Dreams

After last week, Nyari appeared in my dreams this week again. Interesting.

Feb 27 2023

• I took a bus in a foreign city with a female Indian friend to check out the classes in a University. She was thinking of signing up for the school. When we reached the school stop, we stood around for a bit uncertain of what to do, and then got invited into the principal’s office by a teacher to talk to the headmistress there. In that room, we saw the headmistress talking with another Indian or Malay girl who was there with her mom and who I recognized from the bus. The headmistress turned to us to listen to the Indian girl, who asked if she could skip some prerequisites and take some courses here, which would involve her dropping a 1st year Data Science course of some sort to make room on her schedule. The principal laughed and said she didn’t need that course for this course, and gave my friend a proficiency quiz that she pulled out from a drawer of her table, to see if she was suitable for the course that she wanted to take or not.
• In a separate school dream later, I joined up with a school that was also simultaneously a guild with two other friends in a game world, and we formed a little miniguild within that larger guild, which had quite a few players. I started two new characters in the game, one male and one female character, to explore a labyrinth. As part of the joining process, I had to secure a rental apartment in the game, which I did, and the rental manager said that she liked me but I would still have to pass a probationary period of 15 days or so like everyone else, whereby I could not get too many demerit points or I would get kicked out. She gave me a short list of 10 or so items that would cause demerit points, the main one being not being home at the end of the day.
• However, one of the first quests after joining the guild was fighting some creatures that promptly kidnapped the character, win or lose, and sent them down into a subterranean lake area. There, we had to do a series of quests to be able to return home again. One such quest was a fishing quest, where we had to fish in a river until we got a popup message that told us that the fish we needed wasn’t in that area and to finish fishing in another spot. My female character, who I was concentrating on playing through the quests first, managed to complete this first part in 4 fishing attempts, which was extremely lucky. Another quest later on involved controling a team in a game of ice hockey where we had a 4 on 2 power play and needed to score at least once in the net as we were trailing by one goal.

Feb 28 2023

• I was waiting outside a manor building with Zixiang and Jonathan from Dunman High, as well as a few other nameless students. Our next class apparently was in the classroom located in that building, however the teacher wasn’t here yet to unlock the doors for us to go in. The manor apparently housed different people, including residential units, and the person staying next door to the classroom wandered out of his apartment to the balcony and looked down at us, and when we noticed this, Jonathan went up to borrow keys from him and unlock the classroom so we could go in. He agreed, but said that he didn’t have the key to the toilets and he couldn’t let us use the one in his apartment either. We went into the classroom to study for an upcoming test, and Zixiang reminded me that the test was out of 20 and the teacher had said that the minimum mark we would get for it would be 16 no matter how badly we did.
• In a different dream, I was playing a game with Nyari and we were hiding outside a spaceship owned by medusa, creatures with an upper body of a woman and lower body of a snake, who were slithering around outside the ship. Nyari discovered that the medusa were essentially blind and would not see you if you were prone on the ground and didn’t move. He set off ahead of me and I saw him lying prone on his belly by an outdoor pillar that was propping up the front nose of the spaceship, and he told me to hurry up and get to him too. I tried the same thing, running out partway and then going prone and trying to hide out in the open, but this didn’t work so well for me, as the medusa got curious and started slithering over in my direction even though I wasn’t moving any longer, and I realized that they were going to bump into me eventually. I ended up aggroing them and running away. I learnt that this was a demo version of the game anyway as the game ended right after that.
• In yet another dream, I and some others were planting seeds in a garden that woulkd sprout into anime OST albums, and someone was looking for something super similar to the OST for Management of a Novice Alchemist. There was a scoring system put in place for sprouted albums and how similar they were to that. Also, at some point I went back to a school canteen after some time away from it, and marveled at how there were lots of people in there, and the scene in particular was so colourful, and hi-definition, with lots of crisp detail and lots of reds and browns.

Mar 01 2023

• I was in class getting back a quiz from the teacher, and one of my classmates told the person seating next to me, who was new to the class, that I generally got really good marks on my quizzes. I was a bit embarrassed by this as I didn’t think it was really true, though it was true that I got good marks on the last quiz. We also had some sort of quiz or assignment that day that involved going into a game world and exploring an underground sewer tunnel-like area, but I discovered a weird room behind the bottom of the stairs that led down into the tunnels, that led into a separate large room. A bunch of monsters were in that room and they overwhelmed my character, causing her to die and have to choose a respawn location, either up on the surface at the nearest respawn shrine area, or up at a random spot near where I died. I didn’t know how random it could be though so I picked the shrine, which was some distance south, but was at least a known landmark. I then made my way back and cleared out the room.

Mar 02 2023

• I was doing quests in a large city along with many other people, and in particular there was a quest that introduced me to archery whereby I had to run to a place on the edge of a forest and then shoot a small and quick-moving bird within 4 minutes or so. However, that quest had an achievement tied to it which could be obtained by running to a certain spot near the starting location of the quest, which was much further away than where the quest would lead me, and then shooting down a bird within 90 seconds of the start of the quest.
• I attempted this quest several times, with the first aborted attempt being spent trying to find the correct spot in the first place. I started just inside a train station, so I went to an elevator that led to an adjoining tower, but the elevator took so long to arrive and then carry me and others up to the top of a tower that I figured this could not be it — by the time the elevator doors opened at the top, 90 seconds had already more or less elapsed. I used the rest of this attempt to find the proper spot, and eventually found a smaller two-storey viewing tower attached to some sort of Science Centre type building across the street from the station, which I could reach in a few seconds using some stairs next to where I started to get to street level, and then crossing one road and going up another set of stairs. This would leave me about 30 seconds per quest attempt to shoot the bird.
• Shooting the bird still felt impossible as it was so far away, and it was difficult to even make out the bird at times, it was like a little smudge against the evening clouds floating above the city. I decided to spend another attempt going to see where the bird was, as this bird wasn’t flying over a forest but was above the city instead. I approached the location it was flying over, which was a street whose sidewalk was filled with people doing other quests, mostly to do with either the cars passing by or some sort of creature that was on the road.
• There was one person standing around saying that he had compiled a list of character skins from Guild Wars 2, which were basically outfits for various characters, as well as the release dates for those skins, and he had made a Reddit thread with all the dates. Another person had made a comment saying that at least one of the dates were wrong, because his favourite skin was listed as coming out in 2022 (or 2012?) whn in fact he had bought that green foresty skin in 2021 (or 2011?), and he suggested that the person’s data came from when the skin was later modified to be a higher resolution. He even provided a picture of his digital receipt for the character skin. I added a comment to the thread suggesting that that date should then be changed, and when I came back later to the thread, I found that my comment had 2 community upvotes for a total score of 3.
• Anyway, from the edge of the street, I could look up and see the bird not too far away. I took a couple of practice potshots from here but even from here I could not really hit the bird. Someone else mentioned a weird trick though, where you could edit the copy of the game and specifically edit the bird’s model. And by clicking on the bottom edges of the bird’s profile and dragging it downwards toward the ground, one could create a large, grotesque model whose top was like a floating eagle, and was still dozens of feet in the air, but then was connected to a large cylindrical snake-like bottom which extended all the way down to the ground and make it trivial to hit. However, this would become visible to everyone in the city, especially those by the road doing their other quests, and it would not only be embarrassing and cheating but also be pointless as everyone would then go attempt this quest and get the same rare achievement that I was trying to get, so I decided not to do this. I restarted the quest and returned to the tower to try to take more pot shots at the bird, futile though it was.

Mar 03 2023

• Snippet: All I remember today is a 2D view of a house and that I was guarding the door on the bottom right side of the house, on the ground level, occasionally letting some friends in while watching out for some sort of superior force that was frustrating to guard or fight against.

Mar 04 2023

• I was on a boat as a crew member or an omnipotent observer, and the ship had just acquired a new captain, a short, but outgoing and plucky anime-style girl. Her first order was to overhaul a Japanese language class being held on the boat that I was a student in. I was taking this class with two other people I knew, a male and a female, though I forget their identities. The guy was possibly Kelvin from McNally. There were many other people in the class that I did not know as well. And apparently Zixiang was supposed to be there too but never showed up to class.
• The captain became the substitute teacher for the class, and asked what we had learnt thus far. We went over a few things that she wrote down on the board. She saw the girl that I was with read off of a folded reference sheet at some point, and took the reference sheet from her to see what we had been taught. The teacher was annoyed and embarrassed at what she saw though, because the reference sheet, which was from the previous teacher, taught us that each word had a chakra value and that they could be used to help us remember the word or some grammar rules or something. This teacher said that that was utter rubbish and we should get rid of that reference sheet and that stuff like that was why the overhaul was needed. I made some reading notes as the teacher droned on.
• The teacher also surveyed the class, asking who had native Chinese experience as she needed someone to sit up front in the teacher’s desk area to translate some Chinese text to Japanese on the board. I put my hand up half-heartedly, as I only had partial native Chinese experience growing up, but several other people including the boy I was with (Kelvin?) put their hands up anyway, so I knew that one of them would definitely get it over me, to my relief. In the end, there was already a boy up front at the teacher’s desk and typing on a laptop even as the teacher was doing her survey, and she found out that he was the best person for the job anyway — he had done his master’s degree in Chinese and was now studying Japanese as well so he had been trying to get a head start on the translation even while the teacher was doing her survey. By the time she had finished, he had already translated a Chinese paragraph by putting Japanese hiragana over it and we could all see that thanks to the projector that was shining his work on the blackboard above and behind him.
• The boat itself was some sort of a tugboat and cleanup boat, and was involved in an international incident or race to get to a part of the ocean off the coast of America to try to retrieve a black box from a plane that had fallen into the ocean. Air Force One, the presidential plane, had recently flown over the area to try to locate the site of the plane crash, and we were following up behind after that plane left. Someone suggested that America would probably send out a telegram to the other countries as a late courtesy, telling them that we were about to clean up the wreckage, but not until we actually approached the spot, so that it would be too late for any other country to react.
• Snippet: There were a mess of other snippets somehow mixed in with this plotline or my dreams in general, one of them being a scene where someone was calling a bank to try to open a new account when he already had one, and a female Indian clerk was helping out another male clerk and telling him that the best way to do this was to select the transfer option on the remaining $170 in the client’s account and then using the option to send it to a new account from there, where it would let him enter the details for the client.
• Snippet: Another one involved watching the very end of some ice hockey games that we were watching on TV. I believe there were two Edmonton Oilers games, one where we lost 4-1 to the Vancouver Canucks, and another where we lost to the Colorado Avalanche 2-1, which was noteworthy because the Colorado team had been up 2-0 with seconds to go, so they had given up and gone to the bench early with a couple seconds left, and someone on the Edmonton team had snapped up the puck, rushed across the blue line, and put the puck in the Colorado net with less than a second to go to break the shutout. The Colorado coach was pissed at his team for this.
• Snippet: Satinel and I were also wandering a school hallway late at night, looking for enemies to defeat so that we could loot new skills and skill upgrades from said enemies. We both controlled two characters each, though we controlled them on laptops. Mine was on my lap as I sat upright on something that looked like a toboggan with wheels, with my legs stretched out in front of me. I had put a blanket over my legs too, trailing off to either side of the vehicle, and either Mom or a teacher came by at one point and inquired as to what was under the blanket, since the laptop lid was open and causing the blanket to make a tent shape. Anyway I was capable of steering the toboggan even though I was seated entirely on it and my hands were busy with the laptop, so I followed just behind Satinel as she led the way.
• At one point though, we entered some washrooms and triggered a rockfall trap, which crushed us and our characters. Three of the four characters, both of mine and one of hers, died. We had about two dozen resurrect scrolls between us four though, so it was not a problem for the remaining character to loot a scroll from one of the corpses and resurrect one of us, except that the resurrect scroll needed two mana or faith points or something like that to activate, and the remaining character only had a maximum of one. To get around this, we had to exit the game to the main menu and then load it up in a special mode that was only available when one character was left alive. This mode allowed her to extend her skills by sacrificing one hit point to temporarily get one extra mana to be able to use that scroll, so she did that to resurrect one of the other characters, who then promptly turned around and resurrected everyone else properly.
• Snippet: There was a part in my dream itself where I tried to write down preliminary dream notes for my dream journal, particularly focusing on the Japanese class scene on the boat earlier. I wrote down Jap for Japan, then remembered that it was considered a slur and added a couple more letters to be clear. I then sat at a table in a house and tried to get myself to write out the actual dream, but I could not find the concentration to do so. I also wanted to do a writeup on a certain group of gaming friends that I had not written about on my blog yet, as I had liked them and the time I had spent with them, but also couldn’t. Mom was also nearby, she had borrowed Kel‘s laptop to look up something on the internet. I was watching the clock myself too, because it was rapidly approaching noon, when I would be able to ask my parents for permission to actually surf the net and talk with my friends for the rest of the evening.
• Snippet: At another point, I was bunking in a dorm room with a few other people for the night, but Johannes was still awake because he had taken a nap earlier in the day, so instead of sleeping, we played a few games of something together until it was nearly 5 am. I then asked him if he still wanted to play, but he said no, he wanted to try to get proper sleep too and not have to coast through the next day on only a nap. I nodded and laid down on my bed too and turned onto my side, fiddling with a phone game of my own, and then pretending to be asleep when someone came in to check.
• Snippet: Lastly, there was a gang initiation of some sort involving a game with a convoluted city map split into two horizontally by a river, though there were many bridges leading across it. It looked like a more complex version of an Edmonton city map in that regard. The initiates had control of a car, and their goal was to get to a secret location and drive into a garage there without being followed, to see how good they were at evading the police. On the other side were two or three large cars staffed by gang members, who were roaming the city and looking for those initiates. On my digital/holographic map, I could see the live locations of the gang initiates’ car as well as the big red vans or trucks that represented the gang members trying to find them, and their efforts to outmanouver each other. I wasn’t sure how much of the information the people in the cars had, as although it didn’t seem like they could see each other’s positions, it did seem like they had access to some sort of information so it wouldn’t just be searching for a needle in a haystack.

Mar 05 2023

• Snippet: I was in my Edmonton 205 kitchen, except the kitchen was much longer in length. I started on one end of the kitchen, laying down long, thin strips that looked like plastic racetracks for little cars and could be joined together, except each length of track had two columns of grooves set into it. The left set of grooves were little spheres spaced evenly apart, and in those I placed small cookies, candies, and similar confectionaries, whereas the right column was one thin trench that connected smoothly from one strip to the next, and I put liquid chocolate in that so that there was a stream of liquid chocolate stretching the length of the racetrack. The racetrack stretched several metres long by the time I was done with it. I wasn’t alone and it was getting in the way of someone else, so I eventually picked up all the racetrack strips and put them on a serving tray along with a number of my plushies.
• Snippet: I was watching, through a full-length body mirror, some girls celebrating with each other during their school graduation. I had thought that it was a one-way viewing device, but one of the girls eventually turned to me to address me, much to my surprise. She said that some of my hair was stuck on the side of my face so it looked like I had a beard or something, so I fixed it and thanked her.
• Snippet: This snippet also took place during a graduation scene, so it might have been connected to the last snippet. A short girl that looked like the main character of Watamote was sitting in a dark corner on the second level of a grand hall, away from a school exhibition and festival that was taking place on the first level. She was depressed and hugging her knees because she had missed taking part in a school band that had played in the middle of the main hall some time ago. A short, fat boy that looked like he escaped from a western animation cartoon came up to her to try to cheer her up, and said that he had recharged $20 into his card and wanted to take her around the festival to see the various stalls.
• Snippet: Heg and Amy both left a Discord server that we were in together along with a few other friends. Both of them were still in Heg‘s side Discord server though, so I could see them there, but they were offline. I chatted to Satinel and told her that the reason they had left was that they had both left the house that we were all staying in as well, and gone overseas to study. I then went out to the house’s second-floor balcony at 4 or 5 am, and brought in some items that we had left outside on the balcony so that they would be safe.
• Snippet: A male actor was being interviewed about a film he was performing in called Ogender. Someone jokingly asked the actor if that meant that his character was agender. The actor gave a bad answer, ridiculing the question and insulting agender people, and got downvoted heavily as the crowd’s opinion turned against him. Someone replied saying that while the question may have been irrelevant, the way that he answered now made the issue relevant to them.
• Snippet: There was a slander attempt from a guy that tried to confront our Discord server about something. I was defending someone else and told him to feel free to slander me, as I wasn’t going for a job in his industry or in the vicinity of the city anyway. It turned out that the guy was very well-connected, and we found some lists with people that we had slandered in the past, with their name up top and a list of characters he had used to contact various companies below that. The slanderer only stopped when the person listed at the top of the sheet apologized to him, which he considered a victory. He had left behind lots of text chat evidence though, which I screenshotted, and those lists of characters that he used to contact the companies always used the same persona name to make his complaints to each company too, and usually involved a second persona then agreeing with the first one in bad English. So even though I didn’t want to work here, I figured it was better safe than sorry, and I took all the evidence and started to contact the companies one by one to tell them who the slanderer’s fake personas were.
• Snippet: I think this was related to the last snippet, and one of the companies I went to report to was currently running a Korean cultural festival with stage presentations in an auditorium, so I had to sit through that first before I could talk to the people in charge. The emcee lady leading the presentations looked up at the upper catwalk at the back of the room at one point, where a computer that some news broadcasters were supposedly using to record the exhibition was located, and wondered if it was being used to farm bitcoin instead because the machine was making a fair amount of noise but no one was actually there. A man in the crowd suggested that they put a piece of tape over the camera to prevent it from recording the exhibition since no one was actually there.