Dreams

In this week, dreams about “terrible upstairs neighbours” and “how to terrorize smokers”, apparently. Also, an ACPMC dream because I recently finished my writeup on it.

Dec 18 2023

• I was clearing zones in a city in a game, this involved a large game map with various nodes and I would go to each one and defeat whatever was there. After that, I would either replace it with a guard that was around the same level as me, or I would replace it with a sound file that would make it seem like there was a guard there unless someone looked closely at it.
• There was one specific node with a guy who wanted to marry me, but I disliked him very much and wanted nothing to do with him. I had to hide behind a car while he got into another car in a carpark, and then sidle around the edge of the car as his car drove around that other stationary car while driving out of the carpark, so that he and his friend inside the car would not see me.

Dec 19 2023

Dream 1

• I was playing some sort of 5v5 team PvP game that involved two teams shooting at each other with the ultimate goal being to invade the opponent’s base and capture their flag. My team of 5 included friends that I knew, whereas the opponent team was random people that I had no idea about. The game was slow and tedious because it was set as a hardmode round with less gold that one could earn and less items in the in-game shop, so everyone only had normal weapons, and not the flashier or weirder weapons that the shop usually sold.
• Also, I was dead, as Jah had shot me through a tree in the forest that I was hiding behind at some point early on in the round, and the game did not seem to feature respawns so I was in spectator mode for a good chunk of the dream.
• The rest of my team still seemed to be holding on fine without me though, and I was bored just sitting there watching a firefight with everyone shooting at the other team from behind cover. So after a while, I asked Jah to come over to my corpse and rez me, which he did. Since my team was doing fine without me, and the other team wouldn’t have seen me for over 10 minutes at that point and probably still thought I was dead somewhere, I said that I’d sneak away to try to achieve the objective to win the game since there were only 5 minutes left in the game.
• I snuck off and entered a building on the way to the enemy base. I could technically have gone all the way to their base to try to capture their flag, but that would set off alarms and a game-wide announcement that their flag was being carried away. But in this building, a sports auditorium/school gym, there were several collectibles littered around the floor as well as a painting hanging on one of the upper corners of the room against the ceiling and walls, and retrieving that painting and bringing it back to base would also give us enough points to win without alerting the opponents until I turned it in. So I looted all those collectibles and hauled that painting back toward base.
• Jah also came in to the gym to check on me a little bit after I had entered the building though, and I was afraid that that meant that it was likely that the standoff was over and the opponents were also on the move.
• Snippet: At some point in the dream, Allen was trying to figure out why Yiwen went to a convenience shop on campus and had dried tears on her cheeks when she came out. He was concerned and considered going to another similar shop somewhere not too near the school, so no one would find out, and dropping a few thousand dollars to buy one of everything in the store so he could figure out what item she had eaten that had caused that reaction. However, I eventually figured out that it had nothing to do with the store — rather, Yiwen had watched a sad video involving dolphins in the class just before the lunch break, and had gone into the washroom in that store to wash her face.

Dream 2

• A school alumni club, I believe with the initials ACPC (which didn’t mean anything in particular except that the AC stood for Alumni Club), was holding a celebration in 2023 to celebrate my win in the ACPMC math competition from 1997 that I had recently written about in my blog. Both my individual exploits and the win by our Singapore team of 4 would be honoured. I was invited to the event and would be seated right up front in the hall.
• All my friends from the era were invited, although it felt a little bit weird for me since I had since swapped genders. I was slightly worried about shifted pronouns and what people would use. I doubted everyone in the hall knew about that yet. I also felt that it was likely that I would be called up to give a speech or two, and would be passionately talking about my math competition experiences and how fun it was, since there were a lot of younger students there too and I could encourage them to participate in these competitions in that way.
• I arrived at the hall and checked in at the front desk, which was just a table out in front of the door with Nicholas sitting there as a greeter, handing out brochures with the event schedule on it. I greeted him happily and said that I hadn’t seen him in years. And that even though he didn’t actually get to come along with us, he was definitely part of the team too and to make sure that he came up to the stage with us later when the other 4 of us went up. He smiled at me and nodded, offering me a brochure. I took one of everything to scan later at home.
• I learnt that the event was organized by one of my secondary school Math teachers, and although I felt like I knew him in my dreams, he doesn’t seem to have been one of my actual secondary school teachers in real life. He did, however, invite Mr Shah, my Primary 6 Math teacher along, and I was delighted that I was going to see him again as well. He told me to expect Mr Shah to show up in his car at some point even though it was a school day. I also learnt that in the prize ceremony portion of the event, we were going to get red packets with money in it as prizes, Chinese New Year style.
• The schedule said that the entire event was only an hour long, although I expected that I would have to stay and mingle with people after that. That being said, only the first part of the event actually played out in my dream, and that was a 3 vs 3 friendly math tournament on stage, quiz and buzzer style, where five of the contestants were girls and the sixth was a boy named Sakura. The secondary school teacher I was talking to said that they liked the surge in the number of girls participating in the math contests. They were all one or two years behind the grade year that we went to Hong Kong for the ACPMC, so Primary 4-5 or so, and thus were potential competition entrants next year.

Dec 20 2023

• In the earliest part of my dream that I remembered, I was living in an apartment block and went upstairs to visit the neighbours above me, who were living in a large apartment with a shared open area and something like eight private rooms that were rented out primarily to students, half of them international and half of them local. There was also a family living there that I looked down upon, as they were the cause of large stinking piles of garbage bags that were stored along the wall inside the shared living room of that apartment, though they eventually moved out.
• Nonetheless, the students in the residence tended to like living there and generally didn’t want to move out, and to achieve that, the group of local students usually took turns doing a thing where one of them would “move out” and then immediately move back in again, since the transient international students couldn’t tell them apart — all the local students, who were white males, looked exactly the same to them.
• This caused an issue where the international students thought that the shared apartment was really popular, and whenever some of them vacated the place and went home and someone else was scheduled to come in, the roommate who arrived first was always worried that the other roommate would lose their spot because the local side was always full and new residents always moved in within the day that the former residents left.
• There was also a sideplot about someone wanting to borrow three of my worksheets to copy, although they weren’t for school, they were informational sheets for some sort of external event and had some personal info on them. I didn’t mind him copying it and lent it to him, however when it came time to go home and he still wasn’t done, I said that he could not keep them overnight and I took them home with me. The next day, I returned to wherever we were doing this and lent him the three sheets from my bag again so that he could finish copying them.
• Later, I went to an airport at 8 am for a flight at noon. I had heard that due to the COVID-19 pandemic, sometimes flights didn’t have enough seats and it cost people their paid tickets at times, to the point that affected people would sit down in boxes in front of the airline counter all day in protest once told that there were no more available seats on their plane.
• Anyway, I wanted to avoid that, so I went nice and early for the flight. I was second in line at the counter, with a black male in front of me and one behind me as well. They were both very jovial although they didn’t know each other, and in the end the one in front embraced the two of us, me and the guy behind me, and the guy behind me embraced both me and the guy in front as well. I was mostly trapped in the middle but leaned into that and gave them both a hug too.
• The guy in front then faded away into the dream, his turn at the counter assumedly came or something. The square airline staff counter had three staff members attending it, two women seated on chairs at computers in the two corners that were facing the line, and one man on the back right counter that was facing to the side. He didn’t seem to be taking any customers, only the two women in front were. The line was a bit crooked and even though I was the front person in the line at this point, I was actually not directly in front of the counter between the two women as I expected, but off to the side as though I was waiting to be called to the man’s side counter. I adjusted the front of the line to where I expected it to be with the help of the guy behind me, who was now a white Caucasian guy as the black guy had disappeared.
• Soon after, I was called up to the counter, and attended to by the woman on the near right side. She was wearing a tight leather blouse and skirt and I could see her thong panties peeking out from beneath her skirt and thought it was unsightly. While confirming my flight, we had a friendly chat, and she put a newspaper article in front of me while she worked on her computer. I didn’t read it at first until she indicated that I should because she found it interesting.
• The article was a large page cutout from The Straits Times, Singapore’s main newspaper, and featured a study showing that airplane ticket prices at the counter was often affected by the perception of the customer from the airline agent, and the price matches were divided into three categories. The first category were stereotypes that caused a ticket price rise, and the largest rise, by up to 50%, was shown to be a worker in leather worker overalls who was clipping his toenails at the counter. The largest fall in prices, also by up to 50%, was a spiritual medium decked out in voodoo-related bling and chanting soft mumbo jumbo under his breath. The hypothesis here was that the airline agents were scared and wanted to get him out of the way as fast as possible. The third category was a discount for students and seniors and similar groups, but it had been cancelled out by pen by someone as airlines no longer offered these discounts.
• I told the attendant that that was an interesting article and that I should try to present myself in some way as well, perhaps by taking out a laptop and working on some homework at the desk like a student. She laughed at that. I also told her that I was from Singapore too, and she said that that would explain why I looked vaguely familiar to her, since she had lived there for a year or two in the past. All the Singaporean Chinese looked the same to her though, and I fell into that category for her too.
• She had finished processing my ticket at this point, and asked me if a flight that would end up at my destination, which was Chicago, at 12:20 pm instead of 12:00 pm was fine. I said yes, and that I didn’t have a connecting flight, that location was my final destination and I was going there to meet a friend, Heg, as well as to do some sightseeing.
• She also asked me if I wanted some seat upgrades. The first class and business class updates were hundreds of dollars more and I rejected those right away, but the premium economy upgrade was only $20 and I thought about that one a little bit. In the end I rejected it though.
• She then handed my passport back to me and stared blankly at me while I waited expectantly for more. I asked if she could please print out my ticket too and she said oh yes and duly did so, apparently most people just used digital tickets these days but I wanted a copy of it to keep and perhaps scan later. I then took my things and left the counter area.
• I realized that I had not booked my accommodations in Chicago yet, so once I moved on from the ticket counter, I went to sit down and entered some sort of virtual world where I could see advertisements for local businesses and services in Chicago. It was like a small town square area with flashy signs posted on billboards everywhere. I tried looking for cheap last-minute housing but it was difficult to navigate through all the ads.
• Much later on, I was on the rooftop of a school, which also doubled as a physical arena for AMQ. Some renovations had apparently been done while I was away on my trip, or at least since the last time I played. The large, square arena was still there but there was now a wall mostly separating it from a rest area to the right.
• I knew that there used to be a plaque in the rest area where one could check the current score of the game going on as well, but when I went there to check, I found that that area was now sealed off by a balcony. Lined along the inside wall of that right area were posters, each one representing a changelog note for the AMQ game, and I noted that they were spaced so far apart that there weren’t that many spots left — what were they going to do once they ran out of wall space? Make no more changes?
• The head developer was walking along on the other side of the arena with someone that was new to the game, and the newbie was pointing out irregularities in the colouring of the brick walls that made up the arena. The developer was very pleased with that, and was showering praise to the newbie over the arena loudspeaker for contributing to the development of the game, and gave him some sort of a badge reward that he pulled out of his pocket. Before either of them could see me, I snuck to the exit and descended to the 3rd floor of the building.
• Even though it was summer holidays, I still had some classes, and while they were not in session at the moment, I wanted to find a quiet room to study in as I felt that I didn’t know anything at all from a couple of my summer classes. The 3rd floor was arranged with rooms all around on the outside of a square corridor that looped around onto itself, and I started just outside my classroom, 3U, on the bottom southeast corner of the square. The room letters went backwards as I went north and counter-clockwise from there, and I passed some rooms on the east and north that were obviously also classrooms, as well as storerooms, a staff room for teachers in the northeast corner, a small but elongated study area with tables and vending machines on the north wing, as well as a couple of computer labs.
• Although I could have used a classroom, they all felt too big and susceptible to random people walking in at any time. By the time I reached the northwest corner, the room lettering had gone from 3U all the way down to 3C and I still hadn’t found a suitable secret room yet.

Dec 21 2023

• School had just started up again, although this first Chinese class that I was attending was on the Sunday preceding the actual first day of classes. It was a two hour class or so and I was pretty sure that we were going to watch a movie in class instead of doing any real work. This was a good thing as I remembered that I still had two essays and 5-8 short worksheets to do for the class over summer break that I had completely forgotten about, and I would have to rush them all that night.
• Although I did get past that Sunday class fine, things kept cropping up that evening that prevented me from actually getting that homework done, and I ended up getting ready for school the next day but still reasonably confident that I could do all those papers while at school before the Chinese class started as I had plotted out the structure and answers for most of the worksheets and papers, I just had to actually write all of it down.
• Snippet: I could do something to paintings to alter them, in particular I tagged the famous Mona Lisa painting with a modifier at some point which changed the look of the woman on the painting. The effect was reversible, but that is all I remember about this snippet.

Dec 22 2023

Dream 1

• I was in a room which was divided into thirds by two rows of stacked furniture. I was in the middle segment with about ten to twelve other people, while both side segments each had one person with a gun, a female in the left row and a male in the right one.
• I had access to a power that turned the world around me into slow-motion, and the girl on the left was a larger threat to me/us, so I used my slow-mo power to make sure that the gun she was wielding was always hidden away from me behind a chair or table leg that was protruding out of the stacked furniture. She wasn’t actually pointing the gun at me, and couldn’t do so due to my power, but everytime she tried to move the gun in the slow-motion field, I moved myself as well so that I could never actually see it, only an outline of it through the furniture’s leg.
• In the meantime, barring two or three of the other people who were with me, the other ten or so people took down the male on the other side of the room. They then came over to help with the woman. It felt like we were some sort of detective or police group, even though I didn’t know any of them.
• There was a similar case earlier in the dream as well where I was with a few other people outside a house, and a boss enemy was inside of it. I could partially see the enemy through the wall, specifically I believe I could see his outlines and thus knew his walking path and his current actions, and I used that knowledge to pick an opportune time for us to attack it.
• There was also some weird snippet about there being an official disc soundtrack of the noises in my dream that had three more noises or actions that I could analyze and use as story/game hooks to react to.

Dream 2

• My family and I were testing a bus with helicopter rotor blades overhead and a bicycle pedalling mechanism that two people cycled through the air. While it felt lifelike, we also had a save/load game system so we could always rewind time whenever we crashed.
• It was not difficult to control, but it couldn’t stay still and hover in one spot very well, and when we tried to do so, it just started to fall toward the ground. Someone tried to use some magic item to make it stay afloat but I don’t know that that ever went very well.
• One of the things we did with the helicopter was to swoop down at smokers to scare them from smoking out in the open. In reality though, when we tried it, we couldn’t really lift the helicopter-bus out of its downward descent quickly enough and it usually just ended up crashing into the ground behind the smoker instead.
• We rewound a few times and then tried looking for similar YouTube videos to see if someone had made one to explain how to steer this thing better and how much hang time in the air was possible. I found a video about a four-person family bicycle which looked like it had lots of sky places, but when I viewed it, I realized that it was not about the bicycle navigating through the air, rather it was a family in Calgary that had a 4-person bike and used it to visit different highrise buildings in the city while looking for a place to buy.

Dec 23 2023

• One dream memory I had involved a packed train that was stuck at a train station. I’m not totally sure of all the reasons why the train was stuck, as I believe there were multiple reasons, but one of the reasons was that a bakery at the train station had been delayed in getting its daily stock of bread out and the train couldn’t move until they did. I wandered out of the train and over to the bakery, watching the women place out the bread on the racks.
• I knew a couple acquaintances on the train had ordered specific kinds of bread, and I asked if they could make those, and the women manning the shop said yes. I said that of the orders I knew were waiting, there was tea bread, coconut bread, and chocolate chip bread. They said they were completely out of coconuts and that order couldn’t be fulfilled. I said okay and maybe the old woman who wanted it might be satisfied with some David’s Tea brand coconut tea instead. I’d have to ask her.
• Also, there was a train schedule that showed that the train was late to the next three stops, one of them by 15 minutes, one of them by 10 miutes, and one of them was ticking down the last 15 seconds or so before it would be considered late too. The train driver could apparently visit the three of them from first to last or last to first, in that order, and I counselled that he should do it first to last, visiting the one with the longest wait time first and letting the other two wait a little while longer.
• In another dream memory, I was hanging out with Zian and we met up with another guy who wanted to hang out with her. She said that she was busy today as she was already with me, but she could make time for him tomorrow. I also ended up chatting with that guy a little bit, in both English and Chinese.
• Some shady-looking older Chinese men rolled up in a car and talked to Zian too, telling her that for a fee, they could make her Science project, which had won a recent award and was being featured in the museum, more visible to visitors. Apparently the museum had a software bug that made projects very difficult to find once they had won an award, and the museum had had no budget to update the software. Zian thought for a while and then said yes to thier proposal, fishing her wallet out of her handbag.
• Finally, there was a scene where I was in Edmonton 4012 with my family, and a salesman came up to us through the large glass window in the main hall. He was trying to sell us something called directed Internet, which would create an Internet link between two points in the house. Mom and Dad seemed to be expecting this, and I went downstairs to confer with Mom, who was in the toilet but handed Jon a blueprint of the house with some lines drawn on it showing the current Internet flow through the house. Jon was busy so I took the plans and went upstairs to talk to the salesman and explain my parents’ plan.
• Basically Mom and Dad agreed to his service if he could fulfil a few terms, one of them being that they wanted this directed Internet set up in our guest room downstairs, pointing out to the living room downstairs, as the guest room was a dead WiFi zone. If he could connect it to the main living room downstairs, then the guest room’s WiFi could join up with the main house WiFi from there. He took a look at the plans, and once we figured out what all the lines meant, he said that yes, it was possible.
• My parents also wanted him to set it up for a week so that we could test it and make sure it was working, before we would agree to any sort of sale. He considered those terms and also said yes. I then asked, from a question written down on the blueprint map, how soon he could set it up, and he said that he could get it done by this Thursday, four days from now.
• My parents were then headed out in the family car, and they told Jon and I that they had left a bowl of sliced pears in the sink and that we should go eat those fruits. They also invited the salesman to partake in the pears, and he gladly accepted, so the three of us went to the kitchen to eat, the salesman doing so by circling round the outside of the house to the window by the kitchen sink, since we still had not let him into the house.

Dec 24 2023

• I was part of a group of 7 people, all friends from my main Discord server, who were running some dungeon as a group. The group did not disband when people logged off, so we all just remained in group and even added and made Danethor our tank and leader for fun, even though he had not been online in months. His absence was fine to us and didn’t seem to affect our ability to clear the dungeon. The dungeon involved moving from room to room with a short loading screen between each one once we touched the connecting exit, and triggering some of the exits involved things like crawling under a table to touch the exit with our head.
• Later, there was a princess getting married in a school auditorium, but I disapproved of this and thus did not attend the wedding even though most other people from around the area did. Plus the dungeon had dirtied my clothes and I couldn’t find a replacement suit or dress and thus didn’t want to attend it while dirty.
• I stayed outside the auditorium for a bit and then went back into the school building, overhearing some students talk about how boring it was attending classes every day and how they wished that they weren’t NPCs.
• I also heard the princess speak to her groom through a TV broadcasting the wedding, asking him to go to a military tent outside one of the school building entrances and approving mandate number 11 or something which would start a sidequest that would benefit people. I walked over to the tent myself, hoping to find the quest and do it before they finished their wedding, but was unable to find the sidequest mandate itself.