Dear Tigey,
You know, I’d be lying if I said I never thought I’d get this far, to My Diary #100 — the fact that my first 99 posts were “My Diary #001” and “My Diary #099” instead of “My Diary #01” and “My Diary #99” etc would bely that claim. But still, it’s a pretty amazing milestone! Though, 20 years from now, when I hit My Diary #999, I’ll wonder why I never had the foresight to make the diary entries 4 digits long to begin with, and I’ll look back at this and laugh scornfully at my earlier self. Good times eh, future me?
Entry #100 (Jul 09 2023)
Table of Contents
Somehow I’m still writing about…
ට School
ට Work
ට Life
ට Games
ට Plushie of the Week #96
ට Song of the Week #73
ට Writing Prompt of the Week #16
ට Memory Snippet of the Week #80
ට Dreams
School
Nothing happened this week school-wise, which isn’t surprising as it’s between semesters and most of my Sophia stuff is squared away now. Next week I get the results of my alternate housing application from two weeks ago though, the roll of the destiny dice that I don’t mind winning and don’t mind losing, although I expect to not get into this since I think I was supposed to apply in round 1, through my original exchange application, not round 2, through the webpage. We’ll see!
Work
Similarly, nothing much happened at work this week. My boss said I’ll only be getting day-in, day-out tickets until I leave, and no project work or crazy tough tickets or anything like that, though a couple of my tickets have nonetheless spun out of control anyway, as Tier 2 tickets tend to do sometimes.
Apparently my boss plans to hold some sort of goodbye meal for me, and asked if I had any preferences, so I said that some sort of buffet place would be good. He said he’d look into some. Good stuff.
We also talked about my letter of resignation and he said that I probably should write one up and hand it in two weeks before I leave, so around the middle of August, since I plan to leave at the end of August or early September. Whichever sharehouse I end up in for my Sophian stay, I’ll probably be moving in sometime between Sep 11 and Sep 20 or so.
Life
My new phone is way too big! When holding it with one hand, my thumb can’t even reach the other end of the screen. And it has difficulty fitting into pockets that the old Pixel 5 could fit into before. With the phone case attached, it’s far less slippery than the Pixel 5 was though, which hopefully will do wonders for its durability.
In free time outside of any game time this week, I worked on scanning projects, but there’s so much left to do that there’s no way I’ll even get to a point where I’ll be satisfied before I leave for Japan. Hopefully nothing happens to my stuff while I am gone and I can come back to everything in working (scanner) and pristine (documents and trinkets) order after.
Meet Salim:
I mentioned last week that a lot of random store employees and maintenance people and stuff from around the neighbourhood know me, and this guy is one of them — he’s a long-time staff member at the local Safeway, and for some reason we started giving each other friendly greetings and smiles a year or so ago whenever we run into each other, which is pretty much once every 3 times or so that I go to the Safeway. I asked him for permission for a selfie a couple meetings ago, and this time made good on my promise, since I won’t be here for much longer.
Also, the lit-up tree in our neighbourhood courtyard had been left dark for several months now, since Christmas passed, but for some reason it was turned on a couple of times this week. I took the opportunity to take a picture with my new phone, so that my new phone camera and the tree that I am very fond of could meet each other:
The tree itself is kind of blurry though, and I didn’t think to take a big 200MP picture on that day while it was on, but I tried a couple later in the week. One with just night mode on:
And one with night mode and the 200MP camera on, which ballooned the file size from 3.6 mb to 24 mb. I feel like it didn’t appreciably make that much of a difference, except to make my WordPress installation not be able to generate a thumbnail for it again. So here’s a direct link.
I’ve also noticed an uptick in children playing in the courtyard area between the buildings of our apartment complex:
Earlier in the week, I even saw one industrious boy climb out of the second floor balcony of the white building to the left (which is actually the management office), onto the roof of the shed just below the window, and then jump off onto the ground from there.
The weather has been great here in Edmonton this week, which likely contributed to this, although apparently this week saw 3 or 4 days in a row (local), depending on who you ask, where the Earth’s average global temperature reached record levels, and heat waves are slamming different parts of the world at the same time. Not here in Edmonton though, our weather’s been very balmy and cool, with highs somewhere in the 17 (earlier in the week) to 26 (later in the week) degree Celsius range. The two benches in the picture were also recently installed over the last year or so, and I really like them — I have a good view to both of them from my computer desk and I enjoy seeing a steady stream of different people sit down on them (generally facing away from me) and passing time with each other. It makes me appreciate the interconnectedness and the fleeting nature of life and friendship.
My regular Monday morning meeting with Zian was cut short this week, largely because she fell asleep and woke up about an hour after we would usually start the meeting. So we only got to chat for an hour or so instead of two. It’s only been a month since we parted, but it feels so long ago now, and since we don’t talk at all over regular text chat, it makes me sad that it feels to me that we are inexorably drifting away. Oh well. I also read this article (local) this week on making arranged friendships as adults, and it was interesting enough to me that I wanted to save it here in my digital scrapbook.
A Canada-wide single-use plastic bag tariff came into effect this week (well, July 1st, so technically last week), and while I know that this is “good for the environment” and all that, and I’ve gotten used to using my nice reusable shopping bags where I can anyway, this still annoys me a bit because it covers food plastic bags among other things, and I now have to risk having the inside of my reusable plastic bags covered in slop and oil if the food place doesn’t package their food properly, or pay an additional 15 to 25 cents for a proper bag. Plus I reuse all my bags as garbage bags for my kitchen waste, so I’ve had to go out and buy a bunch of plastic bag-like garbage liners from Safeway anyway, which have no handles and are very irritating for me since I hang the bags up on my cupboard knobs in the ktichen instead of using them in a bin. While I still more or less support it, it’s very hard to not think of this as some sort of political posturing and virtue signalling since it feels so ineffective from a personal point of view.
That being said, I do think that while there are valid arguments against the effectiveness of the policy in many cases, like how people who use grocery delivery services (I never have) end up with mountains of reusable bags that are far more damaging to the environment, it still has a positive net effect above and beyond all that though, so I try to grit my teeth and endure any minor inconveniences that come with it by thinking of the greater good.
I haven’t sent in my old phone to Samsung yet. I will probably do that early next week.
Games
Satinel and I bought Eco earlier this week, and we’ve been building a little base in that together with Milumbar. The game is okay, it’s not the best survival game I’ve ever played or anything like that, but I do enjoy the teching up and terraforming aspects of it as we try to unlock new technologies and build a laser to destroy a meteor threatening the world while trying not to destroy the world via pollution in the meantime. It’s an interesting concept that kind of makes me want to visit public servers and see what sort of messes exist on some of them, especially since the game also contains mechanics revolving around social concepts like government, taxes, and laws, which I don’t think I’ve ever seen implemented in a game before, outside of promised features in MMOs that I never stayed around for.
Anyway, here are some pictures of the base that we’ve built in a week. First, the main road, showing some large stockpiles of stuff on the right:
Our wooden capitol building is at the end of the road there, and here’s a closeup of it:
Inside, where we have a kiln right next to our town’s ratified constitution, in case we ever have to accidentally burn the constitution:
And some executive offices upstairs, cramped together from lack of space, plus a flag/banner that I’ve never seen nor remember anyone ever approving:
Next, my mostly-brick house:
It’s two levels high, the bottom level right now is the kitchen:
And the second level is a somewhat cozy living room with fireplace, couches, rugs, and bookcases. Basically my ideal retirement home:
Next is Satinel‘s building. It’s used for tier 1 crafting stations. It’s.. unique.
Here are some pictures of said tier 1 crafting stations coexisting next to each other inside. They’re mostly fully upgraded where applicable:
Next to that building is an open-concept garage-like building that I made for tier 2 machines:
Next is Milumbar‘s house, which is very small and cozy. I took a couple of inside shots of it:
Finally, here’s a few statues Satinel put down to commemorate the Town Musicians of Bremen (or Belobog (local)):
Ignore the Industry in the background polluting the river. And here’s a firepit where I did all of our early cooking:
Lastly, our town is very open and various animals wander in all the time. Here’s a fox that photobombed this photo as I was taking a picture of Tigey‘s powered cart vehicle.
The game got laggy though and even on near-lowest settings now, it occasionally freezes up for a couple seconds now and then, which is really annoying. It’s my computer’s fault of course, since this happens in other games like Minecraft, 7 Days to Die, and Valheim too, though this game doesn’t seem as intensive as those ones — there’s no combat or danger in this one at all, for starters, nor large animal farms, nor are the machines particularly complicated. That’s part of the reason the game hasn’t totally captured me, though I spent a lot of off-time earlier in the week on it, since I kept on waking up early in the mornings at 4 or 5 am with nothing else to do.
There’s one more week to go in the Steam sale, and I haven’t bought anything else — I likely will do one spree for single player games before the sale is out, though, since this is my last sale before going abroad (and I probably won’t have a job right after if/when I come back, so likely the last sale I can partake in without too much guilt for some time.)
Plushie of the Week #96 – Kurumi
Kuromi (local) is a Sanrio-licensed plushie.. er character, and I’ve liked her more and more ever since I fulfilled a request to get a Kuromi plushie for Oaisa back in November 2022 when I visited Japan for the first time. She’s part of the My Melody Universe (local), and although I like the titular character as well because I like characters wearing bunny ears with one ear up and one ear down (don’t ask me why I like that specific thing, I don’t know), Kuromi stole my heart away sometime ago. I even watched this short Kuromi anime that aired earlier this year.
As can be seen on her character page, although her real character name is Kuromi, I also often call her Kurumi, partly because of a pun on the word for plushie in Japanese, nuigurumi, and how the gurumi part sounds like Kurumi with the k -> g rendaku applied to it, as well as Kuruni being a character name I used in a MUD I played many, many years ago, so Kurumi sounds a lot more natural than me than Kuromi. I used to catch myself saying Kurumi and correcting it to Kuromi, but at some point I decided that that was her irrepressible will forcing me to say her name the way she preferred it instead, so I stopped fighting it. Kurumi it is.
I acquired Kurumi from a store named Discount Store Seoul Mart Shinsaibashi in Shinsaibashi-Suji Shopping Street in Osaka, on Jun 08 2023, for 847 yen, when I left Zian alone at the manga cafe that we were in and went out to do some shopping to try to buy some souvenirs for our Ritsumeikan Buddies at the tail end of our RSJP experience in Kyoto
This plushie was entirely a purchase for myself though. The very pointless trivial story behind this purchase is that I had a dream on Jun 06 2023, a couple days before the trip while Zian and I were planning our excursion which would involve skipping classes on the day, that I had noted down as:
- I dreamt that while wearing a backpack, I had asked permission from Ms Hara to skip her class, telling her that we were going to skip her class in order to travel to a neighbouring town. Though it was less about asking permission and more of a courtesy note telling her of our plans. She pursed her lips a litte and asked us to find some original butter while we were there and to see how much it costs.
Though I never did have time to find butter there to check its cost like my teacher in the dream asked me to, I did remember the dream while passing this Korean shop, which looked like a minimart and little supermarket or grocery store from the outside, so I went in to see if I could find some butter anyway. I didn’t, but on the way out, I saw these plushies seated in a box, and I took that as a sign that the dream led me to finally pick up one of these Kuromi plushies. I had seen many variations of these Kuromi plushies during my trip to Japan, but had not actually bitten on one until then, usually because they were either too large or too expensive, or else it just never “felt” right the way that this one did. So this Kuromi plushie became the third of four plushies that I acquired on my most recent Japan trip.
Here are some pictures of Kurumi. From the front:
Back:
That zipper in the back opens up to a tiny pocket that can maybe store a couple coins:
Tag front:
Tag back:
Other tag front:
Other tag back:
Song of the Week #73
Title: Red Dragonfly (紅蜻蜓 / Hong Qing Ting)
Artist: Little Tigers (小虎隊 / Xiao Hu Dui)
Album: 紅蜻蜓 (1990)
One thing I really like about Spotify is their algorithm — they’ve recommended me a lot of songs I either like or had used to like but had long forgotten over the years, due to music being more difficult to document when one is just listening to them over the radio. Or the cultural difference between Singapore and Canada, for example, where due to language and local broadcasting quotas, or even licensing issues, songs from one region can easily be totally absent from another region. For English songs, I’ve more or less circled the wagons and gathered most of the songs that I know and/or like in various Spotify playlists anyway, just from the sheer amount of listening that I’ve done, although old cherished songs that I’ve long forgotten about still do pop up from time to time.
For Chinese songs from my childhood though, it’s a lot harder, because I don’t know most of the song names and never really listened to the Chinese radio stations much in Singapore to begin with, so most of the songs of the era I’m simply not familiar with. There are exceptions, like this one and this one, but I have no idea how many other songs there are out there that I actually do know about, until I actually organically stumble across them, often from said Spotify algorithm above. And this week, it recommended me this one, which gave me chills, as I vividly remember it from my childhood, but otherwise had not heard or remembered or even thought about it for over 20 years.
A lyric translation of this song is attached here (local) — with the chorus in particular transcribed from there to this page:
All of us have already grown up
So many dreams are flying
Like the red dragonfly
We saw in our childhood
The song, especially the starting chords and the chorus, are very nostalgic, and in particular this song reminds me of Dunman High, and the various enrichment camps and such that we had both in Dunman and in Rosyth as part of the GEP. I don’t know why — the song must have been popular enough on radio to be played here and there in those events though, since I know the song despite very low exposure to Chinese music, and since that’s what immediately comes to mind for me. I got hit by a stunned wave of nostalgia when the song started to play on Spotify on Friday evening, and waves of chills washed over me — that moment of discovery of something momentous that I felt was a pretty great sensation. It demanded to be on Song of the Week this week, so here we are now.
Writing Prompt of the Week #16
This week’s writing prompt reads:
“What religion are you, and what role did that play in your youth?”
I don’t particularly follow any religion, though I probably align myself closest to Buddhism, which my parents follow. I don’t specifically study their customs though, so for example while I believe in reincarnation, and would like to believe in samsara, or the karma from their previous lives, I don’t specifically believe in the existence of Buddha or the specific goal of reaching enlightenment that Buddhists follow. And I think that’s fine — being more or less an atheist to me doesn’t mean that I’m morally corrupt because I don’t believe in a specific god, it means that I can pick and choose the good tenets from Buddhism, Christianity, and other major or minor religions, and live my life in a reasonably good way without having to follow rituals that some old men in musty rooms prescribed for their followers centuries ago.
While my parents are Buddhists, they never forced any of us to convert or worship, although they gave us trinkets, which I did and still do value, to carry around for good luck because it doesn’t hurt to do so — even if they weren’t going to work as spiritual charms, it barely added any additional load in one’s day to day life and could still act as a good luck charm and as a parent’s wish for protection for their child.
I remember, when I was very, very young, wearing a corded bracelet of some kind around my right ankle. When I was in primary school, I wore a cord around my neck with a small, golden-hued, rectangular brooch on its end instead. I would wear that through rain and even often through showers and baths, so it got wet and then dry again and so on. When I stopped wearing trinkets like that, I still always was asked to keep a folded red packet in my wallet with a blessed charm of some sort tucked away in it. I still have two tattered red packets with charms in my purse today, in fact:
Red packets are generally used around Chinese New Year when giving money to youngsters, with the red packet itself representing prosperity, so it makes sense that they would also be used as receptables for charms like this. The charms inside look like this:
I have no idea what the left piece of cloth says, or even which way is “up”. The right coin is a 10-cent Singapore coin from 2013, which means I probably got it when Dad went back to Singapore in 2016 when his father/my paternal grandfather passed away. I also have a bottle of holy water from a temple that probably dates from that time:
A tradition I could have mentioned last week is that our family takes doses of holy water like this before important occasions, again just in case, for the chance of added protection. Not for things like regular exams, but I definitely took one before important exams like my GEP one in Primary 3, before we moved to Canada and probably before leaving on every other family trip as well, before my Hong Kong math competition trip in 1996, before my first day of work at UAlberta and likely every time in the morning of the first day of attending a new school, and I’ve continued doing this tradition, having a swig before my surgeries and surgery attempts in 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2017, as well as my Singapore and Japan trips in 2022. I pretty much get a new bottle everytime my Dad goes to Singapore, though I’m not sure if he ever plans to or can go again.
Oddly enough, I forgot to do this on my recent Kyoto trip — I had actually put out the bottle on the counter the night before, but simply forgot to drink it before I stepped out the door, and only remembered it once I was at the airport, oops. I still got back fine though, luckily.
Anyway, one last thing I still have in my house as well is a plaque that I put up on the back side of my front door, to ward off intruders and bad spirits:
My siblings and parents have similar things for their rooms, too. I’ll be bringing this to Japan with me. The family house has a couple of other versions of this, one a framed one that sits on a shelf usually in the main hall:
And the other a large banner that rests on a clothes hanger. I don’t have a good close-up picture of this one, but we’ve had this one since Singapore, as here’s a photo of it in the background from 1998:
And here’s a photo from the family home in 2022, you can see it hanging in the background here still:
It’s just sort of always been there!
Memory Snippet of the Week #80
This is tangentially related to the Writing Prompt this week, but I wanted to write down what I consider to be the supernatural events that have happened to me in my life so far. There have been three, more or less, and here they are in chronological order:
Sometime likely around when I was 5-6 years old, my parents took me at some point to a Buddhist temple (not the medium’s house from last week’s prompt though, this was somewhere else entirely) so they could pray. I was waiting for them outside the temple in a grassy field when I saw a lit candle on the ground and put my hand through the open flame. It came out the other side unscathed, and I moved on with life. Actually, I remember telling my parents about it on the way back in a taxi or car, but nothing came of it.
I’ve carried that very odd memory with me since. As an adult now, I would try to explain it away as perhaps those were joss sticks and it was smoke wafting up from them that I put my hand through, and not fire. However, that’s what my childhood memory tells me, and that’s what the memory has been for the past 32 years, so that’s what I am going with! A cool memory that I remember as a confusing spiritual experience.
The second was on Aug 31 1997, the night Princess Diana died. For some reason, either that night or the one just before it, I couldn’t sleep, and felt really restless, as though something really bad had happened but I couldn’t figure out what or why. I found out the next morning, of course, and spent the rest of the day trying to commune with the spirits and offering her and other good souls whose life got cut short a chance to visit me and merge with my soul so that we could go through a good life together (with me as the principal driver).
The third time was a lot more recent, when Dad shared a couple stories with me during our recorded phone interviews last year. I had told him that back in the late 2000s when he had returned back from another solo trip to Singapore, he had confronted me in my bedroom and declared that the family medium (yes, this one is the one in the link above) had told him that I was suffering in anguish from something difficult and asked if that was true.
I denied everything, but at that time I was indeed suffering from hidden depression from my gender dysphoria and at that point I had no idea where or how to proceed with my transition. I thought that that was very impressive of the medium, especially since I had no idea who she is, had barely ever seen her (a couple brief times when young at most), and had not been back in Singapore in ages anyway. I told him over the phone those many years later that the medium had actually been right all along.
He then shared a followup story about that, and how when he returned to Singapore on his last trip (probably the 2016 one again), the family now had a new medium since the last one had passed away, and Dad went to visit him or her with one of my aunties. The medium took his or her divination and said that Dad had three kids — two females and one male. Our extended family had and still have no idea about my transition, so my auntie looked at my Dad weird, and my Dad shrugged it off as the medium making a small mistake. But he held on to the story long enough to eventually get it to me in that conversation.
Of course life is so complex that a series of weird coincidences can undoubtably be interpreted as a sign from the divine even when it’s not. Or maybe they are, who are we to say so either way? I see it when playing AMQ with Satinel, Heg, and/or Nak all the time, like earlier this week when a totally random song that I happened to know from a show external to our playlists played shortly after I randomly guessed something from the show series itself, a coincidence with odds well north of a million to one. Or sometimes I dream about something and then see something about it the next day.
On the topic of coincidences, a couple other really old and inconsequential memory snippets jump out at me, and I wanted to leave them here before I forget them. One is when some secondary school friends and I were visiting either the Singapore Science Center before we moved to Canada. This would have been with Huihan, Zixiang, and possibly one other classmate. We were playing Big 2 with a regular set of poker cards on a table outside the building while waiting for some meeting time or other to roll around, and I took a break to go into the washroom and relieve myself. On the way out, I washed my hands at the sink where I had to press the button and then the water stream would gush out for a certain amount of time, and I told myself that if the stream gushed for exactly 14 (or maybe it was 17, one of the two) seconds, then when I went back outside, my next game would deliver me all four 2’s, which were the most powerful cards in the deck for the Big 2 game.
The tap flow lasted exactly 14 (or 17?) seconds on the dot. And I went outside, and immediately got dealt all four 2’s (in 13 or 17 cards, depending if it were a 3 or 4 player game at that point) in the very next game.
The other one is less a coincidence and more a premonition — I remember one time in Primary 5 or 6 where I could feel that the atmosphere in the classroom was very heavy for some reason. I couldn’t figure out why, it was like my nose or head was stuffy even though I wasn’t sick. There was circulation in the room as Singapore classrooms have tons of open windows (and doors), and other students were chatting away just fine, so I could not put my finger on what was wrong. I told the person next to me that it felt like I could cut the atmosphere with a knife. Then the teacher came in, and absolutely ripped into either the class or some certain people in the class for something that they had done. So that was what my premonition was trying to remind me of.
Anyway, I’ve gone far off topic here but while coincidences individually have an infinitesimally small chance of happening, the number of sheer coincidences that could happen as we go through life are so big that, because we never know about the ones that don’t happen, and often don’t know about the ones that barely miss being something spectacularly crazy, they seem to be a lot more prevalent than they should be. And god or no god, that’s part of the beauty of life.
Dreams
I barely had any remembered dreams this week, though I had a lot of stuff barely lost on the fringes of my memory when I woke up. Still, the July 06 stuff was really interesting.
Jul 04 2023
- I was part of two opposing groups or guilds of people that were unfriendly to each other due to several reasons, one of which was as trivial as our leaders liking different soda flavours, or liking and supporting different hockey teams. We still occasionally travelled together for some reason or other, and in particular I knew that in an upcoming event we would be leading their group past some locked gates into a compound in some caves that we owned, then taking them underground down a flight of really narrow stairs, through a tunnel past an Indian food and grocery shop (that used to be one giant shop but some famous actor had bought the food shop part of it and caused it to be split into two shops), and then to the foot of another set of stairs that stretched up through the caverns and lit up brightly. Children apparently liked seeing the white glowing lights on this set of stairs from afar.
- Anyway, we were going to ambush that other group and try to wipe them out sometime during this journey. However, Zian, dressed in her red shirt, was on the other team, and though we were both more or less junior members and not involved in the squabbles between the leadership of both groups, I was afraid they’d attack her right away to start off the ambush, or that she’d be killed early on in the fight since it might be difficult in the confined underground space to find somewhere to hide.
- I was not allowed to mention the ambush to her or anyone on the other team, but I tried to warn her in general terms to be careful. She didn’t seem to get the hint though and looked at me in a puzzled manner, saying that she was always careful, so I decided to just stick near her and cover her since I was a shield character and could protect us both. She had a bow and arrow but I asked her not to use them no matter what happened. There were stealthed characters on both teams and I was most worried about them.
Jul 06 2023
Dream 1
- I was drifting in and out of consciousness, and a couple of unrelated dream snippets came together here. Firstly, I was looking at or playing a game called Stories, which involved a big board with a regional map divided into zones. There were land areas and river/lake areas, and about two dozen nodes on the board that represented the start and end of story threads. Most of the stories involved travel in some way, and the individual stories could be advanced by interacting with it and making decisions to steer the plot toward another nearby node until they connected. There were no nodes in the lakes or rivers, they were just zones that needed to be crossed.
- As there was an odd number of nodes, it was necessary that the story thread from one node would not find a partner node on the board to end with, and would instead be forced to leave the map. I wanted to write erotica about this one story to see how or where I could steer this to since it was going offrails anyway, and a scenario about a girl in a school uniform on a musty train and a businessman in a suit nearby that desired her came to mind.
- I floated out of the dream and into my Edmonton 205 room. I was sleeping on my bed in its usual position in the living room, except the bed was elevated and Mom was seated on the edge of the bed near my feet. She was playing a handheld console game of some sort and was not fully paying attention to me. But at one point she also idly glanced over my phone and looked at my blog and said she liked the dream sections. I had nothing to hide so I didn’t mind her looking it over, but I said that if she was interested in my dreams, she could go on my computer and look at the dreams.txt file that I kept instead since that was far more comprehensive, with dreams stretching back years.
- While lying down on my left side, I felt something on the bed beneath me and reached down to grab it. It felt really thin, but was wriggling, so I realized it was some sort of insect that was shaped like a paperclip and tried to crush it between my fingers and the side of the mattress that I was lying on. It continued wriggling though, and both my left and right thumbs and index fingers began to twinge and become sore, as though the paperclip insect was lightly stinging me, even though I was holding on to it with one hand.
- I awoke at this point and drifted off to sleep again with the feeling that I could walk into whatever dream I wanted if I kept my eyes shut and thought about it. I felt like there were tubular wormhole-like tunnels that I could walk into that would take me from one dream to another. They looked like curved pipes from a Pipe Dream game but were invisible, and doubly hard to find because I was keeping my eyes shut.
- I walked into the lobby of a tall office building staffed by the military or police, who were somewhat unfriendly to me, but I also knew that as long as I kept my eyes shut they couldn’t see my real identity and I couldn’t see them. I wanted to go up the elevators and had to open my eyes briefly here and there to see where they were, though, so the guards saw me even though they couldn’t figure out who I was from the brief look. Several guards wanted to follow me up the elevators, so since there were two elevators side by side, I told most of them to get into the right one first, and sent it up to the 21st floor where I said I was going. Then the left elevator arrived, and I went in first, then cast a force shield behind me to block the doorway so that the remaining guards couldn’t follow me into the elevator. Instead of going up to the 21st floor, I sent this elevator to the 7th floor, as I wanted to visit Mr Tanaka‘s office there. The elevator started moving, but instead of going vertically upwards, it went upwards and then curved its route until it was going horizontally. I was frustrated with this but couldn’t change the direction of the elevator. The dream then ended as I woke up again IRL.
- Editor: That end bit sounds like the elevator was in a curved pipe wormhole toward another dream, though I didn’t realize it at the time.
Dream 2
- Someone I knew, possibly Kel, was kidnapped by a professor, after a long, weird sequence of events that involved a big green T Rex-style dinosaur, an abandoned hospital, and an orphanage with lots of kids lined up in the street outside of it and doing morning calisthenics with the orphanage matron. I met an old lady near the orphanage and we went to a road intersection near the orphanage to watch the kids from the other side of some metal railings, and the old lady smiled as she watched them exercise.
- There was also a maze where Zixiang and I had to fight swarms of monsters that came at us with ARPG-like skills, and at one point there were so many monsters that we retreated to a wooden and rope bridge hanging over a tunnel one level below us, and we used the bridge as a choke point so only a certain number of monsters could attack us at once. Some of the monsters at the back that couldn’t reach us instead started to path around an alternate route to come at us from the other side of the bridge though, so we wiped out most of the monsters on our side of the bridge as quickly as we could and then retreated off the bridge so we could fight the monsters coming from the other end as well.
- Anyway, all that was a prelude to a classroom scene where all the students were Chinese or Japanese. I was seated on the left side of the classroom, by the window, and just in front of Zixiang. There was also a male Japanese teacher seated on top of a student desk near the front of the room and turned around to face the rest of the class. Zixiang and I had a trinket that belonged to the teacher, and to rescue Kel we needed to steal a key that the teacher had.
- The teacher said that he knew that someone in class had the trinket, and he offered to let whoever the thief was anonymously return the trinket to his desk at the staff room by this afternoon. Zixiang suggested that he extend this to tomorrow afternoon instead, allowing for two days since we just had a new student with a Japanese name transfer in today (he was seated at the back of the class, in one of the middle columns), and the teacher thought a while and then agreed to this. Other students then perked up and asked if he could postpone a test, as well as a dashimono (a presentation/play that our class had to do in groups) as well, and he said no.
- With the deadline extended to two days, this meant that we could sneak in at night and steal the key instead. I discussed this plan with Zixiang, and he said that he had a skeleton key he could use to unlock the faculty office at night, which he had used before. At first, he wanted to unlock it tonight and then steal it tomorrow in case of cameras guarding the front door, but I said that that was a bad idea because tonight was the only night that we had since the deadline was in the afternoon tomorrow, and also because the door was the only way into the room anyway, so we’d still be risking a camera tomorrow. In fact, it was more likely that the room would be monitored tomorrow since it was the last day, despite promises for an anonymous return system. It was more likely that the darkness would conceal us at night. He agreed with this plan.
Jul 09 2023
- Snippet: I dreamt I had just completed some sort of class presentation in a group that I was rather proud of, and was now preparing for another presentation, except this time it was solo. Each presentation was either on, or consumed, some sort of limited resource that was represented by a white packet of some kind, with a cost involved with each one, but I don’t remember the exact detail of what it was or what other mechanic surrounded it. I did want to go before they ran out of said resource, though.
- Snippet: I was driving a small little car or van and drove into a gated area guarded by police or security guards to use a small, semi-public carpark there. I had to drive forwards and backwards quite a few times once I backed up into the parking lot so that I could align my vehicle with the white lines perfectly. There was a 5 minute time limit for parking there, so I rushed out and did whatever I had to before rushing back in time to see the inspector heading out of the parking attendants’ office and ticketing another car near me. But he had not reached my car yet (and it was only around 5 minutes still) so I got in and drove off.
- At a later point, I drove over a little wheel stop/parking block similar to the ones that can sometimes be found in parking lot spaces for the wheels to stop against, and got into a pavement area that looked like a dead end surrounded by buildings, and I had no real room to turn around, so I had to drive backwards back out over the little road barrier to get back onto the main road.
- Snippet: Lastly, at one point I was playing AMQ with Satinel and Heg, but Satinel was AFK. This version of the game didn’t proceed until everyone had typed in an answer, so I left the song playing in the background, which was Blumenkratz from the Kill la Kill anime, and tabbed out to do other things until I heard the song change, which was a sign that she was finally back.