Dreams

Dec 02 2024

Dream 1

• I received news that Mom was sick and possibly close to passing on, so I made an effort to try to visit and move back in with my parents. Jon and Kel were also both living with them by this point, in a house that was somewhat similar to our Yishun 799 house, especially the kitchen. Mom was in said kitchen doing some writing at the table, and she looked perfectly fine to me, but more frail than ever in general these days after her last hospital stay.
• Jon, Kel, and I privately wondered if Dad would lose his drive on life if or once Mom was gone. To partly counteract this, I took Dad out on an outing to the town.
• We took a bus towards a music CD store, and Dad got to chatting with two strangers on the bus. They complained that music, especially from overseas, was too expensive these days, and Dad said that we were headed to a CD store in a strip mall where you could buy as many CDs as you wanted for a flat import fee of $15 per entire purchase.
• Because Dad was talking to the two of them, we missed our stop entirely, as no one else rang the stop bell to inform the bus to stop. By the time I noticed and pulled the cord, we were three stops past our stop.
• After alighting from the bus, I told Dad we could either cross the road and take the bus back the other way, or just walk south past a couple of streets. The actual bus route back would take us way west, south, then way east to the correct bus stop, but if we walked we could just cut south across the roads and get there much faster.

Dream 2

• In this dream, there was a game where I was part of a team defending a flag from an army of goblins that were attacking it. Our characters had skills and a finite mana pool and there was a respawn system after we died too, although the respawn point was some distance away and the goblins arrived and attacked the flag from a point between the flag and the respawn.
• One of the goblin shamans at some point made it to the flag itself and started channeling a cone of fire spell at it as a bunch of us surrounded it and channeled our own damage spells at the shaman until it expired. The flag did survive but took some damage.
• During a lull in the attack later on, I recalled to the respawn point to refill my mana and then ran back to the flag via a circular route.

Dream 3

• I was running around a game city with Nak. We collected some cement plates from a specific building that was still under construction and was only half-built, with about two and a half stories of the building put together with no roof and a bunch of metal rods and pipes sticking out. The cement plates would let us perch and balance on any surface as long as we put the plate down first, so we wanted a couple of them.
• I asked him if he was going to take some cement bricks too, as they also had some other fancy purpose, and he said yes, if he could find some. I pointed out that there was a pile of those bricks behind him.
• Snippet: I was on a train looking for seats with a few other people. I took an empty seat in the corner of the carriage next to a woman, where there were two seats on one side facing two seats on the other side, after passing by another empty seat across from a guy who had a runny nose and a pile of used napkins in an empty seat next to him. I didn’t want to have to look at him through the trip. Some other guy took that seat though.
• Snippet: There were two other dim dream segments that I remember, one to do with working in a cafe with someone else, and the other about someone’s house and a mailbox.

Dec 03 2024

Dream 1

• I moved in to a new apartment in a Russian city. This was an HDB-style apartment on a low floor, but there was no closeable or lockable front door, there was just a mass of metal chains that blocked half the door and then one single chain that extended out from that and across the other half of the doorway and hooked onto something on the other side to act as a very rudimentary barrier to people entering the apartment.
• I had to roll large dice and dodge out of the way of those rolling dice to determine things like monthly rent and where to pay it.
• Two old women neighbours that were passing by my front door told me helpfully that the washing machine in the room operated on a self-report system, I had to tell the landlord how many times I had used it at the end of each month and he would tack on a fee to my rent accordingly.

Dream 2

• I went on an excursion with some friends from Japanese class to a building that was a mix between an arcade, a restaurant, and several other things. There were tasks we had to do in it which involved an ultimate game skill that each of us had, and then we had to show each other the results of the tasks afterwards. Like there was one skill that made drinks drinkable in one gulp, and another that made housing prices affordable for one turn or something. One of the people I was with was dead drunk and just lay face down on the table for most of this segment.
• Later, I went into a back room with another guy. We approached a counter there and he spoke to the attendant in Japanese, asking to buy a snack packet for $19. She asked if there was anything else that we wanted and we looked around the room a bit before saying no. We split the snack packet, which was made from chewable meat, and I paid him $10 to partially reimburse him for the $19 that he had spent on the snack. He didn’t realize that the snack had to be eaten immediately but I insisted.
• On the way back out, we passed by a woman who was seated at a table by herself and looking dejected. He complimented her pants to try to cheer her up, and she looked him over and complimented his shorts as well. The two of them started chatting to each other while I left them be and went outside.
• There was also an adventure segment of this dream which I rmeember involved a motorcycle and travelling to places, but I do not recall any further detail.
• Much later on, I and someone else were at a house when another man came in and asked us to hide him from people who were chasing him. Those people banged on our front door thereafter, asking us if we had seen the man. We went up the stairs from the room we were in and opened the door, calmly telling them that we didn’t. The man’s wife had already been killed and her corpse was perched on one of the upper steps of the stairs we had just climbed, but it was a very stylized corpse that looked like a computer game asset, and we said that we had done that to prepare for a Dark Souls run with some special rules, and the people at the door amiably complimented us and then left.

Dec 04 2024

• As part of a game or contest, I was heading to a hospital in the middle of town with a guy. We were a team of two, working separately from but somewhat cooperating with many other teams of two to achieve whatever our missions were. Someone from another team was not sure how to get to the hospital and broadcast a request for help on a global chat channel, and I looked at the entire city map, saw that he was on the north side of the city, and advised him to go west until he saw some red sewer pipes, then to follow the sewer pipes south, which would lead him right into the basement of the hospital.
• Although I had apparently played this game before, and was somewhat familiar with the zone, the guy I was with was a newer player, and we wandered around the downtown area of the city before we actually went into the hospital as there were smaller objectives to do outside too. I wanted more active players to start attacking the hospital before we did as there were defenders there that needed to be taken out.
• After a bit, I directed my companion to follow me as we tried to enter the hospital through a roof level instead of the ground floor. There were either guards or zombies there too and we lured some of them out of the building before taking them out and eventually making our way in. We had skills but they were expensive, in terms of mana cost, so I told the guy to try not to use them when possible.
• Once we were in the hospital later on, we ran into a scene where the voice actors from Critical Role were acting out an improvised scene in the hallway. Laura Bailey in particular had taken on the persona of an old lady NPC and Matt Mercer liked it so much that once the scene was over, he opened a small door to see if the room beyound it was occupied, before declaring that that would be the temporary residence of that NPC lady for their stay at the hospital. The room was next to several other rooms that the Critical Role actors had for themselves.
• I was watching this from around a corner, out of the actors’ way so as not to disturb them, but my companion had no idea who they were and he barged right through their scene as he walked down the passageway from the far side towards where I was, causing the voice actors to stop and stare at him as he wandered by. I beckoned him over and told him he needed to be more aware of the situation.

Dec 05 2024

• I attended the very end of a history class presentation in school that was being done on a large room that doubled as a stage. There were onlookers watching the presentation but all of them were outside the room peering in.
• At the very end of the presentation, the narrator asked the actors to turn around and show the audience the backs of their formal suits that they were wearing. Most of them did so, and a couple of the guys even removed their suit tops entirely and slung it over their shoulders, showing their half-bared backs to the audience.
• All those people received an achievement for completing the presentation once they stepped out of the room. The last person to do so was a shorter, somewhat plump Chinese boy who was not only dressed in a suit but also a top hat, and he received an additional achievement that a couple of the other people were complaining that they didn’t get. I didn’t fully understand that part or listen to its aftermath as I was headed out of the building by that point though.
• Outside, I waited at the bus stop for a specific bus to come by. The first bus that came by was a double-decker bus and I could technically have taken that one but decided not to as it was too packed.
• Snippet: I was with Dad and for some reason or another he was looking through a small handful of CDs. The very bottom CD was his Country War CD but he did not recognize it.
• Snippet: Killadrix was doing a No-Map Valheim run, and I watched him end up on an island full of cats while exploring. There was also a stream store with many rewards that I was surprised remained unclaimed.
• Snippet: I took a large transport truck in to a car repair shop for checkup. I watched the person in front of me require lots of repairs to his car. When it was my turn, the mechanic examined my truck briefly and declared that it was completely fine and he didn’t want to charge me money just to tinker with the truck slightly when that would change nothing. I was glad at this as I was going to travel some distance on the truck, I had rented it but wanted to make sure it was fine for the trip. The owner hesitated to ask me something and I asked him what he started to say before he stopped. He said he was going to ask if I could store some cartons of eggs for him in the truck, but figured it would not be possible if I was travelling somewhere else. I agreed.
• Editor: That Country War CD was on my blog post last week, see https://shiara.antarat.com/diary/diary-167/#memory.

Dec 06 2024

Dream 1

• A small game village was about to be overrun with rats and trolls and its citizens were evacuating at the start of the game. The objective of the game was to destroy 3 rat nests, which was the easy part, and then once the third nest was destroyed, a troll would spawn at the village gates and run in. At that point, my group had to find and touch a fourth rat nest, and then either kill the troll or escape out the gates that the troll came from.
• In our first attempt at the game, I hit and destroyed three rat nests and the troll ran in, so we hid from it as we attempted to find a fourth rat nest, but we found that most of them had immediately started to shrivel once the troll spawned, and so by the time we were feeling brave enough to reach a fourth rat nest, it was already unusable.
• Not having that as a recourse anymore, we tried to attack the troll but it smashed us in. So we restarted the game.
• This time, knowing what would happen with the rat’s nests, we hit three nests further out and then ran back toward the back of the village, away from the gate, to a fourth nest that we had left alone because it was easier to reach. We destroyed that too, then turned out attention to the troll, who was now within the walls of the village but was not aggroed yet. We engaged it from far using ranged attacks and took it down.

Dream 2

• There was a combined class made out of people from four different actual classes, and we were being split into groups of 3 in order to do a project. We were given wristbands that we wore around our left wrist to mark the class that we came from, so that the teacher could divide us into groups where we were not paired with people from another class.
• While waiting to be paired up, I was with several people seated at the front right long table in the class, with an Indian girl on the left of me, Nak and another girl on the right side of me, and several people behind me. People were wandering around and chatting since the teacher was taking forever to do the assignments.
• The people behind me were sorted into groups, and Nak and the girl on my right were quickly grouped too, but although I expected the Indian girl to my left to be paired with me, along with another Indian girl who came by to the front of our table to say hi, the teacher missed us while she went to group up the people to the left of the Indian girl, and then went to group up people further back in the classroom.
• While I was sitting around and waiting, I noticed that the attack and defence stats of a sword that I was carrying was abnormally high. Upon further review, it was because Nak had been idly casting a weapon buffing spell on it over and over while we sat around.
• Eventually, we decided to move from where we were as we were surrounded by groups to our left, right, and back anyway and unlikely to have enough space to do whatever project that the groups were supposed to do. We were worried that we would not have enough time for it either, even though there was suppose to be a second class the next day where we would continue to work on the project, before the presentations on the third day.
• We moved to the front table on the left side of the room, which the teacher hadn’t gotten to yet since she seemed to be going from front to back on the left column of tables, then back to front on the right column, while divvying up people into groups. There were either 6 or 9 people left to be grouped once we reached there, and she mixed the three of us with the other remaining people instead of grouping us together. This was fine by me though.
• Snippet: I remember a specific scene where I found a potential home in a town northeast of the city that I felt was a good candidate to buy. On the map, the northeast town was a huge central market area with a train line going southwest out of it toward the main city, and around the market area was a residential band that looped around it and encircled it. The home I found seemed to be a small apartment on the north side of the loop, it was on the second or third level of a tall HDB flat and not particularly large or new, but it seemed serviceable, cheap, and I liked the location. I showed Dad the location to get his opinion and wondered if it was too close to a potentially loud area for him and Mom.

Dec 07 2024

• I was with lots of people in what seemed to be a large cave. Each of us had a decrementing counter of some sort, which represented something that I don’t quite recall, perhaps some skill usage limit or something, but that was nonetheless integral to the plot. Most of the people in the cave were in a first group that was sent out to do something, but they failed, and I was part of the second group that was sent out afterwards and that I believe eventually succeeded in the overall task.
• While I don’t remember the overall gist of the plot, I remember there were some cave horses in a nearby cave that were called “fuma”, and also there was a map of a second game zone outside our cave that was called “ferlic”.

Dec 08 2024

• I remember three wizenly old women in the middle of a market, they were witches and dressed in traditional black witch garb. They were surrounded by citizens going about their daily market lives, and no one seemed overly concerned by them. All three of them were standing at curved mini-stalls that were only large enough to frame their faces and bodies, and they were all facing the same direction. I was standing not far away from them and trying to trigger some magic from them by activating or throwing something at them, but to no avail. I figured out eventually that this was because the stalls were installed facing the wrong direction and the witches could only cast magic when facing in the opposite direction.
• Later on, they ended up on an island with a tiny jutting-out peninsula. They built a hut that had a small zone of infleunce around it and took up the space of the entire peninsula, leaving the hut with one cardinal direction where it could be accessed by land, and three cardinal directions where it could be accessed by sea.
• Snippet: In a separate, earlier dream, I had a long stick that made me immune from a lot of damage and was able to complete many difficult objectives in a quest by literally “scratching” out danger and tough enemies using the end of my stick. It took a while to defeat enemies this way but it was completely safe. I don’t remember the overall quest story here, though I was in a house with a couple other people in my party who did not have such a strong artifact, and we were going room to room to clear things out. There was a room with glowy balls constantly firing against a wall that we had to find another solution for, however.