Dreams

This is a shorter week anyway in terms of blog coverage, but I haven’t posted my dreams since the start of the trip, and there were a few even though it’s harder to dream when in an unfamiliar environment. So why not have them all here at once!

May 03 2024

• I dreamt that I was on a large cruise ship as part of a study abroad program. Every student on board had an aquatic or arctic animal that they predicted that the cruise ship would see at some point, mine was a blue whale. Someone else picked another species of whale and noted that it was unlikely that we would see a blue whale as the other type of whale was obviously already visible and they were never seen together with blue whales. I just knew however that we would eventually see a blue whale at some point during the trip, too.
• Other popular animal picks included fish and wolves, as we travelled past a lot of land as well. There was a large aquarium-like window set into the side of the boat that we could see through, although many people still just went above deck to peer over the edges. There was always the danger of falling overboard as the boat rocked though, so people had to be careful.
• At one point, I was alone above deck while the ship was next to a large flat chunk of ice. Two or three white wolves were trying to move in to the ice sheet, one a mother wolf and the other/s wolf cubs. I had a large pile of flat black rocks by me and took a couple to toss at the wolves to try to chase them away as I was waiting for something else to arrive. The mother wolf taught the cub/s to pick up the stones and toss them back at me, however. I decided that the best course of action was to retreat for now and let them get bored of the ice and leave.
• At another point, we passed a shoutengai, or shopping street, that many of the foreign students lived near. One of them, a tall Caucasian male, had fluent Japanese and was invested enough in the community that the shopping street planning committee, a group of five old Japanese men and women, invited him to join their committee to help make decisions about the shopping street.

May 06 2024

• A girl character that was holding Tigey, and that was being controlled by me as a player, was being harassed by a bunch of younger kids who wanted to play many rounds of a Scissors Paper Stone variant with her. These games started normally but ramped up with far more than the usual 3 options as the round went on. The girl had a manager person who couldn’t understand why the kids knew about Tigey and her and the game and were following her around.
• Later, he saw her go into a Familymart convenience store and saw the kids follow along behind her soon after, and finally realized that his boss, a radio producer, had been broadcasting her location to his listeners. He went in to save her, as she was trying to climb a ladder but her sleeves were being tugged on by one of the young kids. The manager said that the convenience store had Tigeys all around the shelves, and this distracted the kids so that the girl could escape.
• He also made a convenience store worker read out a Japanese announcement about the issue to the kids, basically asking them not to follow her anymore. I couldn’t understand the actual Japanese sentence though and neither did the worker, though he could read it out loud and very quickly. He did see the English word Tigey in there and tried to confirm with the manager that he wasn’t going to read out anything weird that might get him in trouble.
• Editor: I was sleeping on a plane run by an airline named Tigerair when I had this dream.

May 10 2024

• I led a very frail-looking Dad past a few quiet shops and buildings and into a small apartment where the rest of the family was waiting. The apartment was basically a single darkened room with containers and chairs on one wall that made it seem like we were on the back seat of a taxi or a car and facing the front driver and passenger seats.
• While Mom and Dad rested and looked on, Jon, Kel, and I looked through the boxes and tried to figure out what we were going to do for food. I had some dried mashed potatoes with me and demonstrated that we could pour the powder into a bowl and add water and it would turn into something very much edible. Jon saked if you could add more water to it and then eat that still and I said yes, but if he added too much then it would turn soupy and that was probably terrible.
• The three of us went out after a bit, looking to find food and other things to bring home. We apparently had another home or shop not that far away, and Jon brought a vacuum cleaner from there to our current apartment. I thought at first he had taken it from a shop across the street, which was represented by a narrow chasm, but that was evidently not the case since I could still see their vacuum parked across the chasm.
• I also went out with Kel to a small open-air food court and we wanted to buy and bring home some food from there. A lot of the popular fast food restaurants had outlets there, but were overlaid with giant X’s and slightly greyed out in a local area around their storefront because either Mom or Dad had tried their food recently and not liked it, or else they had wronged our family somehow and we no longer wanted to give them our business. About half the stores in the food court were marked this way, including McDonalds, KFC, and at least one pizza chain.
• Kel got in the queue for some store whose name started with Independent, and that was selling local food from some South East Asian country. She asked if I wanted some stuff from there, but I looked at the store prices and most of the dishes cost over $10, so I said no.
• A little later on, I was still in the same area but my family had retreated into the dream background. There had been a school festival in the background that had now come into the foreground, but even though my class was participating in it, I couldn’t really participate myself as I had no time due to taking care of my family, and didn’t really want to in general anyway.
• I did see some school friends and helped them a bit though, like I briefly helped Harvey tend an outdoor stall, and helped two other girls do something to their stall as well. I also was looking for some items and eventually found them, though I do not remember the details around what they were, perhaps some sort of paper.
• There was a news reporter and cameraman going around and interviewing random students about the fair, and I secretly wished that they’d interview me but they did not do so. I hung out near them though, wearing a hooded cloak that covered up the left side of my face and hugging something similar to a bolster as I watched a whole host of students and visitors and even the odd policeman go by in the large, open courtyard area in front of me and a bunch of arches that looked like a bus terminal on the other end of the courtyard.
• I then returned to the classroom and sat at a desk in a row right in front of a number of other girls in my class, including both Paulene and Huihan. They were a bit aloof since I hadn’t been helping out with the class fair though.
• Editor: The $10 policy is a guideline that I tend to follow when I am on holiday in Asian countries.

May 14 2024

• Snippet: I dreamt that I spoke to Mom, who had been talking with Jon and Kel about a new mobile game that they were playing, which was a single-player RPG which they levelled up in and which also had a mechanic where you could donate or trade gear with other players in order to level up faster. They liked the game and invited me to play it, and I accepted, even though I’d be about 60 levels behind them already. That apparently took less than a week to get though.
• Snippet: I also remember running along a set of roads and noticing that I wasn’t getting tired while doing so, so I picked up my pace and continued running harder as it was a healthy thing to do. I overtook a couple of people on the road, who then increased their speed to try to keep pace with me. I ignored them though as I was confident that I would still be able to outpace them in no time.

May 22 2024

• Snippet: I remember the hard bed I was sleeping on becoming a representation of a large FFXIV zone, and a streamer I watch, Inochifantasy, walking around the bed/zone with a character of hers. The bed/zone was divided into squares of varying sizes and colours, with each square representing a challenge or a lore point. She was showcasing various examples of the squares with her high level character to viewers.
• Snippet: I also remember another streaming-related snippet where someone got angry with a viewer and participant named Lana. I don’t think it was related to the above snippet though.
• Editor: I don’t know anyone actually named Lana, but I was watching Inochifantasy play FFXIV just before bedtime (on the hard bed in Kel‘s room in Guangzhou) so that part bled into the dream.

May 23 2024

• Snippet: I was walking down a a passage in a building while chatting to my work colleagues virtually about some new spreadsheet that Ronnie finally agreed that we needed to create. He asked for name suggestions but said that it needed to be really simple because the spreadsheet would be a list of accounts that we’d need another team to create for us and that that other team was really stupid and would lose the spreadsheet link in a heartbeat if it had a complex name. I said that Johannes had created s similar list of accounts in the past when we first noticed the issue, and had named the list “Database” then, so how about that. Ronnie liked it.
• Snippet: Later, it was the first day of class but there were many new students in class this semester. I was a returning student and was helping some of the new students settle down. For example, the guy behind me needed help to solve a math problem that was on the board, and I said that the teacher had given three interpretations of an algebraic formula on the blackboard, like A = B = C where each letter was a fraction that contained a numerator and denominator part, and the second and third ones were what he needed to concentrate on and reduce against each other as they had similar parts, whereas the first one was just part of the original question. Another student was preparing to go into some sort of test in another room with a female teacher, and I told him that he could earn brownie points by helping the teacher reset the power breaker in the room first since that seemed to be what she was trying to do. She said the breaker was on the side of a refrigerator, and he initially went into the fridge itself and got stuck inside somehow, but managed to extricate himself, before finding the correct switch and flipping in.

May 26 2024

• I dreamt that I participated in a school competition that involved getting 6 slips of paper with a different city name on each one, and then sitting through some sort of elimination competition to get to a point where a judge would pull city names out of a hat and whoever was still around and had a matching slip of paper could come up and point at the city on a map for the judges. There was a bingo element to it too, in addition to the elimination element, and when my final winning word came up I had only three other competitors left and all of them had one word left as well.
• My final winning word was Lisbon which was in Iceland in my dream. To show that I knew the answer when it came up, I picked up a map from another contestant’s table as I went up toward the judges’ table in stage, and showed them the star over Iceland with the word Lisbon on it. I won first place for all 6 of my words and received a large certificate proclaiming this. I noticed someone else that had many of my words too and who finished 2nd in all 6 of his words, whatever that meant. He was 17th overall in the competition, which was still quite high.

Jun 05 2024

• I dreamt that Kel and I were at a large and heavily guarded bus interchange on the northern side of Singapore, near Yishun. It was drizzling and we had just gotten down from a cheese-themed bus and were heading across an open courtyard and then down through tunnels to head to a connecting bus. I had my eyes open hoping to find some clothing, particularly school uniforms, that might be lying discarded on the ground somehow. We passed an open jail cell area with a Malay man standing inside of it, he had been detained by the police and was being patted down. Just outside the open cell door were two young children, laughing and playing around.
• Editor: I was on a flight home from Singapore to Canada for this dream.

Jun 09 2024

• I dreamt that Amy, who was leading another team at work in my dream, had become pregnant, and a lot of people at work knew about it. I didn’t, but I knew that something was up, and correctly guessed what had happened from some hints that Ronnie had dropped while we were chatting online. Yet he refused to confirm it and was playing coy with me, with the idea that if I were really a friend of hers then I should already know without him telling me. I said that I just didn’t talk to her much these days since I never met her anymore, but that that didn’t mean that I didn’t want to know important things about her and others at work, and that it was rude to assume so. I added that I guessed that Ronnie thought it didn’t matter since I was leaving work to go overseas soon anyway, which was also rude.