Dreams

I had an 8/10 dream this week, the one on November 14th where I ended up dancing on a stage and summoning aurora and rainbows while auditioning for an anime musical group that I liked. That made me very happy. Not for the first time, I’ve wondered about rating all the dreams I have written down in my diary, instead of just the 8/10 and above ones. 8/10 and above would give them a special highlight bookmark in my Dream Diary page once I finish filling that in someday, but there haven’t really been a ton of those over the years. There’s only ever been one or two 10/10 dreams, and a tiny handful of 9’s. The ratings for the dreams this week would have been 6, 8, 4, 3, ?, 6, 6/7.

Nov 13 2023

• Part of my dream involved a group of wizards living separately in my world. One of them was “evil”, and had sealed away another male wizard who was “good” but had went over to live with him because they were lovers. The sealed wizard had a seven-letter name, and was represented in the evil wizard’s spellbook by an orange gem, next to another orange one in the summoning spell section of the book. Each different spell school had a different gem colour but there were just two orange spells in that book.
• The wizard almost accidentally set his boyfriend free at some point by casting that boyfriend spell instead of the other one, and he had an “Oops.. wrong spell, I almost set him free.” mini monologue to no one in particular. The other wizards did suspect him of getting rid of the other “good” wizard but had no proof for this.
• As part of this dream, there was also a school segment where I was trying to climb over some obstacles and reach a classroom on the third floor of a building to deliver them something, but I don’t remember the details of this part. My siblings were also around in the dream.
• Later I was looking at a Chinese MMO with some online friends, the MMO had a magazine ad that a couple of us had saw and I said that it was probably really boring as it was free to play and had a really low population count. Besides ads, the magazine itself featured children’s reviews of games, and each printed review also had a typed and printed comment reply from an editor, as well as pen comments from another editor who added his comments on top of the first reviewer’s. The second editor either made a lot of mistakes or changed their mind a lot, and a lot of the pen marks were squiggly circular cancellation marks of things that the second editor himself wrote.
• The game itself had a two word name, 6 and 5 letters, I believe it was called Shadow Realm. I played it nonetheless, and formed a group with three other random new players. We entered the first corridor of the first level of the first dungeon and started to kill things there to level up. Apparently each class only had one useful skill, and two other skills which were completely useless but which could be pointlessly levelled up anyway. One of the other players spread his or her points around so both those useless skills also had a level in them, and s/he regretted it before we were even out of that first passage. I also was defeated and died at some point, and while another party member was trying to resurrect me, I just respawned and appeared back at the door without any loss of experience points.

Nov 14 2023

• I was walking with Dad along the streets of one city, hoping to get to another nearby city. We weren’t too familiar with the streets, and found ourselves in a situation where we needed to cross a city block to get to the road on the other side. To achieve this, we entered a darkened warehouse with exits on both ends, and walked the length of the long, rectangular building in the dark toward the far exit. The warehouse was full of spices of some kind, with a weird, but homely smell.
• This was still technically trespassing, and we waited at the far end of the warehouse for a truck belonging to the warehouse company to pass by before leaving the building. Dad said that he would quicken his pace for a little bit, and he wanted me to walk at a slower pace to create a bit of separation just in case either of us were seen and going to get caught for trespassing. Once we were sure that no one had seen us or was following us, then we would meet up together again.
• When I finally caught up with Dad, he was standing by an open garage door and talking to a man who was repairing a carriage that we had apparently used from a previous dream or a previous visit to the country. We had not seen the carriage on the minimap though, which was why we had walked instead, and the man said that the carriage had been impounded for some reason and he had recently freed it, and had taken it here to be repaired and serviced in his shop.
• The man said that he wasn’t sure why it had been impounded, as we had left it within a legal jurisdiction. He showed us a map of the country we were in, which was apparently Germany, and in particular there were four cities that formed a vertical parallelogram. We were in the top left city, Dusseldorf, and we were trying to get to the top right city, Munich, which was X distance away from us to the east. Far to the south of Dusseldorf, about 4x distance away or so, was Hamburg, the bottom right city where we had started off, and about X distance to the west of Hamburg was Berlin, the bottom left city of the parallellogram.
• The man said that as long as we left the carriage in the right-side triangle, between Hamburg, Dusseldorf, and Munich, it should not have been impounded, which was why he took the liberty to rescue the carriage and bring it here even though we had actually left it back in Hamburg during our last use. He also encouraged us to use it again if we were headed east, and both of them looked at me as if waiting for my decision. I said that I didn’t want to risk it and we had walked all this way already, so we could continue on foot for now, since we would then have to park it in Munich and risk it being impounded again, but that we would probably use it on our way back south later.
• Once we reached the eastern city, Dad faded off into the background of the plot and I visited a University to take yearbook photos with my Dunman High 2L and 2K classes. I saw our year 2 yearbook from a previous year and saw scenes of what had happened back then, where we were the last two classes so there was barely any time left for us to complete our pictures before the end of the school day. The 2K class ended up taking several different combinations of people seated on a bench in front of a well, but various people kept photobombing the bottom left corner of their pictures. The 2L class ended up grouping people up for a mini soccer game and taking pictures of that, but we had wanted to do 4 different games for a mini tournament, and there was no time for that, so instead the winning team in the first game was considered to have all 4 wins instead.
• I don’t remember if we were in year 3 or 4 this time, but we took our photos without incident this year, although we were the last classes again. After the photos, a school announcement was made that recess was being abolished and would be replaced by a series of 10-minute beer breaks where we could line up at an indoor beer garden stall to buy some sort of fizzy beer. I had no interest in that, and someone in our class that I didn’t recognize had a twin of his from another class come by, and they chatted briefly about how without a recess block and with classes getting staggered 10-minute breaks, they’d never see each other at school again.
• For now though, the school day had come to an end, and I stopped by the general office, where I saw a woman from my workplace sitting at one of the back desks. She smiled at me and I told her that I had seen something about a Christmas concert announcement, even though it was only November, and was wondering if she knew where I could get tickets for it. She asked if I had meant the concert by the U149 group from The iDOLM@STER Cinderella Girls: U149, and I said yes, and she pointed out the doors and around the corner to the left.
• I thanked her and followed that route, where I found the ticket booth. Tickets for the concert were $149, but I was very excited for this and bought one anyway. I wondered if the girls would be alright in this English-speaking world, and I wondered if they were recruiting temporary helpers or even performers for the concert. I had a vision of actually performing on stage, though I had concerns about my vocal range.
• However, in the vision, I was holding two things that looked like foam sticks, except they were made of a more rubbery material, and I was apparently very good at blowing into them to cause aurora and rainbows to appear high up above the stage, much better than the other girl who tried. I could also leap high up in the air and then float down gently as part of my performance, and when I landed on the stage and cupped my hands together, Tigey would fall into them. The vision of the performance left me feeling very happy, like I was actually joining the troupe.

Nov 15 2023

• I was playing a newly-released MMO and was grouped with some guy I met while also hopping zones to kill bosses with another guy I met who I was exchanging instant messages with. One of the bosses in question was a tiny ant with a red nameplate that moved really quickly for his size along the ground beneath our feet. We killed it and couldn’t figure out at first why the quest didn’t autocomplete, but the quest turn-in was located at a nearby flagpole. At the same time I was trying to maintain relationships so the guy I was grouped with didn’t feel jealous of the ungrouped guy.
• Separately, at one point I was driving around a classically shaped UFO that allowed me to land on top of building roofs even if they weren’t level, exit via a hatch up top and stand on the body of the UFO, and gaze at the view from there. I also occasionally picked up other people when I landed on the ground near them, though I couldn’t tell if it was them voluntarily entering the ship because it looked unique or if the ship sucked them in. The inside was like a car or taxi and they would appear in the back seats. I dropped three women off at a suitable destination near one of their homes though. One of the women then went to pose for a portrait painted by a man who was trying to draw a UFO-themed painting in the garden of her home.

Nov 16 2023

• Snippet: All I remember is one specific scene where I was in a stylized version of outer space and returning to Earth while seated astride on a rocket-like spaceship with two other people. Another being was trying to prevent us from using that spaceship to return to Earth out of safety concerns, but I said that I had figured out how to ride it so it would be fine.

Nov 18 2023

• I was in a classroom by myself over an assembly period that I had decided to skip. Everyone else from class was at this assembly session in a school hall. I had a TV monitor so I could view the proceedings anyway, and it turned into a math contest that I had wanted to skip because I felt like it was wrong for someone 20 years older than them to compete with actual school-age students as I would most certainly crush them.
• The dream then became blurred as I thought about scenarios where I might actually be able to compete. The math contest turned into a three-round contest, two rounds of a best-of-three and then best-of-five chess match with an expert player who was playing several differnt players on different boards at once, and then a third round of a 10-player poker table where a version of me that I was watching, the chess expert, and some other third person were the last three to join the table because this imaginary version of me had stretched the second chess match with the expert to five games in order to win.
• The final two people at the poker table were Julius and me, and I “won” this tournament by feigning that I was a bad bluffer on a hand where I actually had really good cards, and causing Julius to keep on raising me.
• The scene changed back to the classroom, where a plump male teacher came in, asked if I liked plushies, and gave me an orange bird plushie. I brought out Tigey to meet it, and he laughed, then said that it was for the class. He took the plushie from me, looked around the room, and ended up placing it behind a glass jar on a shelf behind the teacher’s desk. He then left the room. – Our actual form teacher, Mrs Shu, came in, and asked if I had enjoyed the assembly. I said that it had been interesting.
• While I had been in the room by myself, I had started to work on a jigsaw puzzle and was more than half done. The bottom left side of the puzzle was a slate wall with many similar but different horizontal line patterns, and the bottom right side of the puzzle, past where the wall turned off into the distance, was a parking lot facing east.
• Both parts of the puzzle had a couple of missing pieces, and I had put other replacement pieces in there whose shape fit even though they weren’t part of the actual puzzle in the first place, but their colour was off, with Minecraft-like gold and diamond textures as well as other shades of grey walls. I eventually decided that I didn’t like it, and began to dismantle the puzzle from the left to the right, putting the pieces back into the box while separating the side pieces into a small plastic bag.
• There was a half-full bag of popcorn on the jigsaw as well and that had apparently been moved there by someone else. Angie was seated on a nearby chair and staring at that and she asked me if I had bought popcorn. I said no and that she could have it if she wanted. She said that she had left a bag of popcorn on the floor and it had been moved away by someone else and that that was probably it, so she gladly took it from me.
• Some students who sat next to me and who had by now returned to the class stopped me from dismantling the puzzle though, and said that there was a way that I could fix those pieces. They showed me that there was a special rule piece in the wall section which would spread its grey colour to any other rule pieces that it was connected to, and that I could make a line of those across the wall section to all the missing/replacement wall pieces, and they would all turn into the correct colour with some variance for aesthetics.
• They also said that while it was tougher to do that for the parking lot area, we could probably do the same thing by changing the surrounding outline of the parking lot to also use the same grey shade as the wall. We had to get permission from another girl in class to do this though as she was the one who had put the parking lot area together a couple of days ago, but it worked.
• Snippet: I also remember sitting down next to Mom, who was seated on the floor with her back against the wall, and chatting to her about something or other at one point, though I don’t remember any more context than that.

Nov 19 2023

• I was at a nursing student and magic exhibition in a university hospital which featured an admission area and then a loop around a set of corridors and past various rooms with exhibitions. The school had a Singapore vibe to it, but was also definitely set in a fantasy land with magic and aspects of game programming and game systems like player stats. As I walked around the exhibition, I also noticed a couple of glass sliding doors that led in and out to other parts of the University that were not guarded and thus seemed like entry points from which students could gain admission to the exhibition loop without actually paying. I found that to be an odd loophole.
• One of the exhibitions I visited ended up with me falling asleep on a large leather swivel chair facing a desk and a wall. The chair obscured the view of people passing by the corridor behind me from actually being able to see me, which was good as in this particular scene the “I” character was shaped like a tiny hunchbacked gremlin, slouched over in a lazy posture, and I had two outfits I could toggle between, one where I was bare-chested (and flat-chested) and a second one where I was just wearing a bra. While asleep, I somehow borrowed a spell from a mage on the other side of the corridor, which apparently cut down the center of the room, and that spell made it seem like a shirt was draped over me as a blanket. But a little later on I heard that the spell was just a demonstration spell and wouldn’t continue to properly work without payment, and also that Mom was coming by to do inspections. I was awake at this point, but while still feigning sleep, I slipped my hands into a proper shirt and then slipped that over my head safely before finally “waking up”.
• Another room in the exhibition involved me programming a for p = 0, p < 3, p++ loop that was supposed to do 3 things, one of which was to iterate through an array of numbers and raise a piece of foam up into the air along a diagonal rail. The code was very simple but didn’t seem to be working, and Satinel helped me troubleshoot the issue too with no luck at first. I eventually figured out though that the loop called an array of integeers from 1-20 but then tried to perform a float operation on it, so I added an f after every number in the array to turn them into floats and that fixed the issue with the code.
• In another scene in the exhibition, I was marching along with a troupe of scouts while also eyeing a cockroach or some similar bug skittering along the grass. The person in front of me and the people behind me were marching very smartly but no one seemed to care that I wasn’t. The person in front of me eventually led us all to a scout troupe leader, stopped in front of him, then assumed a kneeling and bowing pose with only the balls of his fist and his lower legs touching the ground, bowed head pointed at the troupe leader. Everyone else followed as well as I wondered where the cockroach was, since we were both headed in the same direction. I then split the scene timeline, imagining a scenario where I was actually sick and where this awkward posture made me tremble in pain and topple over. In that ensuing commotion the actual me got up and left the room.
• I remember passing by an abjuration mage who was selling his services with what I thought was a particularly catchy selling phrase, though I don’t remember what it was anymore. Abjiuration magic is a defensive school of magic in Dungeons and Dragons lore, and his catchphrase tagline was something similar to “Bang! Whiz! Boom! Ouch! Or you could protect yourself with abjuration!”
• The corridor loop also included a school canteen, and I passed by a number of food stalls there and people eating in the canteen, though the crowd was somewhat sparse. I heard two off-duty police officers talking to each other about the exhibition and possibly plotting something, but I ignored them.
• There was an attached washroom too, where I eventually found myself stuck in the guys washroom and unable to get out because the door handles were pull to open and I didn’t want to dirty my hands in doing so. I was hoping someone else would come by and use the door but no one did, even though there were other people in the washroom. I eventually gave up and pulled open a door, only to find another set of toilet cubicles on the other side of that door. I went to another door and pulled that open and that one did indeed lead back out. Propping the door open, I washed one hand and then the other under a sink before leaving.
• One last thing I did in this exhibition was to recruit some apprentice mages for my guild. We apparently needed 6, who would be trained by another head mage that we had. I was largely looking for people with really good magic potential, I think. I recruited a level 2 gnomish-looking short male and two level 3 guys who had assisted with solving a puzzle in some room, and then later on I found two level 20 girls who knew each other but had been somehow miscategorized by the University system and had been assigned to janitorial duties instead of nursing/healing duties. One of them was holding a stinky bag of garbage, and I got her to go near to a group of three nurses who were standing by the door where the other girl I wanted was before she threw that bag away. Those three girls were somewhat hostile to both of those level 20 girls as well as me. The presence of the garbage bag drove those three girls away, and I was then free to recruit the other girl as well as the first one without further incident. I’m not sure who the sixth apprentice mage was, it might have been me, as I was definitely present in the next scene.
• Either way, once the 6 of us were assembled, we returned to my guild hall. We had a master blacksmith in our guild who wanted to forge something for us, but needed to first forge three ancient forges so that he could create those things. Those ancient forges each required 6 sheets of Grade-C charcoal from a very specific mountain. We had lots of charcoal from that mountain, thankfully, and each one was wrapped in a book cover with a random book title on it as well as displaying the grade of charcoal that it was.
• A group of guild members read the names of various book covers out loud from sheets of paper that they were holding as they sorted through the piles of “books” to find the Grade C ones, and one guy who wasn’t paying attention ended out reading a very long and embarrassing book name that made everyone else laugh. Eventually though they gathered enough charcoal and there were three piles of coal sheets in front of the blacksmith, 6, 6, and 7 tall, though it seemed like each sheet had slightly different length and breadth from every other sheet. I was sure that it was fine, but I did notice a small Grade-B book/sheet of charcoal mistakenly put in with the others in the pile of 7, so I removed that one to even things out.