Dreams

I think I had some pretty great dreams this week. Nothing lucid, and nothing I’d consider S-tier, but several dreams with a good pile of details remembered on many of the mornings, another rare 4-dream night in the mix, many snippets scattered through the diary entries, and basically some experiences that kept me eager to go to bed each night to see if I’d remember anything as interesting the next morning. And most of the time, I think I kind of did.

I also got soaked in rain twice this week, and then at the end of the week, I became a water mage of some sort. Weird linking theme?

Jan 17 2023

• The only thing I remember from the dream is that at one point, I visited an old school again and sat down on a couch with Zixiang to chat. I asked him if there were still often empty classrooms that we could hide in between classes, and he said no, these days most of the classrooms were all in use all the time.

Jan 18 2023

• Snippet: I stayed back after class with one other guy from my class as we both had something we wanted to ask the teacher. She answered his question first, then when it got to my turn, I flipped through my book but said I could no longer find my question. While I was thinking about it, the teacher and the male student picked up broomsticks and started mock fighting each other with them as though they were staves. When they stopped fighting, they saw that six students or so from the next class had come in and were watching them fight.
• They were quite impressed by the teacher and it seemed like the boys were going to hit on her, so the two of us helped the teacher pack up her pencil cases and papers from the desk, and escorted her out of the classroom. Valerie joined us then and suggested that since three of us were female, that we hide out in the female washroom until the coast was clear, so we did so. The boy in the group was impressed as he had never seen the inside of a female washroom before. I went into a cubicle and relieved myself in the squat toilet there while waiting.
• Snippet: I was with Mom and Dad by a riverside, they were saying something about how they were happy to treat me to a meal but it would be the last time, and what would I like for it? They suggested a new roadside stall on the other side of the river, pointing to it from where we were, and I agreed.
• Snippet: Two adventurers escaped on a large garbage platform chute in a building that lowered unwanted garbage from the main establishment on the ground floor into the sewers. The platform descended and came to a stop on the third level of the sewers, at which point the two adventurers hopped out and headed for an exit that was supposed to lead to the second level, so that they could ascend toward the surface. The younger adventurer went through the level change portal first, and the older one stopped, then touched a piece of moss on the wall, which healed him slightly and put him at max health. He then went through the portal as well.
• On the other side, he immediately felt like something was wrong, everything looked strange and it looked like he had gone through the fourth level portal and descended to the level beneath by mistake. He panicked and grabbed a sea urchin from the wall and held it above his head, tilting his head up and opening his mouth while attempting to squeeze its juice into his mouth, because that would supposedly help send him back. The younger adventurer came over to wrestle with him, shaking him out of his stupor and alerting him to the fact that the sea urchin had made him hallucinate and was trying to make him drink its poison. He was actually indeed safely on the second level.
• Snippet: I had a power to colour a large tiled floor palette with many different colours, which I did. After a bit, I had to leave the room with Mom and Dad as they were going to drive me home in a van, and I had to bring something along with me which I didn’t care for as I had not completed whatever it was yet, but I didn’t have a choice. While in the van, Dad told me that there was a game made in Edmonton, or by an Edmonton studio, that I was not legally allowed to buy DLC or redeem free bonus codes for while in Edmonton even though they existed, because the company heads had decided to milk the product for more money by re-releasing it as a base game only. I think he said the game was Spore. I said that I didn’t care and owned the full game with all the DLC and bonus codes on Steam already, and was not going to cave to corporate greed.
• Snippet: There was also a dream sequence where someone in a group I was with was summoning things by pulling out cards from a magical deck of cards. One of them summoned a large scorpion man that was about ten feet tall across the road or river, and that scorpion man ran into a nearby building that looked like a bank. I watched as three guards raced in after it, two men and one woman, and the two men came out after a few seconds, both at extremely low health, and stood outside the door to regenerate their health. I was worried this meant that the unnamed woman had died, but it turned out she was a healer and was just tanking the scorpion inside the room. Once the two men had recovered their health, they ran in again, and after another few seconds, all three reemerged safely from the building.

Jan 19 2023

• I dreamt that I went down to Calgary to meet Satinel and a few other friends and hang out with them. Details are sparse, but a few snippets are linked to this event. For starters, I had a curfew back home due to some mild punishment that I wasn’t able to keep because I was over three hours away, so I told my parents that I was staying with someone else in Calgary overnight.
• On the second day, after I had left the company of my friends, I tried to arrange a ride home with Dad the next day, asking if he would come pick me up, but the 3-4 hour drive was too long so I said I’d find a way to take a bus back home first. I said I could contact my friends again but that I might end up staying one more day and leaving in the early morning the next day. Thankfully it was the weekend so I didn’t have to be at school or work the next day anyway.
• While waiting for a local bus, I saw an Aeon departmental store across the road, and left my bags at the bus stop while I wandered up to it, wondering if it was open and if I could find some of that banana milk I liked in it. It was unfortunately closed, the store apparently opened from 10 am to 11 pm, and it was only 8 am or so in my dream. I had put on a pink jacket to do so, which I had apparently bought from a similar store in the past, and one of the things the store apparently sold was a fashion selection that changed with the seasons.
• It took me a bit to find my original bus stop again, as there were three bus stops in the vicinity and the first two did not have my bag. A couple of buses tried to stop for me but I waved them onwards. I eventually found my right stop (by looking for the Aeon departmental store again and then looking across the road) and retrieved my bags though. It had started to rain by that point and I liked the feeling of being wet, but eventually decided to pop into a nearby residential building through a little side door anyway.
• There was a chair on the other side of that door so I sat down on it, but I then noticed a sign on the inside of the door that said that the door was not supposed to be used, and an electricity bolt symbol on a sticker above the handle. It obviously wasn’t electrified since I used it just fine to come in, but I decided to leave just in case it came on. I used the weight of my bag to open the door and stepped out again.
• On the bus, I was standing next to a seated Caucasian woman who tapped my shoulder and asked me if she could forward someone on her chat my way. I said yes and we tapped phones to exchange contacts, and I soon had two new contacts on my phone. The second person was a friend of hers with a male name and a profile that said s/he was beginning his/her gender transition. I accepted the invite and said hello, and that s/he must be the friend of the woman who turned out to have a Chinese name, according to her profile. The new person said yes, and had some questions about some coloured tiles and how that related to a successful transition. I said I hadn’t really played with those tiles yet but had had a successful and very happy transition.

Jan 20 2023

• At one point, I was in an airplane or something that also doubled as the pilot’s house, with a living room with a computer in it, as well as a side bedroom and toilet. Besides me and the pilot, there were also a couple other random people milling about, like an old woman that I remember, but I never interacted with them. I did interact a little with the pilot though, like I was using the toilet at one point and he needed to enter the bathroom to do something else in there and I told him to feel free to do so, it was his house after all.
• Some distance through the journey, I saw a little gosling walking around in the house as well. And as we were preparing to disembark, I also found a tiny little duckling waddling its way around near the computer desk. It would turn into a flat pancake as a defensive mechanism if it felt frightened, and when it turned into one in front of me, I reached up to the desk and tried to find Ducky to bring him down to the ground and place him on top of the duckling pancake so that I could take a picture of them both, but I instead brought down my little glow in the dark turtle toy. Then the duckling half-unflattened so it had working legs again, and fled the scene. I confirmed with the pilot that this was the last stop for the plane, and my correct destination, and hurriedly packed my bags and left the plane.
• Later on, I was riding a bicycle through the rain together with Amy and a mutual guy friend. We were on the way to his house. The two of them were somehow sheltered from the rain but I was not, and I said I did not care, I loved the rain and loved the feeling of being drenched. When we reached the house, the boy’s father was there to meet us and help us in, and he started to ask about my wet clothes as well. I told him that Amy had pretty much fallen asleep while sitting on her bicycle in front of their house though and she needed to be let in as soon as possible.
• Even later on, I was in a lecture theatre full of little square school desks and chairs pushed together into groups of two. We had bad seats, but nearly everyone left for an intermission, and I took the opportunity to take a table at the front of the slightly elevated second row so that I had a good seat to see the next demonstration after the intermission, which was apparently an interesting one. I called out to Jah, and then Satinel, both of whom were nearby at different desks, to join me so that they would have good seats too. Satinel sat in the empty seat to my left, and Jah moved his table up to my right to join up with my table, so we formed a line of three desks instead. Someone I didn’t know then decided to move his table up to the left of Satinel and join up with us as well. I thought that was weird and a bit rude.

Jan 21 2023

Dream 1

• I was living with my family in a house that was also a public facility that we took care of, we had our private living quarters house but there were also other buildings that were open to the public, kind of like a small Japanese shrine. We opened the front and rear gates every day and let people wander in and out.
• This was also in an MMO setting, and I was part of a guild with friends, and one day Gawaine, who used to be in our guild but was not anymore, came by for a visit. He was a toddler character but somehow had made the trip here himself. My guild figured that his father had put him on the train and paid the fare for him and then just sent him off, which felt dangerous and irresponsible, but here he was anyway.
• I showed the Gawaine toddler around the public section of the base, in particular bringing him to a smaller garden by the back gate, then past a fountain to a larger garden near the front gate. In between there was a building that turned out to be an auditorium, and I also brought him inside that, showing him that it was a two storey thing, sort of like a theatre, where there was a stage in front on the ground floor, some chairs and tables on the ground floor, and more chairs and tables on the upper level that ended at a balcony that overlooked the stage below.
• I pointed out to him that the chairs were divided into groups of four and each group of four were centered around a table, and that the floor was a dark colour but beneath each set of 4 chairs and 1 table were white tiles, and this was so that if the audience needed to be divided into groups for some activity or other, they could do the activity in the groups that their chairs were already roughly divided into.
• Snippet: I’m not sure if this snippet comes from this dream or a later one, but I was preparing to sleep with my family in a large communal room at one point. Mom, Dad, Kel, and Jon. I felt like I wasn’t really staying there with them but had come to visit, and was staying there for at least one night. There was a large radio at the side of the room that was blaring out some lo-fi music, and although I liked the music, I was afraid that that would be disruptive to the rest of the family trying to sleep. They didn’t seem to mind it though. Even though I didn’t turn on the radio in the dream, it still felt like my fault somehow, and when I actually woke up in real life I noted that it was because I had left a YouTube video of lo-fi music running on my computer for background ambience while sleeping, and that was what was playing in my dreams.

Dream 2

• I was in a room with my workmates having a team meeting, and Ronnie announced that as most people knew by then, he was leaving his supervisor job at the end of the week for a new job at the United Nations, as headhunter recruiters had called him up and offered him a job there that he could not refuse.
• I was pissed at this. Partly because he didn’t tell me, one of his direct reports, about it until that meeting, and because it was Thursday on the last working week of the year and there wasn’t enough time to transition anything. But there was also an element of being scared of change and not wanting to have to deal with a new boss at this stage of my career. However, I reasoned, it probably wasn’t all that bad because I was only going to be here 4 more months before I left the job for Japan anyway.
• Still, I didn’t like it, and pointed out to him that only last week, he had said that he would be in this job for many years to come still, and would probably still be here, as leader of this team, in sixty years if the University didn’t kick him out first. Why did the change of heart come so quickly? I was livid at him.
• I also commisserated with Jeremy at some point, laughing with him that whoever the next team leader were would have a hard time if we both didn’t like them, since we both had concessions (like working from home) that were deal-breakers for us if they ever tried to remove it, and we often also had polar opposite demands and viewpoints on some issues and only Ronnie really knew how to navigate and balance us.

Dream 3

• This dream involved a train ride on a route and train that was modelled off of Singapore’s MRT train system, and having to make a transfer from my current line to a train line on the opposite side of the platform that went in a different direction that I needed to travel toward.
• I also knew for some reason that at each stop, the first person onto the train, or the person carrying the most items and getting onto the train, or something like that, would have their profile or achievement captured in an online record called Fotopedia. I was carrying a large backpack and knew that I had a good shot at whatever the award was. However, it wasn’t guaranteed to happen because a lot of people tended to stop at the popular nexus terminal where the two train lines and a couple other lines met.
• That being said, I knew that the train line I was on and the train line I wanted to get to didn’t converge at just that particular hub station, but also the next three stations after that, which were residential stations and thus far more quiet. Going an additional stop also meant that I was pretty much guaranteed a seat, since the train I needed to take was going in the opposite direction, and thus would stop at those three stations before reaching the hub station.
• Therefore, I stayed on my train past the nexus station, and got off at the first residential station after that with one other passenger. This station had two large pillars holding up the roof and each taking up about 1/3 of the station’s length, with a small squarish open platform area in between where I stood and waited for the next train.
• Editor: Fotopedia seems to have been an actual old website but I’ve never heard of it, so the one in my dream was unrelated to that.

Dream 4

• This scene happened around a school field outside a school that roughly resembled my McNally Composite High School, with two teams playing soccer or something in the field and a line of spectators watching them play along the side, between the field to the west and the school building to the east. I was standing to the south of the field, behind the net of one of the teams, half-watching them play.
• I could hear the conversation between the teams and even some of the spectators quite well, and at one point one of the players tried to insult a player on the opposing team, but couldn’t figure out how to finish off his insult. He trailed off for a second, then added a “Your mom!” at the end of it, which caused the audience to laugh. I wasn’t sure which of the two sides, the insulter or the insulted, the audience was laughing at.
• I wasn’t entirely paying attention to the game though, not only because I wasn’t really interested, but because the entire area also had a virtual farm simulation game overlaid on top of it that I was playing. This consisted of several points of interest that produced coins over time for me and that I could upgrade with said coins to unlock new animals or other perks.
• For example, there was a dirt mound on the north side of the school field (but that I could access from where I was standing in the south) that produced rabbits, but that I could upgrade to also produce bunnies (which apparently were distinct from rabbits) and frogs. There were two or three other upgrades that didn’t produce new animals but upgraded the existing ones in some way, like faster coin production speed.
• To the southwest of the field were some school buses, and another area where I could buy and/or upgrade other animals like goats and probably horses. They were more expensive so besides the starter goats that I started out with, I hadn’t really upgraded that section yet.
• To the southeast of the field was a building with a small computer lab or lecture theatre in it. I went into there with my lunch, a box of noodles, which I knew was slightly strong-smelling, intending to eat it by myself at one of the tables since there was no one else in there. I also learnt that that was a centralized upgrade location, where I could see all the upgrades from all the other facilities at once in a floating virtual menu. The first letters of all the words in the names of the upgrades were a different colour too, as long as the letter wasn’t already used in an earlier upgrade further up the list, so I realized that it was some sort of smart shortcut system that let me tap one letter on my keyboard to run the upgrade.
• The upgrade I picked, the bunnies, was made payable to a man that appeared in the room, and I pulled out my grey cat face coin purse (that I have in real life) and opened it to retrieve the coins from the game, which were apparently autodeposited into there as I earned them. I had a scattering of coins and notes in there, and the upgrade cost something like $5.64 or so, so I gave him a $5 note, then a 50 cent and 10 cent coin, and was trying to find enough small change for the rest of it. In the end I gave up, pulled out a 500 yen coin, and asked if that was fine and if he had change.
• He looked at the coin, then started to count out a lot more change than I was expecting. I realized that that coin was actually a special commemorative coin I had acquired from something called the Pirate Bay that I had apparently visited on my USA trip last year. I decided to take back the coins and just gave him a $10 note instead.
• Snippet: At one point somewhere later on in the dream, I bumped against a radio with my right arm and it came on, broadcasting an AM Radio channel with a talk host that was apparently having an interview with Trin about her company’s game, Signs of the Sojourner. I recognized her voice quite clearly but was surprised as I hadn’t heard that she had done any radio interviews for it. I tried to turn the volume up to listen to it more clearly, but the radio then cut off and I couldn’t get it to turn on again.
• Editor: Yes, rabbits and bunnies were two separate animals in my dream. I also did not visit any location called the Pirate Bay during my USA trip last year. By the way, the Year of the Rabbit in the Chinese lunar calendar starts Jan 22 2023.
  

Jan 22 2023

• I was at an MMO taking place on some school grounds, possibly as part of a school festival, as there were many other students also wandering about. For the first part of my dream, I was walking around with a female student a year older than me who I had become friends with, and who I thought of as a senpai.
• There were dorms that one could own and upgrade, and as a new student, I had two cards each granting an Upper 3 room in one of two adjacent residential towers, each of which was divided into four sections, Lower 1, Lower 2, Upper 3, and Upper 4. The level numbers were written in Japanese, each with two kanji and then a 1-4 numeral after each. I didn’t recognize the second kanji that was identical for both terms, but I did recognize the first differentiating kanji for each level as 下 for lower and 上 for upper. I was headed to an office with her to turn it in, and had agreed to give her one of the cards as well, the bigger one if she desired so although they were both probably around the same size, as she was currently living in a Lower 2 dorm.
• On the way to the office, we ran by some people that were carrying planks, and I learnt that there was an entire auction or consignment system where teachers and players sold stuff and students could buy stuff for their room and such, and apparently wooden planks were a popular item for some reason. I guessed that people were making crates with them to store items in their room.
• I also opened a loot chest with ten slots at one point and pulled out six items, including a magical ring, and an upgrade item used for the final step of an item upgrade chain that I didn’t have the prior items for yet. I gave the senpai a couple of the items, put everything else in a plastic bag, and carried that with me.
• I was also carrying a bunch of L5R cards in one hand, though a couple other cards from another game or possibly some student profile cards or something were mixed in to them. I dropped about a quarter of them at some point as we were crossing a field, and some nearby students helped me pick them up, though one student seemed reluctant to return one of the cards and I had to tug it away from him. I then put the cards in the plastic bag as well.
• That delay also meant that I was still around the area when a nearby raised stage became active, and several adventurers gathered around to listen to a figure giving announcements from the stage. Apparently this was where new heroes were anointed, and adventurers could become heroes by finding unique rings, and bringing them here whenever the event activated to get unique titles with unique skills based on their ring.
• The person on stage would then read out the hero names of every player nearby, sorted by alphabetical title order, with most of them already activated titles belonging to heroes that were promoted in the past and who happened to be nearby that day, which basically then acted as an attendance sheet for them. But whenever she read out a new hero’s name instead, she would add a line that said “May the craftsmanship last forever”, their ring would become bound to them, and they would get their new title.
• This was how I got my new title, as my ring was inside the bag I was carrying. I forget my exact title, but it was something like Elegy of Water, or Maiden of Water, or something close to that, and the ring allowed me to cast some unique water magic spells. Everyone else clapped, as they did for all new heroes. I realized that it was quite a powerful unique ring/title, although there was also an Earth, Fire, and Air version of that title, and I had no idea who or where those other players were (if their corresponding rings had already been found), as they were certainly not at this iteration of the promotion event.
• I then moved on, following the senpai over to the building where the matron in charge of housing was. The elevators were really packed, but there were also stairs we could use to get up. The office seemed closed at first, but as we were turning to leave, the senpai saw a plump woman waddling her way toward the office from a connecting corridor, pointed to her, and said that that was the matron. We then waited for her and the older student handled the transaction for us both.
• On our way back down, we used outdoor platforms along the upper corridors where someone standing on the platform could press a button and the platform would lower to the ground floor as long as someone kept the button depressed. If the button was let go, the platform would rise back up to the level it was from. This meant that it was mostly useful as a descending device, unless someone at the bottom happened to pass by as the platform reached the ground, as there was no way to “call” the platform down to the ground from below.
• I wasn’t really sure how the platform worked but we were only on the second level so it wasn’t a terribly long jump anyway, so I had lowered myself so I was hanging on to the edge of the platform, intending to just drop to the ground from there, but once it started lowering I realized what it was happening, waited a little while until it got closer, and just jumped to the ground from a couple of feet up. There was also a Chinese girl dressed in a white blouse, skirt, and sneakers, that jumped down from the second or third level corridor and landed unharmed beside me in a crouching position, I thought she looked really cool.
• Later on, I was walking alone in a field on the school grounds, not terribly far from where the hero promotion field earlier was. I could even hear the announcement event taking place again, and a hero in attendance list being read out and a couple new heroes being anointed with the same “May the craftsmanship last forever” line as before, but I was too far away to actually have my title read out.
• There were a group of four named NPCs wandering by in a little square, and I was trying to aggro pull one of them, a warrior maiden, away from her adventuring party and toward me with a ranged attack, so that I could attack and defeat her, but as she came running toward me, she got distracted by a guild store that was set up in between us, and a jewelry display case where there were several accessories on sale, including four different rings that could be taken to the stage to get a unique title from.
• She was considering them, and when I went over to look at the rings with her, I saw that the listing showed their unique skills as well. All four of the rings cost 600 coins each, which wasn’t a lot in the context of the game. One of them was a smoke ring that billowed out smoke around the wearer, and the other one was a red heal ring, which gave some sort of AOE benefit to people around the wearer whenever the wearer received a red heal. The ring itself could produce a small red heal of 2 hit points every now and then, but a guy nearby was complaining to someone else that that ring seemed really weak, as most players’ heal spells were not coloured, and thus would not activate that ring.
• I figured that that was a very niche ring that had to be combined with something else, and hazarded a guess that there was a specific zone with an altar that produced a pulsating red heal every few seconds or so, and that ring would trivialize that particular encounter and nothing else, so the character who bought that ring would likely end up spending a lot of time hanging out in that area and helping out any other adventuring groups.