Dreams

Dec 26 2023

• I was playing an MMO that seemed like a mix between LotRO and Guild Wars 2. I ventured into a zone with a guild announcement that I was going to go try to get a quest achievement and whoever wanted to join could feel free to come along. A couple others did — Kel, Anaden, and one other person who was online. Naveras was also online and I considered inviting her as an olive branch even though I didn’t care for her, but decided not to bother as she probably already had it on her main character anyway.
• The zone we went to was an underground sewers zone connected to a snowy carpark. The achievement I was after was a two-parter, the first part to kill a regular normal monster, and the second to kill a giant boss with an 8-letter name, something close to Ragnarok, that would spawn as a weakling humanoid and then turn into the boss once killed. It was a 12-person raid but the zone wasn’t at level cap so there were likely some other overlevelled players in there. I was a healer and we had a LotRO guardian tank too, and I also had a lowbie tank as an alt these days so I wanted to watch what he did to learn tips and tricks from him.
• We killed the first mob in quick order, and then found a large group of 50 or so people gathered in a room near where the boss mob spawned. There was a raid leader organizing an impromptu public duel event there, along with several duel teams, several loose audience members who had wandered by, and a few helpers standing outside pointing people into the room. We decided to join the audience and watch. I commented that public events could be very neat and unique, and used to be common on our old LotRO server too, so we may as well watch while waiting.
• The first duel started with a guy seated near us in the front row being selected. He looked across the front row for his opponent and almost picked Kel, who was trying to hide behind Anaden, as an opponent, but picked a girl next to her instead. She didn’t have a weapon and asked if she could borrow mine. I was carrying a heavy saucepan with a broomstick handle that had basically snapped off and was only very flimsily attached still, so I fully removed the handle and offered it to her. She accepted. The host asked if it was clean, which in this context was defined as whether it ever touched my toothbrush or not. I said it never went near my toothbrush. So the host approved it.
• After the first duel was over, which the girl won, the weakling boss monster spawned. He had a weird face that looked like Mr Bean but was stuck in a tilted head pose. Kel cooed over it as she had never seen the boss before, and we reached out to pat and touch it, to ensure that we tagged the monster. Then because it was a loose, weak mob in a raid of 50 random people that were here for duels one way or another, people attacked it and it transformed into the giant, and everyone swarmed it and it died in seconds. The raid leader tried to calm the group down by saying over the announcement system that it was pointless to attack it, the raid was over power level 50 and the boss giant was barely 10 or 15, but it was long dead before he even finished speaking.
• Once things settled down, we planned to leave but I hung behind to watch one more match. This match was between two groups of girls, each one representing a secondary school. One of the girls mentioned something about 5th year being as difficult as the old Pre-University system and possibly even more so, so this sounded like a Singapore school.
• The raid leader made a rules announcement and said that instead of fighting at the same time, both teams would get to channel their spells and do an attack chain uninterrupted on the other team to see who could do the most damage. He said that it was okay to go slightly over one round, but little cards automatically popped up next to the duellists’ shoulders to announce the start of each person’s attack round in a turn-based sort of fashion based on however many attacks they took, and if he saw a Round 3 notification pop up by anyone then that team would immediately be disqualified.
• Both teams had around 6 girls each. The defending team of girls sat in a circle on the floor, facing inwards at each other and holding hands. The attacking team sat in a 3 by 2 rectangle. The attacking team charged up their ritual spell, revving it up and holding it like they were holding their breath, planning to unleash it all together once everyone was charged up. It fizzled twice after a few seconds of charging up though, because someone kept on losing their concentration, and then fizzled again a third time when someone got confused.
• They were allowed to try again but took a quick break while one of the girls who had ruined an attempt because she was overcome by laughter, and thus lost her breath, calmed down. In the meantime, another girl who was in her first year but had made the team for the attacking school talked about her positive club experiences and how the older members of the club had guided her.
• Snippet: There was also something about wearing a school uniform, with a blazer overtop a gray blouse and an attached tie. I couldn’t find the tie at first but was shown that it was already attached to the uniform. Someone helped me adjust the tie, telling me to be careful when buttoning up the very top button by the neck, and then showing me how to slip the back of the tie into the tie hoop once it was tightened.

Dec 27 2023

• I was walking around a University campus with some friends in the late evening. There was an Olympics-style multi-discipline sports tournament going on in the University, and we passed a gym where the door was open and we coud see a Canada vs USA match going on where they were playing a version of football on a hard court where the ball was a really light volleyball or handball. We saw Canada score a goal between two cones that were set up a little ways apart on the ground as we passed by. Some of my friends broke off to enter the gym to watch the rest of the game, while some declined and walked onwards. I followed the latter group.
• A few minutes later, I noticed that I had a 7-day event task checklist relating to the tournament going on, and one of the tasks was to watch a team score a goal. I wondered why that goal we saw didn’t count, perhaps because we were outside the gym? I broke off from the group and went back to the gym, entering through the front door and finding out that that match was actually a practice match and was over now. There was another adjacent sports court open and an actual volleyball game was being played there, so I stayed to watch that instead even though I didn’t think that anything there would count toward that task.
• I sat down near other audience members on the polished wooden floor, and after a while the Canadian coach came around and asked us, the audience, to scout for good players amongst us as well, specifically by looking at the people that we were seated nearby and recommending them if it looked like they had the right build or skills for the game. I was afraid of being dragged into something unnecessary here so I quietly teleported myself home. I almost teleported myself and my entire row of audience members home along with me on accident, but toggled that option off in time.
• I came home with an armful of shirts, a couple of which I was wearing and that I had to take off in the bathroom and rinse. I left them all on the bathroom floor in a neat pile of slightly damp, folded shirts that came up to a height taller than me while I was seated on the floor. I had also brought home a pile of DnD sourcebooks, about two feet high, and I put them next to a plastic storage drawer unit by my computer while complaining to Kel that I didn’t have room to store them. She suggested just leaving them where I had put them on the floor, and I agreed.
• Jon got recruited for some team due to having a special blood type match that the coach was excited about, and I volunteered for that as well to keep him company. It turned out the selection and blood test process was called Alvin’s Missing Dance, and the coach explained that the test originated many years ago when Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis, who were fantasy book authors that I had read when young, witnessed a child in Singapore standing at a traffic crosswalks with a pair of earphones connected to a Walkman. When the crosswalk light turned green, the child began to dance as he crossed the street.
• Somehow a blood test was built off of that and they had been trying to find the child ever since, in a Cinderella sort of fashion, but it was found that those people with near matches were also a great fit for whatever sport the coach was recruiting for. Anyway, upon listening to the story, I said that that could very well have actually been me, and the coach got very excited.
• Also, at one point there were little game pieces spawning in a room that people could use for their various projects, but no one was actually claiming and using them, so I started picking them up and investing them in building a wall and ramps, until someone else in the room wryly commented and wondered why I was bothering to progress the game, especially on such a low-value task as building walls.

Dec 29 2023

• Dad was leading some sort of school and family outing to a museum but had bought a TV and a Playstation and was going to abandon us and take a bus ride somewhere else. He hailed a bus driver and boarded the bus even as I yelled at him not to do so. I boarded another bus that travelled alongside his and gesticulated and called out to him until he agreed to disembark at the next stop and talk to me since all the passengers on his bus were staring at him.
• When we confronted each other, I told him that he needed to come to the museum with us and not run off by himself as everyone else was relying on him to lead the way. I pointed out that he would not be able to go enjoy himself anyway as he was headed to Disneyland but one could not enjoy that sort of place while holding a heavy box in each hand. He agreed.
• I also showed him a survey from the students from the previous day that showed that people found the trip underwhelming compared to past ones because we didn’t do anything as a group on the first day. 8 of the students, including me, had to write the survey results in Chinese rather than English for some reason, and had our answers separated from the other couple dozen students so we were at the top of the results sheet, although I mixed both Chinese and English for my reply and no one seemed to mind that.
• Snippet: There was also some event where I was trying to do some sort of test in an MMO and at some point near my in-game house I was ganked by a high-level wizard player who was bored and walking back and forth looking for much lower level players to kill. However, since I was right by my house at that point, I just respawned there and continued upon my way.
• Snippet: I also dreamt at some point that the Chihayafuru 4 anime was announced and Seren had pinged me in Discord in a group chat with Satinel and the two of us, letting me know that we would need to prepare for a writing project for that as well. I noted that it seemed like a good time to do a full rewatch of the first three seasons.
• Snippet: I also remember the presence of a burly, orange-haired guy with two tufts of hair sticking out of his head that looked like cat ears. Not sure how he featured in my dream.

Dec 31 2023

• I was a student at what I think was a cop school, and Mom and Dad were also involved with the school somehow, at least to the extent that I was taking the Singapore-style MRT train home with them this day. We were also meeting Kel at the station, and were going to take the MRT line northwards toward home.
• We had to cross several zones or neighbourhoods to even get to the station, which could sometimes get dangerous, and as I was their child, my parents insisted that I wear a motorcycle helmet for head protection even though I was very much an adult (and a cop in training) in the dream. They did allow me to not buckle the neck strap up though.
• We passed a small outdoor Christmas market next to the train station, and when Mom inquired as to what that was, I said that I had seen it here before in previous years and that even though it was rather small, at least only large enough to hold about a dozen stalls or so, we should stop in to browse the stalls as something to do together as a family. They agreed.
• However, when we got to the entrance to the market, there was a woman there manning the entrance and collecting tickets from people before she would let them into the stall area. Apparently to get in, one had to buy items from stores in the adjacent mall, which would then give them free admittance tickets to the Christmas market. I balked at this, saying that the mall was extremely expensive and not worth it, and expressing my disappointment as admission in previous years had been free. I wasn’t the only one too as there were other frustrated passersby outside the entrance glaring daggers at the woman.
• I asked my parents what they thought and they said it wasn’t worth it either, so we returned to the train station, met Kel there, and caught our train north. We were travelling from near the start of the Northern line (so around whatever was the N1 station or so) to the end of it, and Kel and I were going to get off at N11, Khatib station, in order to get home, whereas Mom and Dad apparently lived separately and were going to N12, Yishun station, to get home.
• Because our stations were pretty much at or near the end of the line, we boarded the train and then entered a box room compartment on the train that I had no idea existed and had never been in before, this was a small, private room that seated four people and had a lockable door, and we passed by the time chatting to each other in there. I also took off my helmet, returning it to Mom.
• When we reached the N11 station, Kel and I left the private box room, but I got confused as I forgot that I was still on the train even after I stepped out of the room, so she stepped out of the train onto the platform proper while I got turned around and remained on the train as the doors closed. In this way, I ended up alighting at N12 with my parents instead of at N11 with my sister.
• I knew that there was a Christmas night market outside the N12 station as well, one of three stations along the northern line that had one, and I figured that I might as well go since I had ended up here anyway. I asked my parents if they wanted to go, but they said no, so I texted Kel and invited her along instead if she wanted to catch the next train here. I used the Malay word for the night market, pasarmalam, to describe this particular market, even though I didn’t use it for the first market.