Auntie Anne

Not quite sure why I decided to remember this dream and not the hundreds of others I've had since I last updated this blog, but the decision has been made and so the best way to accomplish it is to write it down.

It began with some stuff about Daggerfall and a game called Shakespeare. Some weird stuff with DOS and computers. I don't really care. That wasn't the part of the dream I wanted to remember. No, the dream really begins when I get some muscle cramps. Apparently there's some treatment for them in our bathroom, so I go there. But I end up getting a drink of water instead. Now, there's two sinks. I get a cup and fill it with some water from each sink. Then I drink it. Now, here's where the weirdness begins. The water talks to me. Each sink provides water with it's own personality. I don't remember what the left sink's name was, but it was obnoxious and weird and I didn't like it very much. The right sink, on the other hand, was named Auntie Anne (hence the name of this post). I liked her. I drank from her a lot and talked to her about stuff. I talked to her about sinks, and apparently there was something about horse racing and bookies and stuff, but it's more of an anecdote than the actual story of this dream. Anyway, the way it works is you drink her water and as long as the water is inside your body, there's a kind of psychic link with her sentience, because in a way she IS the water that flows out of the sink. Anyway, I start to tell my family members about her and they think I'm crazy. I fill water bottles with her, drink her at school, and get her help trying to think about exam problems. I tell her fairy tales and nursery rhymes. Then, one day, while I'm asleep I get a message from her: somebody's broken into the house. I need to find the two things that have been stolen. This is of the utmost importance.

Then I wake up.

May 6 - "Drakengard" / James Bond

Well, it's been dead here for a while now, but I'm home for the summer and I'm hoping that the newfound ability to sleep in will help me remember my dreams. So here goes.

Dream #1: "Drakengard"

I am aware that Drakengard is a video game. However, such is the nature of dreams that this is not fixed. In my dream, Drakengard was a Shakespeare-like play, similar to Macbeth or Romeo and Juliet. I don't remember all the details, but apparently my dream consisted of a weird change to it. The play, in its "original form", consists of the following: a man has an affair. Then the son by this affair has an affair with the same woman (which manages to avoid the obvious fact that this is incest). I think the dad was a king or something that had usurped the throne. The son has a child by the woman and he shows it to his dad or something and that causes the usurper to get kicked off the throne. At some point, too, the woman is reassuring the son about something to do with the sex they were going to have. Anyway, that's the background. My dream involves all of this background, yes, except that it twists it. In the dream, the son has an affair with a male orc. He complains to his dad, who apparently set this whole thing up, because if the affair is with a male orc, then he can't possibly have the son he needs to continue the "Drakengard" reenactment. It doesn't come up at this point that the dad who set the whole thing up wouldn't find that particularly desirable, either.

Dream #2: James Bond

I don't remember all the details here, either. I'm James Bond and I've gotten some kind of ridiculous injury and am wearing this blood-stained misshapen jacket thing. I have to go to the bathroom to straighten out my outfit. Then at some point I'm not James Bond or something, and I'm this ENEMY of James Bond, and my assistant goes off to summon him. He leaves the room and gets killed by James Bond and dragged into a closet (I know this despite not having any line-of-sight here). He shoes up and takes this knife and does SOMETHING. Anyway, this dream is significant because it marks when I realized that my dreams usually involve some kind of blanket or something from real life. I sleep with a blanket almost all the time, and if it's over my head, I usually end up not seeing very good at some point in the dream, and if it's kindof twisty and messed up, well then I get a dream like this.

April 6 - Church / Aliens

Church:

Some kind of church. Apparently there was this recurring church service feature thing where various famous people talked. There was also this whole thing beforehand where I was getting ready to GO to church, and my brother was there and we talked a lot. But then we got to church and apparently M.C. Escher and Barack Obama were both going to our church and could have been this weeks guest. Then some person recommended Joss Whedon / Mutant Enemy and I'm like "yeah, but nobody recognizes his face, just his work. Well, except for me, but I'm a freak."

Aliens:

Kindof tied in with the church. There's this whole thing about "robotization" which is like socialization except it's also for robots. So I think I'm robotizing in church, and then I'm this alien and humans don't like me and they're messing around and eventually they mess with me so much that I go to war with them and they're like "Aha! I knew the aliens/robots wanted to go to war with us!" and I think we beat them and then leave peacefully without them killing us.

March 30 - Blur

Blur is right. I'm reaching the point where I remember a large chunk of dreams each night, but not really the larger context. If you follow along, you'll probably notice me talking about a dream but never really describing how it began, because beginnings are the worst for recall right now. The big problem I'm facing is remembering the context and timeframe. I'm not sure how linear time is in dreams anyway, but it was pretty hard for me to really remember how things fit together last night. I may end up having to swap out the idea of listing "dreams" and just start listing dream concepts some of the time.

Anyway.


Part 1: Flight

Don't remember a lot here. Good old "me flying". I was pretty high in the air. I was apparently flying instead of using these floating funny-shaped stepping stones (they look like your stereotypical ancient ruin). The flight mechanism this time was more of a passive floating type deal (almost like I'm in orbit) rather than the other mechanism I sometimes have where I rotate my arms in funny patterns. That kind is more controlled, whereas this is more like a bird: swooping and stuff.


Part 2: RPG

Remember those films and movies about wilderness survival? Where the protagonist is trapped without contact with anyone and has to live on their own wits in the wild?

Well imagine that. As a computer game (an RPG). Starring Indiana Jones.

Well, I say "Indiana Jones" in a rather loose sense. It was associated with him because the weapons in the game are a gun and a whip. Well, actually there's also a flaming club, not sure what that's about.

I seem to recall it being almost TBS-like. It's an RPG in the sense that you control one character and you make choices and stuff, but it's turn-based. There's resources like wood and food. I kindof think you start out with just your weapons, clothes and a cotton sheet. Trapped under a log that fell on your leg. But then you improve your clothes and sleeping gear and stuff, it's like an RPG in that sense. I kindof think that this wilderness survival thing is sortof the tack-on ending to a larger dream about a platforming game or something. More on that later. But in any case, you get to make a choice early on about whether or not you're going to last the full two weeks before getting rescued or if there's a random chance every day of people finding you.

I kindof think there's some other party members, trading and stuff because I remember this scene where apparently one of your (the protagonist's) friends is dying. This was toward the end. They're dying, and we perform some sort of black arts ritual that turns the protagonist into a mummy while saving the friend. Well, I say mummy becauses that's what it was in the dream. What it looked like was more like the Egyptian god Anubis wearing a really badass black cloak. Apparently the ritual involved a pillar of rock, a coffin, and some weird stuff. Anyway. Shortly afterwards, we get rescued (early). There's this reporter asking us if I'm aware that I'm a mummy (that's why I said mummy earlier).

More about the framing context: I kindof think this was a video game that was being played in a class in college. There was this class I had last semester that was really pathetic in the "why the heck are we doing this in a COLLEGE class? This is the sort of thing you do in middle school" sort of way. Apparently that class was a prerequisite for the Indiana Jones TBS/RPG wilderness survival video game class.

I should point out, of course, that while I'm supposedly playing a video game, there's no computers. Sometimes I'm the protagonist, sometimes I'm watching the protagonist. But I'm always doing it from inside the game world.

Also there's this whole spiel I had about repetitive gameplay, and a scene where we're apparently rafting down a river that's not supposed to exist while being chased by guys with guns. While on this raft we exhibit the old classic, complete lack of traction.

March 28 - Rail Shooter / Pacific / Scientology

Well, got three here. At least, three distinct contexts of dreams that I don't remember how they connect. They might connect, they might not. It's hard for me to say with my waking mind.


Dream #1: Rail Shooter

Well, this one starts off apparently as Professor Layton. Well, that'd be great, except I've never seen anything from the game other than promotional graphics. Apparently, though, I'm supposed to travel from various nodes to various other nodes, and find secret passages and solve puzzles. There's various islands and stuff, and I'm solving these puzzles (well, most of them). They're more like classic adventure puzzles than the puzzles I understand are in Professor Layton, but that's OK. So then I think I come to this one puzzle that I don't remember the details of except that there's these rotating blocks and I'm supposed to use them to create some kind of border when I'm told to. Apparently sometime around here it is revealed that the plot of Professor Layton consists entirely of the Professor and his sidekick solving puzzles and defeating evil villians off-camera. Well, this'd all be great, except that the Professor Layton in my dreams actually looks like the protagonist from Zach and Wiki. Oh well. But sometime around here we make a full-fledged switch and we end up with a Zach and Wiki rail shooter. Zach is zipping around on some power lines shooting various that's dangling from the sky. And that's the end of that dream.


Dream #2: Pacific

This one's a little odd. I don't remember quite how it starts except that I end up in this church-like setting (complete with pews) and apparently I'm a female slave. So there's this auction or something and then the dude next to me pulls a sweater over my head and convinces everyone I'm some saint named Mary. They all start worshipping me and apparently this whole thing was a plot of me and my buddies because then these dudes convince me to lead the entire pack of them to a certain place and then lose them. So I go around through this sort of mall-like setting and they follow me, with me following a guy I hate from college a little ahead. We come to this elevator and apparently only holy people are allowed down it. Or something. So we take the stairs and I'm talking to the dude next to me and apparently this is on some pacific island where the High Priest or the Mayor (sometimes it switches between the two) mysteriously vanished (incidentally, apparently the Mayor is Bosquinha from Lusitania from Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card), creating a power vacuum and upsetting the social sytem of who's allowed where. So anyway, we walk around and I manage to lose everyone in some sort of really lush verdent residential district. I end up finding them again only to discover that me revealing myself to them at that point was a bad idea, because then they realize that the person they've been following for a while wasn't me. So I capitalize on this and there's some stuff that happens and then someone angers the volcano god and it starts pouring rain. Then we manage to convince the volcano god to make it HOT, only that just turns it into hot rain, which is apparently a perfect recipe for malaria. So we run around, and I think there's this flashback and a dude from my church back home, and then I find myself outside of this house that I seem to recall having similar design to some dude I had in a dream a couple years ago that I don't remember anything else about (and indeed, only just remembered that part when the dream felt familiar). There's this huge table in there and some people singing, and at some point there's me talking to some people about finding a different island to be on. And that's all I remember.


Dream #3: Scientology

This doesn't start out being about Scientology. It starts out being about me talking to some old friend back in Goshen. They've apparently found a new house and I'm talking to them about their internet service, which is apparently being run by my servers which are subletting from Verizon. I talk to them about college, and then apparently I start talking about Scientology. They have a watertubing slide like thing from Scientology apparently, and then that gets emptied of sand, and then a whole bunch of other friends show up, and I make some mean jokes, and they all turn into Scientologists and chase us off the property. But we go just past the edge of the property (apparently there were these goggles and some surveying done earlier so we ended up seeing the edge of the property exactly in some sort of glowing purple), and they pump us full of bullets (which apparently don't hurt, even though they've got, like, AK 47s), and we laugh in their face and tell them that we just videotaped them trying to kill us while we weren't on their property, and then I wake up.


Fragment: Newspaper

Don't remember where this fits in, but apparently there's this thing with a newspaper and I'm treating the newspaper like a website, and the newspaper has hyperlinks that lead to this columnist's blog, and there's this police officer talking to this woman and apprently he has to get out an AR-15 because she has one and it's police policy here to have at least as good a gun out as anyone you're talking to.

March 19 - Moon

Quite the dream last night. Another one of those long dreams with the shifting contexts and bizarre twists.

Starts out with some stuff that I don't remember. But then I'm driving in this bus and I start getting this extreme lurching sort of paralysis where unless my joints are all bent at approximately half their capacity TO bend, they lock up and give me extreme pain. So there's this funky scene where a bunch of ambulences show up and do SOMETHING or other with colored hoops, and then the dream takes an abrupt turn for the supernatural.

Turns out there's some force out there giving me this joint problem. There's this cool prophecy that I remember was cool but don't actually remember (it's disappointing how often that happens), and then I get in a fight for this file folder where it's stored. I get it and it turns out that this prophecy comes with pages and pages of rules for some weird game. If I can solve some sort of logical conundrum, I can play the game against someone. If I win, I'm cured, if I lose, I die. It's sort of like a grid-like game with some glyphs and stuff. Apparently I have to jump from square to square in a certain fashion. If I land on certain squares, I gain a certain number of lives. If I land on others, I lose them. I win if I get 7 lives, and lose if I run out. I remember that there was a second player to the game, and yet the rules as I remember it and just told you, you'll notice, have nothing to do with more than one player. Maybe the second player messes around with my movements or something.

Anyway, suddenly this woman shows up. Apparently I'm a woman in this dream, because I have a boyfriend who suddenly starts getting hypnotized into a gullible moron who believes anything this woman says even if it's a blatant lie. So there's this whole scene where me and my boyfriend start not getting along very well. Then, all of a sudden, in a bizarre twist befitting my long line of bizarre dream twists, it turns out this is a role-playing game of some kind, because I suddenly say to my boyfriend something like "Man, this gameplay style is kindof annoying. It mixes IC [in character] with OOC [out of character] and it's hard to tell our real feelings." Something weird like that that made no sense in the previous context of the dream (actually, it doesn't really make sense in the rest of the context of the dream either, come to think of it). Anyway, suddenly my boyfriend starts kissing my arm. It's really bizarre. Anway, I kindof recall getting married at this point and then we take our honeymoon on the moon.

So we end up on the moon, right? So there's these little green bugs or something fleeing in droves from this forest. We ask the bugs where we should be going, and then the bugs tell us to follow the RED bug who's walking backwards. Anyway, we do that and we reach the forest. Apparently the forest is the power source for this bad guy that was giving me this lurching paralysis that mysteriously got cured despite me actually not having gone through the supposedly required hoops.

Anyway, there's this really awesome music playing in the background (yup, my dreams have a soundtrack). I don't remember much of it, but it kindof reminds me of the musical style of the Rohan theme from the Lord of the Rings movie, or else the musical style of the dude who composed for Firefly. Anyway, I throw this match at the forest, it lights on fire, and I wake up.

---

Freud would have fun with this one. I mean, I'm a girl in it. With a boyfriend. But Freud is a pathetic nutjob.

Dream Signs - Family

Well, it's taken me this long to recognize it, but me seeing my mom or dad (or especially my brother) is generally gonna be a dream sign because I'm living at college miles away from any of them.

Of course, some of the dreams about family took place when I was at home for spring break or whatever, but I fully expect that dreams with my family in them will continue.