Dreams

Dec 04 2023

• I was playing a Sniper Elite style MMO with Satinel and a few others, and I checked her stats at one point while we were lurking outside some enemy building and watching a window for enemies passing by, and she had over 900 kills and 100 non-lethal takedowns. There were also training areas and regular areas outside of combat zones.
• One of the training areas was some sort of large, round pit, and we trained pets there to race on a ledge that went around the pit, trying to complete laps as quickly as possible by cutting corners and jumping over the edges of the pit now and then. There was a lower circular ledge a little ways down inside the pit that would catch you if you fell, and vines that would let you climb up again, but if you fell onto that ledge, nine eagles would attack you and you would have to fight them off before you could come back up. We were explaining all this to a new dog pet that we had recruited, as one of our other pets, which was either another bipedal dog or turtle, demonstrated a run around the pit.
• Jah had challenged her to some sort of bet that involved rolling up new characters and racing to do something, and they were trying to decide what Jah‘s punishment would be if he lost the race, which to me seemed to be very much the inevitable outcome. I suggested two outcomes, one being that Jah had to level up some new characters on an account for Satinel so she wouldn’t have to keep doing the newbie missions whenever she wanted to play a new character.
• The other suggestion I had, since I happened to be standing next to two train tracks that crossed each other in a perpendicular cross at that moment and staring at the weird train track setup there, was that Jah had to try his best to avoid trains for the rest of the day. Trains were entirely cosmetic in the game as they had not implemented collision detection yet, so even though they rumbled by fairly often, players just ignored them and walked through them.

Dec 06 2023

• I remember playing a first-person fantasy game where I started off with no weapon and a bad suit of armour, with a friend watching me and wondering what I would do as a new player. I walked around and found a room with a bipedal polar bear, plus two smaller bears or other creatures encased in red spheres that were rolling around.
• The room contained two doors on opposite walls, but I could walk around the outside of the room to easily get to either door. The room also contained a lot of gear — there was an entire set of leather armour strewn around the ground, which would get my passive block skill up to 10 damage, which I knew would defend against the creatures inside the red spheres, though I wasn’t sure about the polar bear. There was also a nice sword sitting around, and a drawer which I eventually discovered contained a gold coin and a key.
• By watching the enemies inside shuffle back and forth, I was able to time running into the room from whichever door they weren’t looking at, grabbing one or two items, and then running out the room again before they turned on me and became aggressive. I also managed to barely grab the key at one point between two of my fingers as the polar bear turned to look at me.
• Eventually I picked up all the gear that way and decked myself out. At that point, one of the red spheres, whose shell I noticed earlier was cracking, rolled out of the room toward me, and the shell broke completely, freeing the creature within. Instead of attacking me, it said that it was finally free of the sphere and knew that this was bound to happen eventually, and needed to go find another red sphere nearby.
• Snippet: There was also something about a large field with small dirt holes in the ground, similar to a giant game of whack-a-mole, and groups of similar figures or heads or something would pop out of them now and then. I’m not sure if the object of the game or scene was to destroy them, but different heads/figures definitely were linked to different ammunition types, there was one that represented sniper ammunition, for example.

Dec 07 2023

• I was at home with Dad and Kel but was outdoors doing some leaf raking using a snow shovel. The entire leaf shovelling process was automatic, and the shovel floated around and did the cleanup by itself, but at the end of it the shovel was supposed to dump its leaf pile and navigate itself back to its starting position by our garage door. Instead, it floated around for a bit and got stuck on our neighbour’s driveway across the street. I had to go manually move it back to our garage and empty the leaves before shutting the door.
• Around this time, I noticed that a 30 minute fog warning was issued, so I told Dad that if he needed to go do anything, like shovel snow or something, he had 30 minutes to do so before the bad weather hit. Dad was lounging on the couch in front of the TV and was reading some newspaper or something, and he said that he was fine.
• I went to take a shower. While in the shower, the doorbell rang, and a lady going door-to-door asked if anyone was available to take a survey. Dad answered the door but declined but Kel accidentally wandered out of her room and got caught up in the survey, and was too polite to say no. She wondered out loud where I was. I overheard this in the shower and decided to give her a piece of my mind later, telling her that just because she got caught up in this doesn’t mean that she had to try to implicate others as well, but thankfully the survey lady didn’t seem to note this. The shower room itself was also slowly spinning around the outside of the house, so I had to keep on moving in order to not be seen through the windows of the room, but from my vantage point I watched the lady conclude her business with us and then wander off.
• Snippet: There was something about a list of Japanese billboard songs based on seasonal anime, and how the charts had a number of strong songs that rose or debuted this week. I saw that beside each song was a delta change number, showing how much the song had risen or fallen (or whether it was new) that week, and noted that it was similar to my old song sheets.
• Snippet: I was hanging out with two friends who were also a couple, and the boy would occasionally leave a couple of items for the girl that he had looted from a game that we were all playing together, that he thought she had not unlocked yet. Apparently you needed to have an item at least once and then could unlock it permanently. I accidentally took and cleaned up a couple of these items at some point though, including one that was some sort of blue cloth shield, because I was trying to clean the area up of clutter. I just offered to generate a new blue cloth shield afterwards instead since I also had the unlock already.
• Snippet: There was something about a new 3D version of a database software that worked 10% slower than the 2D version released years ago, so very few people used it. A friend told me all about it while explaining how the software worked to a young boy that he had taken under his wing. The friend said he had about 1400 databases built upon the old version of the software and was comfortable with how it worked. I saw the box for the 3D version in the bathroom before I took a shower (separate from the earlier shower scene) and even the box had an apology message that said that the old version was 10% faster if you could still generate diskettes from it for your databases.

Dec 08 2023

• On the way home from school, I sometimes took the train with Zian but she wasn’t there today, so I was travelling largely by myself. I saw Antonia at the train station too but we weren’t that close and she never waited for me so we waved to each other as she left on her train and I waited for my own.
• Because I was by myself, I wanted to take a different route home today. My usual route involved just one train transfer, but about 20-25 or so train station stops. The route I was trying today only took 7 stops, but required more train transfers — I would travel one station west, then five stations south along the Circle Line, then one station east, and I would reach my home station.
• However, being unfamiliar with the route, I hopped on an east train going the wrong direction at first, so I had to get off at the first stop and then take the train going back in the other direction, past my original station, and then one more stop west to the first transfer point.
• I then took my planned route 5 stops south and one stop east without incident. Some stations I passed on the way were real Singapore train stations — Aljunied, Novena, Newton, and Simei amongst them. The exterior area of one of the stations I passed was also just a forest and mangrove swamp, but I remember thinking that some of that was going to be cleared soon for a new shopping mall, and how there would be an area outside the mall where an old man who was someone’s dad (and could easily have been my Dad) would earn his living manning a food cart, and a particular small area by a drainage pipe would become very meaningful and significant to him.
• I waited for Kel at our final train station, one block away from our actual house, as there were rumours of some unsavoury people around that were part of a sports team or something. I admired the architecture of the building while waiting, as there was a red brick bridge stretching above us for some reason, and I noticed after a bit that the people around me were also admiring that architecture. I exchanged some friendly words about it with a woman seated near me.
• A young man who apparently lived in the building above handed me a piece of paper as I was about to stop waiting for Kel and head home myself. It contained his phone number, scribbled on the back of a sheet with several other numbers on it. He said he’d show me what else was up there if I want and I politely told him that I’d call him sometime. I had no plans to however, and if we ever met again and he pressed me on it, I would say that Mom told me not to talk to strangers.
• Later, I was playing a trivia quiz game with some friends and was a little bit behind in score, but we ended up at a category with cryptic clues which I knew I could score a lot of points on. Each of the six pictures in the quiz had a theme and a picture that related to it, for example #6 had a theme of Apothecary and its picture was a fence gate that was slightly open, so the answer was ajar/a jar. I had decent answers for a couple of the others too, like #5 had something to do with fowl/foul and either #1 or #2 had to do with a fruit, and I knew I had enough points to leapfrog over the other players into first place.

Dec 09 2023

• Snippet: I remember a specific part of my dream where, as part of some game, I had to apply some modifiers to some things that were going to get some amount of something applied to it, and in particular there was a container that was going to have a larger amount of that something than it could hold added to it, so the modifier that I had to apply to that container caused its overflow to be redirected into another container that wasn’t getting enough instead.
• Snippet: At another specific point in my dream, I was having dinner with some friends and translated a menu that was laying on the dinner table for everyone. There were five lines of Japanese text on the menu itself, and the first, third, and fifth line all basically either said tea (茶/cha or お茶/ocha) or large tea (おお茶/大茶/oocha). The fourth line contained a bunch of text and was basically describing a plate of rice with various types of meat and vegetables.

Dec 10 2023

• I dreamt that I went to a booth counter at the Singapore border, this area looked very much like a train turnstile with attendants seated behind a library desk on the left side of the turnstiles. They were expecting me and had been briefed on my passport case, and as I had arrived early in the morning, one of the women greeted me and took my passports from me, as well as a bunch of ID cards and such. She asked for a few more ID cards that I had brought my last trip here, and had photos of them, but when I saw them I said that those were business cards and didn’t exist anymore. She accepted that answer. I told her that ICA had refused to let me renounce my passport in the past due to an ongoing case which didn’t exist anymore but wasn’t fully processed yet, so they had asked me to hold on to my old passport as well as the new one, and that was why I had two.
• She returned all my papers and said that they’d let me know once my application was processed. I bid her goodbye and left back the way I came, into a multi-national train station, and took the train one stop east to South Korea. I then stopped, thought a bit, and took the train the other way again, back to Singapore.
• I returned to the same counter, looking for the lady who had helped me — I recognized her, with her short bobbing hair and her glasses, and got in line behind three other people who were all asking quick questions. When it was my turn again, I apologized and asked for a time estimate — would it be two weeks? A month? The reason being that I was going to travel around the region and wanted to plan around that before I returned to Singapore again. She said that two weeks might be enough, or it might take a month, she really didn’t know, but to check back now and then as late as I could manage. I said ok and left again.
• This time I went another way along the train line, ending up in Australia. Specifically, there were many stations in Australia, the railway system formed a figure 8 of tracks starting from a station one stop west and one stop south of Singapore. However, one complaint people had with the line was that it never actually stopped in the busy market area of the city, which was on the southwestern end of the figure 8, the tracks there just cut right through the district and stopped some distance outside of it.
• On the train, I met up with Huihan, Satinel, and two other boys who I feel like I knew as well. While travelling, we were all playing a handheld game that I didn’t enjoy at first but came to figure out that it was decent. The game started with some sort of PvP until someone had earned three separate victory belts. Once he did so, the game shifted and a map with connected dots on it appeared, similar to a map of a train station. The belts would appear at one of those eight or so dots strewn around on the map, and we all had to move our cursors to it and spam press a Button 33 key on the controller until the game awarded the belts to one of us. That person would then win, and could deploy all three belts again and have them appear at another point and try to repeat the process.
• I found out after a bit that each time the belt appeared, it spawned with a “health” of 200,000, and all clicks on it would reduce the health of the belts based on how much the person’s clicks had been upgraded. The person who dealt the final killing blow to the belts would “win” the round and get the belts. But you had to win a round to be able to upgrade the clicks in the first place, so I quickly fell behind and never got to upgrade mine since everyone else won early, so I never did win a round.
• Occasionally some sort of losing penalty item would spawn for the winner to apply to one of the losers as well, and there was a guy who applied at least one of them to me, turning my character’s clothing into a bear suit. I vowed to get him back if I ever won. Satinel also did win a couple times and after one of her wins, she had to pause the game and delay the next round because somehow she had clicked so hard that her Button 33 had come unbound in the keybindings and she had to reset it.
• Eventually, we reached our destination, and the four of us started walking around. We visited a CD store first, then walked for a long time on a pavement that started along the side of a road, then winded its way around parks and buildings. I walked behind the two boys and next to Satinel and Huihan. Huihan broke off from us at one point to take a nearby alternate path that led pass a fountain, and rejoined us when the path joined up with ours again after that. We ended up at another vinyl store eventually and I said that that was only really interesting to me if they sold CD as well. The boys had already gone in and were standing at the cashier with some vinyls that they were going to pay for, though.