DATE: January 2, 2026

I can't remember the exact beginning of the dream, so it really just feels like an exposition dump. I think it started with me hanging out with my grandpa. Not 100% sure about that. I had my laptop, it's charger, and a Playstation 3 controller. I left from my starting point to go to our town square. I feel like I walked around a little bit before I arrived at my destination, our family's candy store. However, this was not really a journey walk, I really just ended up in the area, walked around, and then ended up in the back of the candy store. There I met up with my dad. It was a little cold in there. I don't remember personally feeling cold, but the vibes were cold and he was wearing a thick flannel. We made some breif talk, but nothing of real substance. I didn't have a bag to hold the things I was holding, so I started to set up my laptop on a table but I really wasn't going to use it so I was kinda hesitating between just leaving it closed or opening firefox to screw around with for a little before leaving. Either way, I ended up heading out. I left with a journey in mind, but I can't remember exactly what. I just remembe feeling sure about it. When I was last in the candy store, it was late afternoon, when it was not night but still distinctly after the reds and purples had left the sky.

When I set off to wander around the town square (same as found in other dreams). It was early morning. I remember thinking it was something like 6am, and being that it was winter, that meant it was dark dark outside. Being up so early was anomalous, so I either stayed up super late and just hadn't gone to bed since the previous day, or I magically woke up insanely early. Can't remember which. As cool as it was, seeing this warm city lights with no one around was really spectacular, but that also mean't there were no buisnesses around that were open. I walked around, sat down, took in the world some, and cycled through that a bit. I can't remember if I veritably did this to any other establishment, but at one point I walked inside my barber's shop and kinda just hung out for a second. I guess he forgot to lock up. One ot the things I was worried about was waiting at a place for it to open and having the employees have to see my and then open it up and then I would come in when they're only half-ready and still tired. I really wanted to go to the arcade, but I wanted to avoid that feeling, so I kept walking some. But, as I approached the arcade, it turned out that they had already open. The building on the outside said something like "[Hometown Name] Auto Repair Shop" with a smaller sign under it reading something along the lines of "We fix it up good, definitely, and do nothing else". This place was basically like a multi-establishment hub area, but also I felt like the arcade front faced directly to the road, so I am unsure.

I went in to the front area of the arcade, but I got stopped before I could really do anything. Inside looked really cool, and it reminded me of an arcade that I had in a different dream. There were lots of kids playing inside. When I tried to enter, this little girl stopped me and asked me for help. This arcade used one of those token systems, so she needed help getting her money in and getting her tokens. There were lots of signs on the token machine that made it kinda convoluted to use, so I decided to try and show her by example. She pulled out her money to get ready and she had a lot. I don't remember how much, but it was definitely an obscene amount of money for a young child to have, let alone have on them. I tried demonstratitng with my own money. I went to my wallet and only found 3 twenties and 2 tens that sometimes only looked like 1 ten. I was really dissapointed, not only because I thought I had much more money than that, but also because I thought I would have at least had a five. I didn't want to spend a whole 10 dollars on this, but so be it. I showed her how to slot in some money. I went inside and there was a "better" or at least different token machine. I had this check that I wanted to use for arcade money, and I thought this machine accepted checks. I put it in but then some error came up. I tried getting everything to fix but nothing happened. I tried calling in the one worker there (but not the only employee) over. It was hard because throughout this happening, most of the kids left and a big group of adults came in, including the owner. It was still a mom and pop shop, so this wasn't like some buisness party, but it was still a different crowd. The worker my age there came over to help me and I got my check back. He put a big sticker/piece of paper on the machine that had distinct coloring. It was an out of order form, and he was writing what was wrong with the machine. The paper was going way on front of the machine and I thought it was just user error so I tried convincing him that I was at fault, maybe that my check wasn't endorsed or something, but he kept going. That, plus the big crowd of people who looked like they were doing there own thing and me being the only other outlier, made me leave. I figured I wasn't really wanted.

My travel cut to that of a large mall. This section of the dream started with me leaving a big glass doorway, and I can't remember if it was the actual enterance to the mall, or it was a shop that I had already been in. Either way, it still felt connected. I started walking in hopes that some store would catch my eye. Instead, I saw my friend A there and went over and said hi. We talked for a bit, and I don't remember any details of it, but we ended up parting ways pretty quick, which is odd, because normally we're really close friends. I walked some more in the decently-sized crowd, and then I saw friend B. I was really confused since she lives about 6 hours away from where I presumably was. I went up to her and tried to say hello. She didn't recognize me at first, which made me start doubting myself a little bit, but I could never forget those distinct glasses. Eventually she recognized me and we started talking. Pretty quick I was like, "What the hell are you doing here?", because I thought it was crazy of her to be so far from home only to come to a lackluster town. She said something like, "To go shopping, duh," then I was like "No shit, but I mean what are you doing in this town?" She said it was something like she was passing through, I can't remember anything else from the conversation. We walked and talked through that mall for what felt like a while, at least comparatively from the last interaction I had. We really didn't go far, but it felt like an intense and good conversation. Somewhere along that walk I saw friend C, who I am also pretty close with, so I wanted to be with them, but I didn't really want to abruptly end the conversation with friend B. I told her about how I saw friend C and how it was really great catching up, and I might have tried to get some contact from her, but we eventually parted ways. As I saw her leave, her haircut changed entirely, from a slickback ponytail to Tim Rogers' haircut in the Boku no Natsuyasumi video (opens in new tab). Then I caught up with friend C. We talked briefly but then he had to go.

I wandered around some more, alone, when I saw a giant ferris wheel within the mall. On it, friend D. I wanted to say hi, so I went over there, squeezed through the crowd, and tried to get on. There was this weird ramp thing that was where the line to get on was. At the end of that ramp was friend D's sister. I went up and down the ramp a few times, hoping to come up with a solution, but friend D noticed me and helped me with my plan to get on. Somehow she grabbed me and I was able to join her in the farris wheel. We had a really great time catching up. She showed me her website. It had a really weird design, and I couldn't tell if it was really artful or really amiteurish. The website didn't start in the middle, it was in this corner, and it was all off center, even though I hadn't zoomed in. You had to scroll around for the title, reading "[Friend D]'s Homepage", similar to one of Olia Lialina's pages (opens in new tab). The background was a repeating drawing she made of the JoJo's part 3 characters, and if you scrolled to 1/3rd of the way across the page, a transparency of one of the characters from part 5 faded in to view, and at 2/3rds a similar thing happened for a character I didn't recognize. I looked around and saw she had an award from some weird film festival. I could tell it was for some subgenre/subculture, but I didn't recognize the acronym they used for the genre. I looked it up and found out that it was for really poor quality early 3d British animated TV shows. On British internet, a nostalgic subculture grew and despite being American, friend D joined in the fun. She had always liked British media so this didn't seem out of place. I congradulated her. We wanted to get off the ride so we could talk in a better place, but we had just passed by the place where we were designated to get off. The way this ferris wheel ride worked is that when you wanted to get off, you could press this button right before you go to the platform, and then it would stop for you there. Instead, she pressed the button at a point where we were convienently just enough off the ground for it to be safe enough to leave. We slipped out easily and landed with our feel on the ground and no worry about that, but we both had to suck it in and shimmy out through the sides. We ended up on a green outside of a school.