Dreams

It certainly feels like I’ve broken through some sort of memory barrier lately. From Sep 17 2024 to today, Nov 17 2024, I’ve missed a total of 4 entries in my dream journal — Sep 18 2024, Sep 27 2024, Oct 06 2024, and Oct 27 2024. Granted, a couple of the other entries, especially earlier on, were very short, and many days they’re still very fragmented anyway, but it’s amazing that I’ve had decent to good dream recall nearly every day for the last two months. Obviously this won’t last forever, but I’m here for the ride while it lasts!

Also I wanted to highlight that my Nov 16 2024 dream invented a word called “narra”, which was roughly defined as the empty block space inadvertently left above a door when building a house in survival crafting games. And similarly, on the very next day, Nov 17 2024, my dream defined “meglar” as a magical wand or sceptre, similar to that wielded by a magical girl. Very oddly specific and amazing. I love when dreams do that, and I also love when I dream in different languages or see different languages in my dreams, like also partially happened this week on Nov 12 2024.

Nov 11 2024

• My first dream had something to do with a piece of desert land and three machines on it, arranged in a triangle, that each looked like power generators with bullet holes in them. The owner of the land wanted to put the land on display or open it for some event but the actual dates for the display or event were misaligned with the dates that the owner could open the land since she had nothing to “anchor” her start and end dates to.
• Therefore, the owner, who was a Japanese girl drawn in an anime style with long black hair and curled forehead bangs, decided to turn on the machines one at a time and run them for one day (or one week?) each, chaining them so that when one needed to be turned off so it could rest, the next one started up. This gave her a way to count time and thus somehow allowed her to align the display timespan of her land to the timespan of the event she wanted to open the land for.
• Later, there was a separate dream where the first part had me playing around with the “correct answer” of a game, which involved a bunch of buildings pieces arranged into an empty settlement and a large, five paragraph message of words that explained the plotline. Being an irrepressible gremlin, I realized that I could get creative with this, so I took the settlement pieces and rearranged them to form a different structure, and then took the words in the message and arranged them so they said something completely different as well. There were some weird proper noun-like words in the message that were composed of letters from the English alphabet but weren’t actually real words, but I managed to squeeze them all in to the message somehow and was proud of myself. I also had extra metal wall pieces, so I stretched them off to the south and made a little bridge from the settlement to another zone nearby.
• I was doing all this from the TV in my family’s apartment, as I was waiting for Mom and Dad to come home from shopping so that I could get their advice on some houses that I was going to see later on that day. Either Jon or Kel was around but out too, I believe. None of them returned in time for me to properly talk to them though, as my parents only returned home shortly before I had to leave myself, much to my regret. Although Dad did see the message that I had made and complimented me on that creativity too.
• Anyway I ended up having to leave my parents’ place before I was able to properly talk to them, as I had a specific schedule that I needed to visit the house for. I took the Singapore-style MRT train from the apartment west, toward Clementi MRT Station, noting along the way that this was near where our first family house was too. I don’t remember what else happened from here except that I did walk around some open-air markets and shops and also that I had a pang of nostalgic or melancholic loneliness while here.
• A little later after that, I was watching a stream of Nomakk also exploring the Clementi area, except it was in the context of a game, and the area was run-down and post-apocalyptic and had ruins to explore and human enemies to defeat. He said that he had forgotten to turn on the logging of Twitch chat today, and as he knew that I liked everything logged and archived, he hoped that someone else was doing it. Trin piped up in chat and said that she was logging it, but when I asked her if she was willing to upload the video afterwards so that I could get the chat for it, she said that it was too much effort and to just pretend that she hadn’t spoken up at all.
• I was both frustrated at her for that as well as a little confused, as she had mentioned that Nomakk‘s horse had a certain 9-letter name but I could clearly see on the screen that his horse had a completely different 9-letter name. Either way, I settled down to watched him and saw as he clambered up a ruin, followed by another nameless player since the game was apparently an open-world MMO-style game, and then saw him jump down from the second level to defeat a gangster while the nameless player took another direction and went into a balcony on the second level. Nomakk then continued on heading west, and I noticed that he was heading toward the metal wall pieces that I had put down earlier to act as a landmark leading to my scrambled up settlement and message. I wondered if he would end up heading that way accidentally.

Nov 12 2024

• My first dream involved a weird scene where I was looking for a tailor or weaver and spoke to various craftsman, including three that were standing on top of the same square in a game, so I had to first select the square and then select the person to speak to from a drop-down list, at which point I could see their skills. Each crafter had four different crafting skills, but there were many different crafting skills in the game, so it took a while to find someone with a tailoring skill.
• One of the three people on that square did turn out to have a tailoring skill though. He was a short, blue character shaped like a ball, and he had a Chinese name with a three kanji name that I saw in my dreams but didn’t know how to read.
• I still needed to talk to all three crafters in that square and ask them about all their crafting skills for some reason though, and I either had with me, or outright was playing the character of, GordMcLeod to help with the interviews. I knew this because of a Gmail screen that I brought up and that showed an email from him being third in my email list.
• Anyway, I could only ask the crafters about their skills twice per conversation cycle though, so I had to talk to the three crafters six times in total in order to cycle through and complete all their crafting conversations. Each time I finished the chat cycle, the crafter and I watched some sort of line graph update itself in real time on a small UI screen floating in front of us.
• Later on, I had a separate dream where I was graduating high school, and I went to the graduation ceremony with Mom and Dad. I made a short speech to the effect of how I put in a lot of studying effort for it, and while I didn’t do that well in middle school, I did do equally well in primary school as well and was glad that I had managed to do it again for high school.
• That dream eventually transitioned to a school excursion where we visited a town with craters and zombies crawling around. I fought off a few of them, then got tangled up with a zombie that kept coming back to life even after I speared it seemingly to death a few times.
• A girl came over to help me just as the zombie itself changed weapons from a harmless stick to a pistol after one of its deaths, so that it could reach me behind the railing where I was piercing it in relative safety from. I wanted to protect her from the gun so I made sure to be vigilant about piercing the zombie the moment it started to move again, and eventually the zombie died fully.
• This dream also had weird segments, like some NPCs in the school excursion town which I could talk to to have them cook things from cooking recipes. And something about a stairway dancing contest, as well as a levelling system where I could pick 2 of 4 items for myself whenever I levelled, but depending on who I was speaking to as I levelled up, I let them choose my items for me instead.

Nov 13 2024

• I had a somewhat disjointed dream involving a game with multiple levels. I had three party members with me, and in one level we had to craft a certain amount of berries as the overall objective to get past the level. We did this by combining the crafting from all our characters at once and stacking all the incomplete tasks, which had a physical representation in game, on top of each other, since the ones underneath took their quality from the one directly above them, and this meant that we only needed to concentrate on making the top berry dish good and the quality would transfer down to the others.
• Despite all this, some poison or fatigue or something took us all down to 1 hit point left, but we still survived and passed to the next level. It would have been even worse if we did not stack the berry dishes that we were cooking though. When we arrived on the next level, there was a skinning quest and a tutorial that popped up telling us how to skin dead animals as we entered the zone.
• The game itself wasn’t all about crafting or even fighting though, and there were social aspects with tasks as well. Also, there were people in one of the zones that we met that didn’t know how to play the game, and I think we might have visited a restaurant at one point too.
• I remember a specific workplace scene involving people who had returned to office to work, and other people who were still working from home. I was in the latter group. One of my quests I had there involved a message that I had to pass on to some of the office admin staff who were working on premises now instead of from home, and I tried using a chatroom that we had been in in the past, but found that it was now abandoned.
• I was supposed to go into work to deliver this message, but I didn’t want to do so, so I waited at a water slide that people used on the way home and intercepted the person while she was sliding by and passed the message on from there instead. To make this work, I had to bring along my toothbrush and put it in a cup in the washroom to pretend that I had been living in the office all day and was brushing my teeth on the way home, but I had grabbed and brought along all four toothbrushes from my cup holder at home without thinking, and someone commented on how each toothbrush was a different material and how cool that was, and how the wooden one had probably been the most difficult one to obtain. I said that the wooden one was actually one of the first ones I acquired.

Nov 14 2024

• My dream involved a scene to do with a Rimworld map and some field planting layouts in a rectangle that was longer vertically than horizontally. Somehow or other, this then turned into a boxing match where I moved into a first-person view camera and kept my distance from my stronger opponent before lunging in and punching him a few times and defeating him while staying unscathed myself.
• Later on, there was a post-mortem on a moving train where my former opponent asked an expert seated next to him why he lost, and was willing to pay him quite a bit for information on what he could have done better. Something like 11,000 gold or so. He didn’t recognize me even though I was seated across the aisle from them, and I piped up and joked that I would be willing to act as a broker for his question, if he gave me 9,000 gold instead, I’d help him refine the question and pay the expert a smaller fee for just a nuanced version of the question.
• The expert looked at him to see if he wanted that offer but he didn’t seem to or perhaps didn’t hear me, so the expert processed the original fee and began explaining the fight to him from the start, everything from how the win condition was to land three good punches, to explaining some mechanics that I actually had no idea about, for example how different parts of his gloves had different elemental affinities like fire and ice.
• Later the expert was reminiscing over the fight to himself and mumbling something about maybe setting up a formal consultation service with a price ceiling that he could charge for his advice.
• Snippet: There was another scene later on that had to do with green apples and an arena too.

Nov 15 2024

• I remember just the start and end of a large, somewhat abandoned building complex that several groups of people, including my group of 4 or 5, were casually exploring. It was laid out like a large, single-level shopping centre, with the start of the zone being a short corridor with copper water pipes leading into the rest of the building, and the end of the zone being a pharmacy shop full of medical supplies.
• I spent quite a bit of time in that pharmacy shop, which stocked not only lots of medicine but also clothes, because the medical supplies in the shop were free for taking. I wandered the shelves and filled up two small shopping baskets with supplies like bandages, boxes of pills, bottles of liquid, and more, as I wanted to refill my first aid kit and bring the supplies with me in my bag so that I would be prepared for any eventuality.
• I also considered some stretchy sports shorts but the waist gap was far too small and I didn’t think that I (or anyone else) would ever be able to fit into it. Also, the clothes in the shop were not free, and those shorts cost $4, which I didn’t have, even though there was no manned cashier in the shop.
• Three kids were in the shop when I arrived, so I started my “shopping” on the other side of the shop from them and waited until they left before I wandered over to their side. Tyler A came in after the kids had left, and he started on the side of the shop that I had already vacated. I also more or less avoided him.
• There was an elevator in the medical shop that led down to a long corridor, reminiscent of the airport corridors that lead from the airport gate to the waiting plane. However, only two people at a time could use the elevator, so two other people from my group first went ahead, before I and possibly someone else went down, and then Jon, who was also in my group, came down after me.
• There was supposedly a final boss to fight after the 90-degree turn in the middle of the corridor below the lift, but everyone had figured out by that point that the boss could be safely one-shot from afar with a ranged weapon, so no one really paid it any mind and people didn’t even wait for their entire group to arrive before killing it anymore. Each smaller group just killed it on their way by.

Nov 16 2024

• I watched a scene of two groups of kitchen inspectors showcasing inspections of a cutaway view of two different kitchens with the same layout. The first pair of inspectors looked like a pair of young kids, and the kitchen was fine, so the inspection was over in an instant. This was supposed to represent how a normal kitchen inspection should look like.
• The second pair of inspectors looked far more professional, they were from a company whose name consisted of two words, the first word was a nine-letter adjective and the second word was “Kitchens”. It was similar to “Makeshift Kitchens”, but with the word makeshift replaced by a different word with positive connotations. I don’t remember what it was though.
• But for this showcased inspection, the inspectors said that the stove was literally on fire when they arrived, and they had to put it out when they arrived before they could inspect anything. Also, the cupboard interior below the sink was half-full of soot and ash as well. They had instructions to thread a pipe through it to connect some appliances as part of their inspection though, and they did so, surmising that the reason the owner wanted to do this anyway was because the cupboards or pipes were made of an expensive material and the owner wanted to eventually salvage and clean up the mess.
• But I figured out that I could visit the game world that housed this kitchen too, and when I did so, I found out that the real reason was just that the house owner was a bad designer who didn’t know how the “game” was played. When I entered the area, the scene I saw was a Terraria side view map, with the house at the top of a hill and a slope leading left from the house that went down to the bottom of the hill.
• However, the player did not seem to realize that one could just walk up the hill normally, and he had placed many little wooden horizontal platform sets jutting out along the slope of the hill that people could jump onto to get up. Each set of platforms was just 1 square wide, but 5 squares high — in other words, it was made up of 5 short platforms stacked on top of each other in five consecutive vertical squares of the little voxel world, so that people jumping with different strengths would catch a higher platform instead of just overshooting the platform set altogether. However, the platforms were placed far enough away from each other that adjacent platform sets did not connect with each other to form a longer, safer platform.
• Even worse, the intention of the platform sets did not quite work out that way, as several of the platforms in the platform set had been incorrectly built with wooden blocks instead of platforms, with the difference being that one’s character model could not jump “through” wooden blocks like they could platforms, so to actually get up to the house, one had to make a series of awkward jumps to get over the blocks interspersed through the platforms. There were some coins placed on some of the platforms as well, obviously left there by the careless owner, and I tried to jump over those too to avoid picking them up and “stealing” them.
• To get to this 2D Terraria world in the first place, I had to walk through a PvP zone in a 3D game, and activate a console or computer on a countertop in the southern part of the zone. This left my 3D avatar floating near the ceiling and unattackable while I phased into that 2D zone to take a look at it. When I came out of the zone, two guys that I had seen in the northern side of the 3D zone when I had first entered had come over near me, and were obviously waiting for me to come out of stasis and contemplating attacking me then, but they apparently hadn’t quite decided to do so yet and were hesitating on what to do next when I came back into my body and landed on the ground again.
• I managed to befriend them instead, and with the help of a third character who wandered by, I talked to them and mentioned that I was new to the area. Although I remembered coming in from the west side of the zone, there were only two visible entrances into the zone, one from the southeast side near where we were which started off with a grass-covered path with trees and bushes, and one from the northeast side which started off with stone floors and a conveyor belt from Satisfactory that was full of coal. I said that I had entered the zone from the southeast entrance, and pretended not to recognize coal at all, calling it “the black substance” on the conveyor belts and saying that it looked interesting.
• From there, the scene morphed a bit as the four of us chatted about the forest, and a lineup of young gorillas holding exam paper results appeared. It was implied that they were students but had not done particularly well on a test. The mysterious man who was the fourth character pulled out a card with the number 6 on it and talked to the gorilla who was sixth in line and held a similar card with the number 6 on it. I believe he awarded that gorilla something as well.
• The gorilla that was ninth in line held up his 9 card upside down though, pretending that it was a 6, and insisted that he should be the recipient of the talk and/or award as well. To defuse the situation, the man walked up to him, and whispered into his ear that he would make a fine gorilla when he grew up, and to become a proud adult and protect the gorilla women when he did so. This seemed to inspire the gorilla kid so much that he turned into a fully grown gorilla adult on the spot, doubling his height and width as the other gorilla kids watched on in awe. His 9 card turned into a 9.5, too.
• At least one of the other kids was dressed in a red bikini, which looked very out of place since most of the other gorillas were not wearing any clothing. That was supposed to be a representation of a female gorilla in the dream scene though.
• The scene shifted again, and I found myself in a workshop a bit later on. There were about a dozen worker spots as well as a leader spot, and everyone was crafting a different component as part of their job, depending on what spot they were sitting at. I managed to grab the leader spot at the top left part of a long table, and found out that I could also reroll what random component I saw the other worker spots making. Due to that, I crafted a wooden plank to make a door and rerolled my table’s worker productions until they produced 6 sticks of roughly equal length, using them to make a door frame for my door plank, with two sticks forming the top and bottom horizontal part of the door frame and the other four sticks forming the left and right vertical part of the frame.
• I also learnt in my dream that the term for the empty space above the door of a house in a game world, created when one builds a house in the game and leaves a hole in the wall for the door, but then finds that the door doesn’t go all the way to the ceiling, was called “narra”. The hole that had been left for this door to be installed in had been 3 squares high, but none of the characters in the game were more than 2 squares tall anyway, and all the doors were made to be just 2 squares tall as well, so I figured that we could just find another voxel block and fill up the narra with it once the door was installed.
• Finally, this entire dream from start to end was framed in the context of me preparing for a trip to East Asia somewhere. There was an overall time limit, with a finite number of turns that I had, and then a buffer of about an hour of real time after that before the school excursion I was supposed to attend would start.

Nov 17 2024

• The first and main part of my dream revolved around a 3D game that involved a team of us players running down a corridor and avoiding fire jet traps set from the ceiling that would burn us if we ran exactly under them. The corridor led to a large, open arena with some minor monsters in it and one boss monster that we had to defeat. We generally tried to avoid pulling the trash mobs and just isolated the boss on its own instead of killing all the little monsters first, because apparently the other monsters fled once the boss was aggroed.
• Our characters had skills, and I remember seeing that some skills were so complex or powerful that they ended up taking up two class slots rather than one. For example, there was some kind of a ranged skill that unlocked four abilities, the most powerful one of which did 3,000 damage, but I could also then unlock a “Part 2” of the ranged skill with four more abilities, the first one of which tacked on to the 3,000 damage skill and made it fire twice for a total of 6,000 damage. And the other abilities in the second skill were even more powerful than that.
• The boss fights felt like a game of dodgeball or bullet hell, my main mode of attack was throwing down plushies on the ground and letting them fire bullest at the boss — I had Tigey, Ducky, and one other plushie and the three containers that I was carrying them around in, and all three plushies plus all three containers basically acted as turrets once I activated them. While I threw down the others, I held on to Tigey myself, as he could fire while I was still holding on to him, so I ran up to the boss and dodged around and behind it to make sure that Tigey was spewing bullets into it from point-blank range.
• We won the boss fight, our second of the day, and I picked up my plushies but couldn’t find all their containers afterwards as the arena was a mess. Dad was waiting for me in his car to take the him, Mom, Kel, and me to lunch though, so I had to abandon my search and leave. However, as we were driving away down a street which I recognized to be next to the University, I had second thoughts and asked him to let me back out as I had decided that I needed to find the missing plushie containers more than I needed lunch. He said that was fine, and I left the car, although I put something in the car that allowed me to hear them talking still.
• Dad let me out by a bus stop next to a busy intersection, and I heard my parents trying to guess which bus would be the next bus to arrive at that stop. We could see both Bus 6 and Bus 9 waiting at the intersection, so they guessed it would be one or the other, but in a surprise victory a Bus 17, labelled Manchester United, swooped in and arrived at the stop before either of them. I wasn’t waiting for a bus though and just walked back toward the University and the arena.
• I could still hear and see my parents and Kel as they drove off to the restaurant. Mom and Dad ordered an 8-course meal, where they could pick what side dishes they wanted for the courses from a list, and Dad picked a big plate of vermicelli, together with some meat and vegetables and a bowl of soup. He was not sure what to pick for the 8th item, and wanted to pick another bowl of soup for Mom, but Mom said that she had her own 8 to pick anyway and if she picked that as her soup item then they would get more meat in it that way, since they would penalize Dad for having two soup bowls otherwise.
• As the food dishes started to arrive, Dad also asked Kel to help Mom empty the dustbin next to her chair, but from the point of view of my camera, Mom was seated on the left side of the table, with the dustbin on the ground to her left, and Dad was seated on the right side of the table, where the dustbin was out of sight. Kel was seated on the near side of the table with her back to the camera. Mom and Kel could both see the dustbin and they informed Dad that the bin was already empty. He went “Oh” and continued eating.
• I finished collecting the plushie containers and had lunch at the University myself. I do remember having a hearty meal as well, which was good enough that I felt like I was even more satisfied than I would have been had I gone to the restaurant. I don’t remember what exactly I ate though.
• From here, the dream unravels a little into a number of snippets that might or might not be loosely connected. Firstly, there was a mention of a fishing science activity option that we could do, it wouldn’t advance whatever overall quest was related to the dream and the monster game, but it would earn us some money.
• Our team also had a workshop aspect where we not only made weapons and turrets to fight the bosses with, but for a reasonable price we also helped upgrade other heroes and their gear so other teams could fight the bosses too. One hero that came by talked about another character, which he called “My son, Slaygauge”. He smiled as he did so and was apparently very proud of his son.
• I also learnt that “meglar” was the technical term for a magic wand or sceptre weapon, similar to one that would be wielded by a magical girl.
• The dream also showed a bunch of related idol girl groups at some point, similar to the subgroups in The iDOLM@STER Shiny Colors. A montage showed them all training in groups, trying harder to practice so they didn’t get left behind by our team specifically. However, most of the montages just showed dancing practice scenes.
• Somewhat later on, I also remember a Heroes 3 style game where we were looking down on a 2.5D top down map. I was teaming up with another player against a stronger computer player. All our castles were close to each other, with our lands to the south and the computer’s to the north. I had three heroes with their own armies and wanted to chain my moves together to combine their troops and attack an opponent hero which I felt had extended too far south, but he still seemed too powerful so I decided not to in the end. I instead wandered away south toward an objective and hoped that I could either get back in time before the computer noticed that my castle was defenceless, or that my teammate’s army would scare away any possible computer advances while I was gone.
• Lastly, there was a snippet near the very end where I was helping load up the car of a teammate in the front foyer roundabout of a school, which was laid out vaguely similar to Dunman‘s front foyer, with some items that we had used or acquired from some game or activity we did that we had just completed. This was mildly illegal as we weren’t supposed to be here at this point, but we needed to do it anyway. To try to cover his tracks, he picked up a small, sealed box nearby and placed it in his car as well, in order to pretend that this unauthorized activity was part of a robbery instead, but I had no intentions of helping him with that so I left the area.