turned tail and fled back toward the town with the crocodiles chasing them.
• The townspeople in general had been supportive of the pair when they were looking for a place, and it was suggested that they both originally hailed from the town as well. A new character was introduced here, a diminutive girl with pink hair and pigtails or buns who had just received some commissioned gear from the local blacksmith, and was now going to set out on a journey to find the runaway pair as well. She was friendly to them, and neutral to both the Argent Dawn and the Crocodile Templars, as she was a normal human girl.
• At this point, I received a “To be continued” screen as though it were an episode of a show whose weekly broadcast had just ended. I then immediately woke up.