Man, I just had the most upsetting dream I've had in a while. I was at this huge school. Like, huge. I think the architecture was inspired by that video of the huge Chinese school I saw on X the other day. This one:

It was a new place too. Usually in my dreams I'm in places I know I've been before but with modified layout/architecture, but this one I had never been to. I don't know if that means anything. Anyway, I'm in this place, and eventually I get to my class. It's this massive cooking class, like 1000 people, a big room full of cooking stations, imagine a stadium, but smaller because it's only for 1000 people, but there's ground level and lots of cooking stations there, but they extend upwards at an angle to the sides too, so there's a lot of people everywhere.

So I'm doing my tasks, I'm learning, I'm getting really invested. The teacher is Gordon Ramsay for obvious reasons. The fact that I'm getting invested is a direct mirror of real life, because in real life I am getting into cooking and learning how to make good-tasting and healthy food and enjoying it. So that's happening, but then comes an exam. Gordon explains the exam, then his helper hands everyone a tablet. The helper is wearing a suit, doesn't look fully human, like kind of a robot? I guess he most resembles Chat from Northernlion's Tomodachi Life playthrough.

I look at the questions, there are 20 of them, and they all look pretty easy, but their order is bugging out on my tablet. Like question 13 is appearing first, some questions appear in some places and then move elsewhere, and so on. This is a mirror of real life too, as one of the issues with my blot website was the posts were showing up missing or in the wrong order all the time, and I had to fix several bugs related to this when we were moving the website to my own server. Anyway, I ask Gordon about this issue and he answers but I don't remember his reply. It doesn't matter, though, because I just move on and do the exam, answering all questions correctly, except for question 19, which I wasn't sure about, so I don't answer it.

After I'm done I continue with my other tasks. I'm so invested in the tasks that even as Gordon hands me back my graded exam I'm barely paying attention. After a few minutes I look at it to see my score, which I expect to be 20/20, but thinking back it can't be that because I didn't answer one question, so I should expect it to be 19/20. But then I look and it's... 1/20? What the hell? I look at it and the first question that appears is question 19, the one I didn't answer. But then the other questions didn't even load, so they weren't graded. I can literally see the loading circle, the next questions trying to load but they can't. So this is clearly a bug. But Gordon is speaking, he's saying how the exam had one question that was a trap to weed out the cheaters, and if you didn't answer that question, it's clear you were a cheater. I'm guessing that was question 19.

I try showing Chat the issue with my tablet, Chat is understanding but doesn't seem like he'll help me, so I call over Gordon, who barely looks at it and is immediately dismissive. I try to explain that during the exam my questions were ordered incorrectly so maybe that's why the grading bugged out too. He's having none of it. I'm insistent, but I can see what comes next. You know that face Gordon makes when he knows he's right but he's also perplexed that someone is fighting back and disagreeing with him? Like a surprised-mocking-superiority face, that's his fucking face right now. And then he goes off on me. I don't remember what he says exactly, probably many sentences involving me being an idiot sandwich or a fucking donkey, but at the end of it he says, "Weren't you making tons of excuses right as the exam started too? You're a fucking loser, just give up."

And this really made me mad. Like, this spiked my cortisol to tremendous levels. He was just fucking lying. I wasn't making excuses, I asked him a single question about the exact bug we were talking about! I actually got so fucking mad here that I paused the dream. I can do that, I can pause my dreams. I think at some point when I was younger I often had a particularly bad nightmare and to stop the bad thing from happening I'd pause it, and my brain learned you can just do that. Doing this doesn't make me aware that I'm dreaming. So I'm there, dream paused, fuming, looking at Gordon's fucking mocking face as he's just straight up lying about me. I am so fucking mad, this is so fucking stupid, and then I wake up.

Now, what could this dream mean? Well, it's not quite the classic "there's an exam and I didn't study for it" school dream, but it's close. It is interesting though that it takes the form of injustice, right? The feeling I woke up with is the same feeling I felt when I got banned for an entire summer when I was 13 from my usual CS 1.6 server due to "hacking" even though I was quite clearly not hacking at all and the admin was just mad I killed him too often. But I don't feel this feeling anymore. Like, ever. If something unjust happens to me now, my framing is pretty much always one of "I know I didn't do anything wrong, this has nothing to do with me spiritually, it's entirely about the other person's relationship with power and their learning to use it." This kind of situation has particularly never happened to me in a school setting. There wasn't a single instance of me thinking a teacher judged my work incorrectly or anything like that.

There are the real life related events, getting invested in cooking, the ordering bug from my website, but I'm not sure if those mean anything either. There's the architecture. It was definitely a new place I've never been to before. Most places in dreams, even though I've never been to them in real life, I can just tell I've been to before dozens of times, probably in previous forgotten dreams. This one was fully new. It was very white, like the Chinese school video, bright white lights everywhere, floor and walls pure white too. But I'm not sure what it could mean that it's new. There's the fact that I didn't answer question 19. When I had a question I wasn't sure about in exams, I'm pretty sure I tried answering them anyway, why would I just refuse to answer this one? Or did I fail to answer it, or answered it incorrectly? I actually don't remember now. It's possible I tried to answer it but I knew it was incorrect?

Could a situation like this happen to me in real life right now? I am very invested in my art, currently the games and books I want to make. Let's say I release a new game and someone I look up to reviews it very poorly. Uh... no, that wouldn't work, I don't really look up to anyone. There's no one whose presence makes me invested enough that anything bad they could say would feel, viscerally, like some kind of judgement. The school setting is unique here because you buy into it, you buy into the fact that there's a mentor, and you allow him to judge you. Real life is not like this, at least not related to my work. There's no one judging me, because I don't believe that anyone knows any better than me.

Ah, but this is only true for making games, actually. I'm learning how to write, how to make music, how to cook, I'm going to the gym more often... I'm learning a bunch of new things and in those settings it does make sense that I'd be worried about being judged. I'm not worried about being judged by others entirely, but mostly myself, I think. The thing I try to avoid the most when doing anything is not trying my hardest. For everything I've released so far, the one guiding line is: "did I actually try my best?" I don't want to look back on something and feel like I could have tried harder. If I release a game or a book or anything, it means that was the best I could do at the time.

And so maybe dismissive and unjust Gordon is actually the broken facet of myself that would betray this principle. To answer "did I actually try my best?" I need a trustworthy verifier. But the dream was about the verifier malfunctioning. The horror, what spiked my cortisol, was the lying, the clear unashamed lying, evidence that the teacher didn't even see my effort and thus didn't grade it properly, right? True horror is the verifier being wrong, the compass going astray, intuition failing to answer "did I actually try my best?" accurately. Yes, this makes sense. It also makes question 19 make sense, the trap question, which I don't even remember if I refused to answer or answered poorly, it represents uncertainty on whether I tried my best or not, because trying your best would for sure mean actually trying to answer it.

Hmm, yes, I like this analysis. It also makes sense why it would happen now, maybe I'm spreading myself too thin.