Dreams

There were some awfully long dream segments this week again. I like this very much. Even though none of the dreams again have been 8/10 or higher emotionally, the level of remembered detail in the diary entries has been of a fairly high quality.

Oct 14 2024

• There was a dream where my workplace was being taken over by another company. This announcement was made to us staff while we were in a karaoke room, and myself and two other people immediately got up and walked out of the room to protest the takeover. The three of us reconvened outside after that spontaneous act of solidarity, and set up a work chat channel on our messaging app that we could converse on. Also, there had been some sort of dossier in the karaoke room that had notes about mainland history and a previous game that we had been working on or playing. We were no longer tied to it now since we were leaving though.
• Snippet: In a separate, unrelated dream snippet much later on, my boss had announced that he was leaving the company in exactly a year’s time, which depressed me and my workmates.
• There was also a dream that involved game snippets of a hostile invading army that vastly outnumbered and thus overwhelmed a friendly defensive army on a top-down grid map. Later on, this somehow transitioned into me figuring out how to open a storeroom in my house that had been shut for ages because the key wouldn’t work in the lock any longer.
• To do that, I had shoved the key only partially into the lock instead of all the way in, and jiggled the key lock until the tumblers were in place, then used the edges of the key to grip on to the edge of the lock and turn it until it unlocked somehow. Anyway, Mom came by and I showed her the open storeroom. We peered in and saw mostly shelves of clothing and toys, including a set of three vertical colored things that looked like bowling pins that I had apparently acquired a replacement for earlier in the dream, so now we had two sets of it. Mom also pointed at a folded pair of jeans on the lowest shelf and asked if a badge pinned to its belt loop was a Dunman High badge, I looked closer to it and said that it wasn’t, it was just a generic pin with the brand of the jeans embossed upon it.

Oct 15 2024

• While looking for a guildmate named Aardyn who was downed somewhere in a game world and needed a revive, I followed instructions from my guild leader over guild chat, and from Aardyn over tells (direct personal chat), and clambered down a short sewer ladder beneath a manhole to look for her. At the bottom of the manhole was a T-junction, a narrow passage in front that I had to bend over to climb into but that didn’t seem to lead anywhere interesting, and then taller tunnels to my left and right.
• The left tunnel also seemed to be a dead end, so I eventually headed down the right tunnel as there were lights headed from that direction, but this led me to an alternate reality world that was outside of the game world entirely. It opened up into an entire underworld city filled with devils and with a cavern roof overhead.
• There, I met a couple who offered to guide me out of the city. I followed them along the streets and heard them or someone complain about teachers not being a lucrative job in the underworld despite needing to acquire certifications before one could become a teacher. At one point they also got annoyed at me because I was still trying to get in touch with Aardyn to confirm that she had just gone ahead and respawned, and when my phone pinged the network I received ten messages at once that were all queued, and had to stop to skim them all, before catching up with the couple.
• The couple brought me to the base of a tall HDB flat, where I met Dad there. He was apparently stuck in this alternate reality world too but they told us that we needed to go up to the 12th floor and take the elevator from there to get home, so we started climbing the stairs. There was a wedding between a handsome devil and an older deviless down in the bottom floor of the flat, and we could hear them talking as we climbed the stairs.
• Different devils were congratulating her on her marriage, and she was being snide and sarcastic to each of them to show off her coolness. They seemed to appreciate her replies instead of getting annoyed with her. As we climbed the stairs, we met a deviless on the landing of several floors as well and she also exchanged words with them as they appeared before us.
• Once we reached the 12th floor, Dad and I entered the elevator there, but instead of going up like we expected, the elevator started moving downwards as well. There were four devils in the lift with us, they seemed nervous and unsure about the destination of this elevator though and stopped it at the ground floor, where they got out.
• We remained in the lift and it continued its downwards journey into the ground. We apparently had to set parameters for where the elevator would take us, so Dad listed a temperature range and amount of rainfall that more or less matched Edmonton’s weather. I quickly added a stipulation that the place had to be in Canada too, so that we didn’t end up somewhere in Europe.
• Eventually, the elevator doors opened and we stepped out into a Singapore-like train. However, this was indeed Edmonton, since it was the only place in Canada that matched all the parameters listed. I mused for a few moments and raised a doubt that I had with Dad, wondering if it was the same Edmonton that we started out at, or if it was an alternate reality Edmonton. We spent some time staring at the other train passengers, staring at the people standing and sitting around in the train to see if they had discrepancies like tentacles or extra limbs or misshapen proportions, but they seemed normal.
• Once I was home later on, I remember helping some friends make a schedule for four teams to play each other for some MOBA or team shooter game. I was helping them organize it but was not actually playing myself.

Oct 16 2024

Dream 1

• The first part of my dream involved a great race through a number of zones in a game that was very similar to LotRO. I was running the race from a computer on my desk in a room that looked very similar to the setup in Tampines 294, except there was an extra seat on the left side of the computer where Jon was seated with his own computer, next to the wall.
• I was going to be streaming this, so I was trying to setup a mic at the same time that I was getting ready for the game. I couldn’t find the base tripod for the mic at first though, but eventually found it folded up in front of me on the desk. While setting it up, I kept having to occasionally shush Jon and Dad because I was streaming and they were making noise.
• I looked at the statistics of the race and apparently the world record for the journey was about 2 hours, although our class-wide best personal score, since everyone in class had tried it at least once, was 2 hours and 8 minutes and was held by Eisen. Everyone’s scores were kind of close though, between 2 and 3 hours in all.
• The race itself involved a journey from a southern zone, along a series of zones that stretched out east and northeast. The first leg of the race went through some savannah and then through a desert. There were plenty of checkpoints along the way, those normally did something in game that involved giving the player that touched them small buffs, but it didn’t do much in the context of the race besides being things that we had to touch to prove that we were there. I also pulled up a rough community walkthrough of the race that basically listed a list of five zones that we had to go through and another five zones that were optional suggestions of zones we could pass through depending on which exact route we wanted to take.
• Oddly enough, even though it was in an MMO, and you could see other players in the game, and the event started for everyone at the same time, all the participants were nonetheless unable to see each other because we were in different instances. I noticed too that the record times were actually a bit deceptive, as rather than recording the time between player start and player end, it was actually recording the time between event start and player end, even though the player could start their own race a bit later.
• I started my race, but I died while walking through an early zone because a warg or wolf chased me and injured me, and then I tumbled off a cliff trying to get away from the creature, and suffered the LotRO fall damage mechanic, which was being hobbled with a “broken leg” for a minute which cut my movement speed in half. In the meantime, the warg or wolf raced down the hill via a different path that didn’t involve jumping down, looped back around to me, and killed me. Then it reset back up the hill.
• While lying there however, a passing newbie player who was not taking part in the race, but was instead levelling her healer and had a resurrect spell, kindly casted it on me, bringing me back to life with all my ailments removed. This saved me a bunch of time, and I thanked her before we parted and moved on.
• In the next zone, while walking through the desert landscape, I saw a large, long circus tent that reminded me of a viking longhouse. Entering it, I noticed that this tented zone was not listed on the walkthrough, but it was a market with vendor zones that I had actually found and entered earlier on in the dream as well, long before the race started.
• In particular, there was one small, rectangular plot of land in the market where the player could set up a specific industry in, and the options for that were to either create a garage building that produced and stored a vehicle for use, a factory that produced components, which were a valuable resource, or some sort of magical thing that I forget the details of.
• There was an NPC running the plot who said that he’d rather see me build a garage there, but I had instead built the components factory there, and the garage on a similar plot of land just outside and to the northeast of the tent, atop a small hill instead, since vehicles would be more accessible and usable outdoors rather than indoors. I was going to go try using that vehicle in the race instead, since it was probably built already, but I woke up around here and the dream ended.

Dream 2

• Once I went back to bed, I ended up in a different dream that involved me living in a place similar to my Edmonton 905 apartment. The bathroom was a lot larger though, but the water wasn’t working for some reason, I tried turning on the shower and nothing happened. Then I left and returned and turned on the sink and that worked, but the drain wasn’t working, and the sink filled up to the brim with water, so I shut off the sink too.
• After a bit, I noticed that the shower, which wasn’t a real shower head but was just a hole in the wall, was actually gushing out water into the room as well, and the reason that the sink wasn’t clearing was probably because the water from the shower was rushing into the drain on the floor and the two drains were probably connected. I wanted to turn off the shower, but something about the way the light from the flourescent light strip in the ceiling was glinting off the water made me suspect that it might be electrified somehow, so I went to find my pink rubber slippers before reentering the bathroom and turning it off.
• I also then noticed that there were two steady water drips coming down from the ceiling onto the counter in the bathroom, which was doubling as a desk which I had boxes and papers on. Both drips were safely falling into conveniently placed trays for now though, so I moved some of the papers and stuff away and then, once it was safe, moved both trays away and placed them on a cardboard box next to the counter, and let the water flow safely into the sink.
• I decided to step away from all this and went outside for a walk. I found myself on a city street across from an indoors market building with its main entrance facing a road junction at a diagonal angle. The building was at least five or six stories high, and there was also a small trellis in front of the building, arching over the front door. Four or five young kids were climbing up the trellis and then clambering around the windowsills and pipes and jutting bricks that dotted the front of the market building, and I was very worried about them before I learnt that they were apparently in town for an acrobatic kids’ convention, though I imagined that their parents would still nonetheless be very worried about them, because they all could not have been older than about 6 or 7 years old.
• Upon entering the market, I tried to squeeze between a small gap next to a table of fruits set up by the entrance to get to the inner stalls, but I ended up knocking half a box of fruits onto the floor. I apologized to the vendor for that and said I would pick up the fruits for him. He said it wasn’t a problem and that the market organizers were going to be moving things around soon so that there would actually be a path for people to get by. The fallen items included potatoes and apples, as well as one fruit that looked like a starfish, and a couple that looked like gnarly gingers. I returned him his box after picking all that up and was oddly proud of myself for finally achieving some sort of a victory in the dream.

Oct 17 2024

Dream 1

• Zixiang, Huihan, and I were travelling separately to Jean‘s house through the rain after school, and planned to meet up once there. I knew I was behind the other two as I ran along a road, so I tried to use a keyboard combination to summon a mount or vehicle that I knew that I had somewhere, something about holding down two keys at once, the V key and something else, but for some reason it was not working. So I just kept on running.
• Once I reached the house, I met up with Zixiang and Huihan and we all went in to meet Jean, passing through the main room into her bedroom. Her house was somewhat cluttered, with books everywhere, and I remember there being a Japanese sort of sword on the wall as well.
• She had a friendly dog that came to meet us, and she showed us that the dog could do tricks, including standing on its two hind legs and walking around on them a bit while waving his two front paws at us. The dog put one of his paws on my thigh, and it left a weird tingly feeling there that I could still feel once I woke up shortly after that.
• Just before waking up, I also made a note to make another donation to unlock a second teleport perk point in the game world that we were in, which would then let me mark a save point, teleport away to the other save point and do something else like look for my mounts, or retrieve my school bag, or find a better camera to record that dog with, and then teleport back to where I was originally.

Dream 2

• This one was a workplace dream, which took place in a large, three or four storey school building with corridors that were open to the elements. A new employee from another department mentioned not being able to access her new account even though she started work today, and when we checked her department, it showed her as an employee in the Bookstore.
• We were confused why she had no account, as her details had been entered correctly, but upon further investigation I found that the person in the Bookstore department in charge of creating accounts was instead holding a course in a lecture hall where she was teaching other people in her department to not use the tool we gave them to create accounts, but instead to download Steam, and use an app on Steam to create some other sort of weird account instead.
• This would not give them access to our systems, but was very typical of other departments going off and doing their own thing, so I got frustrated and informed Ronnie of this. Surprisingly, he merely laughed and said that they would see the error of their ways soon enough once they ran into errors. I said that we should still nip this in the bud early because it would cause more work for us.
• Ronnie came over, open the door and walked a couple of steps into the lecture hall to glance at the ongoing lecture, and then stepped out again. I chided him for this too, because now that he was seen in the hall and still did not say a thing, it was like we had given tacit approval for the course and would be blamed once things inevitably went wrong. He said not to worry again. I said he wasn’t the one who would be actually doing the work.
• Snippet: Somewhere in the dream, there was a word game where I was playing where there were letters arranged on a grid such that the corners and sides were all filled but there was a big empty space in the middle of the grid. This was some sort of word search game, where the letters next to empty spaces could be connected, but the letters were not really forming any words so I pressed a button to scramble the letters again. To my surprise the shape of the hole changed as well, from a circular hole to a flatter, wider oval, and this time the Q letter and a string of S’s or T’s were out of the way and so more words could be formed.

Oct 18 2024

• I brought along a plastic bag of papers and other items with me into my mall while I went to renew a passport. The service counter I was headed to was on the second level of the mall. I was the first person there, so I took the first available counter, while about five other people trickled in. I chatted in a friendly manner with the two female attendants behind the desk as we waited.
• They handed out a survey to everyone around the time that I realized that I was probably at the wrong counter. Notably, hanging above the passage next to the desk was a sign noting a bunch of nearby services and arrows leading toward them, and the passport centre was apparently one room over. I had for some reason rolled two six-sided dice around the same time at my counter, so I joked that I had passed my intelligence or wisdom check and had finally realized that I was at the wrong place. I asked if the passport room was just down the hall in the direction of the sign, and the attendants said no, it was actually outside the service counter area and one shop over. I thanked them and left.
• I found that passport centre easily and went inside. It was a multi-stage queue, with the first stage in the very first room involving a bag check as well as a document check to make sure everyone’s papers were in order, and there were about ten people ahead of me in this first queue. I put some of my stuff down on a box while I rifled through a bag to make sure I had mine. I was only renewing my passport and not my Chinese visa this time so I hadn’t brought everything, just what I thought I required, but I think I ended up missing something so I retreated out to get it.
• While outside, I realized that some of my items were missing, specifically a thin cookbook with a flattened spine so the pages were flat no matter what page the book was opened to, a notebook with many loose, detached pages shoved between its covers, and a Shredder figure that was painted on the outside of what I vaguely recognized as the shape of a doll toy figure with a long dress from my childhood, so the figure was thinner on top where the head was and thicker at the bottom where the dress folds were. They used the folds to display Shredder’s billowing cloak instead.
• Anyway, I went back around to try to find out where I had left those items. I peeked in through the window at the first service counter again but could see my seat still unoccupied and nothing on the desk there. It looked like the other five people were in the middle of an exam, so I left. I realized that I had probably left them on the box in the second shop, the passport service centre, so I went there to inquire instead.
• The two men on duty there told me that they had seen the items but had gotten rid of them since they were on the box and the box itself had been taken away too. They said that the Shredder figure had been sold to a toy vendor or distributor who was now on the fifth floor of the mall in a separate shop. I said that that one wasn’t as important since I had seen that they sold those figures for $6 on eBay and had considered buying a second one anyway, but that I would go try to track him down after.
• For the two books, one of the two attendants said that he had stashed them away in a trinkets box of interesting stuff that he found. He opened up another cardboard box and pulled out a plastic box, and opening that plastic box, he handed me the first book that he pulled out. I didn’t recognize it but held on to it for now. The second book he pulled out was the loose-leaf notebook, but there were other loose papers mixed in with it as well. He handed me this second book and I sorted the pages out and counted through all 40 pages of the book using their page numbers, before returning him all the other loose pages.
• Editor: I have a note in my book that I was mildly impressed that I could not only recognize all the numbers in the dream, but that they were correctly numbered, since the outermost sheet was labelled 1, 2, 39, and 40 on its four pages, the next inner one was 3, 4, 37, and 38, and so on. I’m not sure if this note was a reflection of my thoughts in the dream, or shortly after waking up from the dream, though.
• I then told him that I was fairly sure that the first book he had given me was the wrong one, and returned him the first book again. He pulled out a third book and handed it to me, and I recognized this as the correct cookbook. I thanked him for the two books and went off to track down the Shredder action figure.
• A little further on in my dream, I was by a dock and a streamer friend was pointing out a ship to me and boasting that he had done a full round of service in the navy on it, and had gotten 50 of 60 achievements while doing so. I looked up the achievements for the ship and saw that they were largely for doing something or other while on the ship, but in particular there was a set of two achievements — both were to stand on top of the ship’s wheel and then glide down from it, remaining airborne for 10 seconds before touching the ground, but one was to do it as a guy and the other as a girl. I thought that that seemed like it couldn’t be actually done unless a person was transgendered and had the foresight to do the first one before they transitioned.
• The captain clarified for me however that the achievement actually triggered for everyone on board as long as someone of the correct gender did it, and that due to gender imbalance in the navy, all of them had the male version but none of them had the female version. I offered to trigger that for them, and mentioned that I had actually gotten the female version of the achievement in another dream a long time ago. The captain accepted, and showed me which way to stand and glide off of, since I would have to actually glide over a barrier and then turn my gliding direction to float off the side of the ship without touching it, and land back down on the dock below, in order to reach 10 seconds of hang time.
• I was wearing an ankle-long gown here, so I actually messed up on the first try and hit the barrier, and had to reset my attempt and clamber up onto the ship’s wheel for a second attempt. The second attempt apparently went much better though, as I floated down using my umbrella as a glider. But then a large tidal wave swamped over the ship and engulfed everyone.
• A nearby rescue submarine automatically sucked me into itself, along with four other people including the captain, as well as the ship’s cat. When I got up, one of the other sailors was glaring at me and I had no idea why, until I learnt that the submarine was only supposed to be able to suck in and support five living beings, but apparently the cat had bit on to my dress as though it was trying to drag me to safety, and so the submarine had picked the two of us up together as one of its five lifeforms. The sailor felt that I shouldn’t have been there, but the captain and the others did not care.

Oct 19 2024

• Most of this dream that I remember took place in a school that zombies or aliens or something were occasionally attacking. There was a turn-based combat segment where we took turns flinging skills at each other. We players were much stronger than individual enemies but there were a lot of them. I remember a skill that did lots of damage to the opponent but also did a little bit to the caster, which was often myself.
• At one point there was a row of friendly NPC troops who all looked down at the ground and away from me when I said that I needed someone to cast one of those spells, because they were afraid of the self-inflicted part of the damage even though it was tiny. They looked like giant, cartoony chess pieces with large faces and I was thinking that they definitely were not suited to becoming protagonists with looks and attitudes like that.
• There was also a game with a grid of circles, about twelve across by twelve deep or so, where enemies were advancing down the columns and attacking my side of the grid. I could place melee and ranged troops on my side of the grid to defend the school, by blocking and attacking the enemies coming down each column, but each troop I placed could not influence any other column but the one they were currently in. We took turns to place enemies on our ends of the boards, the enemy could place several at a time but my defensive troops were stronger, so I made sure each column had a ranged fireball caster or archer, several weaker troops, and a tank, and it was an easy win from there.
• Outside of combat, there was also an open world segment where we could explore the school. I remember exploring the school with a couple other people working in different teams. There were also Halloween and Christmas specific scenes that could be triggered on those days, though I forget the context of them.
• There was a hideout room that we converted a storeroom into. The room was on the third level, and to prevent enemies outside from seeing activity in the room, we closed the horizontal blinds over two of the windows adjacent to the same corner and nearest to the school’s front gate, but made sure that the slats closed downwards so we could peek down at the ground floor through them. We also left the actual window open so we could escape through them in an emergency without having to open the blinds and then open the window first.
• For the other three windows in the room, we closed the windows with the slats upwards so we could set up crafting benches and other tables near there and not worry about needing to be quiet or keeping the lights off near those windows.
• At one point, Dad and I also visited a mall to look at showcase rooms and various items that you could buy from them, as we wanted ideas of how to decorate our hideout room and general clutter to put into them. However, those showcase rooms were in a large mall floor somewhere, and we couldn’t find them because the shops were arranged in terms of general shopper popularity, and there were things like large supermarkets and hardware stores taking up most of the shop spaces instead. We went through the top 25 stores and did not find the showrooms.
• There was also a kitchen somewhere in the school or hideout that looked like our Edmonton 4012 kitchen, and another scene there involved Jon seated at the dinner table while I brought a couple trays of snacks to the table. One tray was some Chinese peanut cookies that Kel had left for us in the fridge, and I was excited to eat them.
• I also noticed that Dad had left a large, black purse in the kitchen, even though he had gone out to do grocery shopping, but upon checking the purse I found it to be empty anyway. Jon said he expected Dad to return with a large pack of soda drinks, among other things, because they were on sale. And that he would be coming back via bus and we could probably see him with a big bag slung over his shoulders when he stepped down from the bus. However, I was tired and went to bed in the safe room before Dad returned.

Oct 20 2024

• One friend and I visited a school building in the western area of Edmonton, and got mixed up in a huge game fight with a huge, oily-skinned sumo wrestler that was angry at us for some reason or other. He was standing on a 13 by 13 square area with white tiles just oustide the school, and attacked us there.
• We couldn’t deal with him in melee so we retreated several feet out of his range, and found that from there, his only attack was using a bow and arrow, and we could easily dodge his arrows, so we waited him out until he either failed his objective to kill us or ran out of energy, before we went back up close to him and defeated him.
• We found out that he was a character that was controlled by an old woman in the school itself whose mental presence was not all there. She’d fade in and out of clarity over time. We tried to chat to her a bit but it was difficult to get a coherent conversation going, however she did become a bit attached to us despite, or perhaps because of, us beating her character. She wanted us to buy a meal for her and we were hesitant at first but eventually accepted as an act of charity and went off to get it from somewhere nearby.
• When we returned, she was nowhere to be found, and we learnt from talking to the school staff that they had sent her off to an old folks’ home who didn’t really want her either. The school also said that she had been a bother as no one could really talk to her, and that she was harassing people who approached the school, so they had put a nerf on her specific weapon, the bow and arrow, across their entire campus zone, since no one else in the school used that weapon. So that was what had made the arrows easier to dodge.
• We saw a scene of her in the old folks home remotely, where she was sitting on the floor in a carpeted hallway by the house’s landline telephone, waiting for it to ring, while everyone else including the attendants were in the kitchen. The old folks in the house were represented by babies and the attendants were adults, and the adults were playing with the babies in there while summarily ignoring the baby outside by the telephone.
• The two of us assumed an alias when visiting the home so that they wouldn’t demand that we take her home with them, but we did manage to drop off her food for her in the end, even if she didn’t fully understand or appreciate it. This did give her some hope for recovering and leading a normal lifestyle though, and she came out to watch us as we rode off into the west on a motorcycle.
• Despite us leaving, we also had a scene later on that seemed to represent her mental state, we were trapped inside a large treasure chest but it would occasionally open to let us out, and we had books 5 and 6 of the Fabled Lands, as well as another fictional book from the series that I didn’t recognize, and we were flipping between the three books as we jumped between paragraphs, trying to follow an incoherent story. At one point, we found some part of the story that made sense, and the scene changed to a protagonist girl with a glowy outline at the helm of a small ship, steering it with the ship’s wheel as it cut a path through an ocean.
• There was also a scene at some point around here where there was an orange tiger from a zoo that walked upright, and he was visiting a restaurant along with several other people from the zoo. The restaurant had another orange tiger who was a floor rug, and it was unclear if that tiger was still alive or not, but we touched the unmoving tiger’s paw to the visiting one’s paw.