Dreams

Dec 09 2024

• I visited a dusty weapons shop nestled between a couple of other shops on a street with a friend, within the first few minutes of a game. We only had lousy random starting gear like most other players, so we were wary about apporoaching the place, especially as another player who had already found an overpowered artillery weapon on wheels drove by on the road with that vehicle without seeing us.
• Once we were in the shop, we found out that it had no gear that we actually wanted, as we were looking for specific weapons, but the shopkeeper slipped me a yellow post-it note and a $5 bill. The note mentioned something about a new hairdresser’s shop nearby and was a recommendation, written in blue pen, to go try it.
• Once we left the shop, we considered crouching just outside the shop and attacking some people in the shop, using the front passage of the shop for partial cover from bullets. We decided it was too foolhardy though as we would be too susceptible to other passing players too, so we left.
• Snippet: There was a snippet about something being resistant to slash damage and needing to use pierce damage instead, and to do that we needed to build a big bonfire, dedicated to pierce damage in this case, to change the overall damage type of something. I already had the bonfire built atop some tree branches, which I showed the group, and I was already hanging out with the group when we learnt that we needed pierce damage so this was proof that I hadn’t gone off by myself to build the bonfire after hearing about the damage change but before showing it to them. There was also a feeling that the bonfire represented something about the first event of the year or the school semester.
• Snippet: Another snippet I had was about work, with four people from the Service Desk contacting our team over chat at the same time about four different tickets. The one I ended up looking at was from a client asking if only Japanese students were exchange students at our school, because if so, he had found an exchange student who we had not added into that email distribution list even though he was an exchange student, and he had “helpfully” CC:ed that exchange student telling him that he had been missed and was not getting emails. However, the answer was simply that he was not a Japanese exchange student, but Mexican or something, and we had not been given a list of students from there by the exchange department to add yet.

Dec 10 2024

• There was a computer game with a central social hub area with lots of little portals leading to different levelling adventure zones, each one of which had a different minimum and maximum level range for their monsters. The zones themselves could be ran solo or in a group, though the only ones I remember personally running were solo.
• I remember recognizing a lot of friends who were playing the game as well. I was level 20ish, and ElanaOrama was 31, which put her a couple levels out of reach of me being able to level with her since a 10 level difference meant that the higher level character would barely gain any experience at all. I remember wishing that I had a few more levels under my belt at that point so that I could join her.
• I was near another two guys who I recognized, and one of them asked her how much it would cost for him to request that she “talk harshly” to him as he wanted to experience how that felt like. She said that no amount of money made that possible, but that they were welcome to join her levelling party.
• Snoot_tv was a snail character in the game, and she slithered up with great speed to Elana, then opened her shell to reveal a pointy-shaped rock. Snoot presented it to Elana as a gift, before closing back her shell and slithering off again. Everyone thought it was a poop-shaped rock at first but upon closer inspection it was not, it was a rare stone from some exotic portal zone that Snoot had found that was just shaped that way.
• There were hundreds of portals in the hub area and some led to rather exotic zones with unique loot. A girl was complaining though that because there were level limits for every zone, once she levelled a certain number of levels past a certain zone’s level range, she could not return there as the zone became very “hot” to her as a defensive measure, and would burn her for as long as she remained in the zone. A lot of the other servers’ starting zones for example were very easy to miss this way. That made me realize that even though it was slower to level, I wanted to explore other zones for special loot.
• I filtered the list of portals in the game by element, and picked a Wind zone because I was partial to the Wind element. There were about 10 different Wind zones in the list, and I picked the lowest level Wind zone, which was a level 2-3 zone connected to an Amsterdam server and was empty, and entered it.
• This zone was a single, large cavern with a small lake and a mountain made of rocky soil in it, and a number of small animals travelling around. Eventually a large boss animal spawned atop a hill and all the little animals gathered together and attacked it. As I was way over level for that zone, I expected to feel that heat too but it did not seem to trigger, so I went around gathering as many resources as I could, and also wiped out both sides in that big boss fight for maximum crafting resources before returning to base.
• It was also possible to level by crafting, and some other people concentrated on this. In particular I remember a set of Chinese Chess pieces was very good for levelling because you had to craft each individual round and flat piece in the set, which meant a lot of experience once everything was added up. A burly orc-like character was chastised by his friends for wasting resources though, as he had crafted a number of little rectangular pieces with faces on them, even though each one was worth very little experience.
• For my part, I crafted Elana a forge to repair gear that I placed beside their bed, and a container that I put on their bed. The bed was between the portals and the vendor that she normally visited to sell stuff, thus I put those things there so that she could visit them on her way to and from the zones.
• There was also a segment where Zixiang was entering the hub zone and I went out to meet him at the lineup outside the zone. Ms Khoo was minding the line and she looked at him suspiciously because she knew that he was normally a troublemaker, but now he was a low level healer class, which tended to be reserved for quiet, well-behaved people. I was standing behind Zixiang and vouched for him though, and told Ms Khoo that I had seen Zixiang turn over a new leaf and had been helping him level the healer in a couple of low level zones already. She thus allowed him into the zone with me.
• I led him toward the central hub area, which involved first running through a set of corridors marked with trellis archways. There was more than one route going through the place, and I led the way, holding his hand to guide him while walking in front of him. At one point, I stepped into a puddle of water and fell into the deceptively deep water beneath it, being completely submerged from head to toe for a split second before my reflexes kicked in and I jumped out and backwards, pulling Zixiang to safety before he fell in. Because I was only in the water for a second, even though I was totally submerged, my hair and clothes were only slightly damp. Apparently this falling into the water was considered a lucky sign though, and I guided him down another pathway instead. We reached the hub area soon after.
• Snippet: I also remember a separate scene where I was watching a boy band perform on stage, and one of the boys forgot his lines, which caused everyone to go off sync with the song being played. They eventually caught up with the music when the next boy rattled off all his lines really quick like he was doing rap, in order to catch up with the music again for the boy after him.

Dec 11 2024

• Snippet: I remember a game system where I had to trade in smaller blue and red balls for larger ones, but when I selected them I could make an offer to the NPCs I was trading with to try to get a discount, something like 9 small balls for 1 large one, instead of 10. I needed those orbs to fire at enemies too though I’m not sure if I permanently lost them when I used them.
• Snippet: I also remember levelling up on the back of a giant bird taking me to a place that it was going to stay at, which was where I also needed to travel to for some reason.
• Snippet: There was a soccer scene where the ball was too close to the edge of a set of outdoor stone stairs that I had to walk down, and then the net that I had to kick it into was some distance away and to the left. I knew that there was no way I could kick it in, as I would have had to kick the ball in with my left foot and curl it left somehow, even though I usually used my right foot when it came to kicking balls. Still, this was a penalty shootout, and our team had apparently already won 2-1, as the two teams’ combined first three shots had gone in and everything else since then had missed, so this shot was inconsequential anyway. I kicked it the best I could and watched the ball curl to the left toward the goal, but it was so far away and so awkward of an angle that the ball never actually even reached the opposing goalkeeper.
• Snippet: Later there was a scene in our Edmonton 4012 house where Mom was upstairs in the bedroom, when there was a bunch of noise above us from some neighbours. I used a broomstick and hit the kitchen ceiling to try to get them to shut up, then had to clean up some paint flakes that had fallen onto the ground from the ceiling.
• Snippet: There was also a scene in our Yishun 723 bedroom, but I forget the context of the scene, I just remember the carpeted room and then two-tiered floor of the room where the side of the room with the beds was on a carpeted platform a foot off the ground.
• Snippet: Lastly, I remember another open-world game where I was exploring a rather desolate outdoor wilderness map and found a broken bridge running north-south on the very eastern edge of the map. The bridge was broken in half, and standing on the northern edge of the southern half, staring at the northern half, was the roadrunner from Looney Tunes.

Dec 12 2024

• I was in a small, two storey shopping centre, and had several looks at it over a period of a few days. The shops were the same but the people at them changed. Someone complained about part of the shopping centre in general, saying that the area was lawless, and tended to attract gang members who hung out being delinquents. Apparently even the shops were not monitored well, and one of the shops had destroyed a small mobile food stall that was parked inside the mall and just outside the shop.

Dec 13 2024

• I died as a player in a game story, and could not respawn until two days later, but in the meantime I could wander around the world as a ghost. I followed my friends who were still playing for a bit, but could not follow them into something that looked like a shopping mall. Instead, there was a small hole next to the entrance that they took, and this led to a small mineshaft where one of them had to work later on. I decided to go down to see if I could help him out a bit so he would have less work to do later. There was a red miner’s hat lying on the ground, and I put that on and then wondered if people would see a floating hat if they saw me right then. I hit the ground with a pickaxe, then saw some empty space under the ground that I was standing on and hitting, so I decided that using a pickaxe there was too dangerous. There were several palm-sized stones on the ground and I concentrated on picking those up and putting them on a nearby stool instead.

Dec 14 2024

• I was looking over the outsides of houses with several other people, and there was a game wrapped around it that involved clocks and timers and game rounds. Each house also had a group of six or so balls that circled in a ring around each one, and people could change the ball mode between six different settings — single, double, thorns, invisible, reset, and something else. Though once the invisible mode was set, the mode could not be changed again afterwards, except via using reset. These visitations and changes were done in person, but there was also a housing app program called something similar to Blockee or Blokee linked to it.
• Snippet: Separately, I remember a specific scene of running through a school corridor looking for a bin to throw a used piece of tissue paper into, but all I could find were small individual dustbins inside the classrooms I was going by, instead of a large garbage bin that I expected to find in the corridor itself. I eventually used the bin in my classroom.

Dec 15 2024

• Snippet: I was on board a ship with dozens of other people. Some people in charge were trying to solve a crime, and had a suspect they were certain was the culprit, even though I knew that it was not her. They also had the true culprit’s exact height and weight, and collected everyone’s height and weight details and lined all the numbers up in the center of the ship before very meaningfully looking at their suspect and her data, as though trying to embarrass her and call her out in public, even though her numbers were a little bit off the culprit’s decidedly average height and weight.
• Snippet: Later, a separate dream involved bringing different head snapshots of people up and superimposing them over body cutouts that weren’t theirs on a screen, and the heads would then begin to talk. Either we would then award a prize to them, or they would award a prize to us, I forget which.
• Snippet: I also remember one last scene where three kids, two girls and one boy, walked up to a standing microphone on a stage and declared that “We’ll do our best to save the world”. The two girls were dressed in frilly princess-like dresses and the boy was dressed up in some formal wear too. I believe I might have been one of the girls, but the connection was tenuous, since I was also looking at them through a third person dream camera from the audience at the same time.