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... no seriously.
I would label it a nightmare, because it wasn't really the sort of dream you wake up from in cold sweats shouting "OH GOD, THE BUNNIES!". It was more the sort of dream in which you fear death in a semi-detached way.
The bits that I remember start with me on a ship. A big ship. A glorious old ship. And by ship I do indeed mean water ship. A ship with gardens and foutains and an immense library (I suspect it was somewhat based on Uni and/or the Women's College, but don't ask me why; I couldn't pinpoint it if I tried). A ship with 'god' knows what sort of specs for the dream that ensued. Then again, it did become one of those horror movies based on puzzles and getting ALL the answers right, because a wrong answer does of course mean death; that's how you find the winner. Thankfully the game didn't get quite that far, but the fact that it was like a horror movie (and, you know, a dream) meant it had licence to change any and every spatial spec at its whim.
I was walking up to the front of the ship, up one of the fountains (we can't go under it, we can't go round it, we'll have to gothrough it over the big arse water feature ON A BOAT) to get to the front garden. The both of them were beautiful, though I couldn't describe them to you in any detail. Also, I was with someone... don't know who, but I suspect a female. Something told me I had somewhere else to be, I had to go looking for something, so I turned away from it, went back down the fountain, noticing as I went the enormous drop to the ground between the fountain and the window-doors to the garden (it was like looking down the gap between a train and the platform, except about three or four times as deep - crippling, but not quite deadly I thought), and started my search. In the same room were two doors - one leading into the hideout of a group I instinctively knew was bad and evil and the who I was going to use whatever it was I was looking for against. Probably because it was clearly labeled as their hideout, and they weren't being secretive about it at all, so that meant there could be no disguise on any other level, so I just knew they were evil? Dream logic rocks my socks.
I didn't go in through there, though, because the guards would have killed me or captured me or both. So I went to the other door, the one that led into the great huge library. This was also rather nicely labelled for the dummy dreamer who can't find their way out of a chalked circle, and in the same oddly curved font as the other door's. So, again quite instinctively, I knew that the library was going to be a challenge - it's probably at lest owned by those guys, if not run by them. Again, dream logic.
I went in. Instead of it being the library, it was paths leding to the library that I first saw; an antehall, I guess, with two halls to choose from to get in. I chose the left with the reasoning that the right would be in the direction of the cult-ish group I was trying to defeat, just in case they had a connecting hall that ran right to their hideout and by going that way I would alert them to my plans. It was a smart move, but it didn't really help.
As soon as I was in the library, I realised something was wrong. It was dark and there were lots of places to hide, and given that I was pretty sure someone else was going to be coming in and that I would need to listen to their conversation, I hid behind a collection of ancient urns; possibly Egyptian, possibly Greek. They at least felt Egyptian to the dream logic I was using. Also, at this point I'd like to explain why it is that I thought it was a horror movie I was in - at the time I didn't realise this, but looking back on it, I realise that I knew what was going to happen before there was anything to react to and draw conclusions from. Clearly, I was watching from a distance like it was a movie and was therefore able to predict what was coming in accordance to the Rules Of Movie Plots, while linked via a shared brain to the i that was in the movie. Super Ego and the ID, perhaps? Two separate consciousnesses linked and team-working to MarySue/Hero-like results. Except, you know, it was a dream so I was probably just making it up as I went. :P Still, any chance to sound smart.
So I'm trying to hide behind the urns, but I keep sort of... missing? This would be the influence of my Listening requirements for Music in the Sixties this week seeping into my dreambrain - Pulse Minimalist Four Violins is a piece that sounds like electric bagpipes just missing the note their supposed to be playing, repeatedly, sort of just sliding off it and hitting somewhere close but not correct. Like two magnets of the same pole sliding off each other's magnetic fields before they actually touch, striking the air/ground/surface just next to the magnet instead.
As I'm trying to hide behind the urn, someone comes in. Someone who's looking for me. Someone I'm trying to hide from so I can watch them and listen to the inevitable conversation, assuming I can learn to hide behind urns and not disrupt their plans to reveals... well, their plans. I'm sort of successful in hiding and not breathing heavily in the semi-light, but then someone on the level above us on a sort of balcony that overlooks the library from somewhere else... their hideout?... spots me, calls out to the monster-like plan-revealer (I've only just noticed that he isn't human; I blame the semi-darkness of the library) and I have to run away. Past him, of course, but then again, he seems to have the same problem with Running After Plan Wreckers as I did with Hiding Behind Urns, except far worse - he sort of keeps missing the movement in my direction and keeps just ending back where he starts. I guess the two of us are the anthropomorphic representations of Pulse Minimalism and Glitch Music respectively.
Somewhere between running away and getting to the elevator(which I assume was within the library)*** I've picked up friends. The elevator is where the horror starts, by the way; the rest has just been an Indiana Jones movie up until now; now it becomes... actually, I don't know what sort of movie it would be. The friends I've picked up include two guys and one girl. One of the guys is pretty cute, so while waiting for the elvator and while on the elevator, we flirt a bit. The other guy is a ditz, and the girl is smarter than she appears. To explain this, I'll describe the elevator - it's a single platform, big enough for the four of us and the person in the shadows to the left of me who I can't quite see or even be certain that they exist. Because it's just a single platform, there are no walls or ceiling - you can see the gearworks jutting out from the sides of the platform into the shaft wall on the opposite side to the door (and the door side), but side walls aren't there - it's just a big open stone room with no floor as far as we could see (because, hello, it's an elevator shaft on a boat that transcends space and defies reality). The girl is right up against one of the walls that don't exist and tries to be funny by jumping back into the darkness to her death (that way that people do) but landed on a small shelf off the platform's side. We felt like pushing her off ot prove that she wasn't funny.
Then things got interesting: the platform dropped. Not 'went down', dropped. Physics would tell you that we wouldn't have been able to stay on it, it went that fast, but dream logic meant we could grab hold of the platform and each other before we were left behind to fall comparatively slowly to our deaths-on-impact. Of course, physics would also tell you that when the platform hit the bottom impact would still be a problem, but just before we reached the bottom, the platform swerved to the side that the girl was not on (the shadows that concealed someone side) and I guess our momentum shifted sufficiently so that we didn't die. Trial One. Influence: House on Haunted Hill, the new one with Jean Grey, that Old Guy Who's Pretty Cool, and Nikki from Heroes.
When we got out, we were on another shelf, and we had to start moving - there were zombies coming. The shelf we were on opened onto sky (odd, for being deep down in/below a water ship, but whatever, more will change) in which structures hung from nothing. Structures composed of multiple yellow platforms, possibly bound together by bamboo and vines, but again yellow. There were three separate structures across, and I don't know how many deep, but we knew we had to start going across otherwise the zombies would come. Then they started coming anyway. We took the middle set of structures and tried to cross the expanse on them, hoping the next level (because it all seemed rather Mario/Zelda/Super Smash Bros-esque at this point) would appear sooner than zombie. However, no such level appeared - as soon as were we all on the structures the zombie turned around, hopped over to our line of structures and started making their way to us. Trial Two.
At his point, Steff (she's appeared in dreams before, though none of you know her) who is an expert on the undead told us that the zombies wouldn't do anything as long as we didn't look at them. Sort of like not aggravating bees, I guess. The swarmed around us, but then left. Once they were gone, one of their troup leaders (not a zombie) had joined us and was introducing the next Trial. It was a riddle: a small wooden box with no lid. The top was divided into two sections - one was a line of small models of African animals and terrain at the top, the other was text burnt into the wood (in the same font!!) at the bottom. The text was something like:
the lion holds a pleather bag but drops it
and when you turned the box around to have the text upside down at the top, the spaces between the trees and animals read "WHY" and something that could have been a question mark. That's the bit I noticed; I found the actual question. Someone else, possibly the troup leader, pointed out that pleather was a synonym for phyrigian (a musical mode, similar to a scale, hence the musical references before). I didn't understand that until now.
Somewhere between exiting the elevator shaft and now we'd picked up the rest of our contestants - you can't have a horrific reality-bending puzzle game with a penchant for blood if you only have four contestants; they'd die too quickly. We ended up with 12. Also, we were no longer in the sky, we were in a stone courtyard, surrounded by trees and green and beauty*****.
One of the women, her name started with M, came up with an answer, or an almost answer - it was more a thought that she didn't want to finish in case the answer was wrong. I was pretty sure she was wrong. Anyway, the troup leader asked if that was her "idea", and she shied away from it, pointing at someone over on my side of the circle. Everyone then started pointing at me as if it had been my thought and my answer. I refused to be their scapegoat though, and said so. M then had to take the blame for the answer she almost gave, and was penalised. She wasn't killed, because she hadn't actually given an answer, but for trying to get around The Rules she was given "a little bit of pain in her thumb". Clearly zombie troup leaders have a different idea of "little", and possibly "pain", judging by the look on M's face - she was in agony and her whole left hand was going grey and swollen (which I'm pretty sure is how my dream logic represents death). At that point, she must have been "evicted" though, because we all went back to reasoning and M sort of disappeared. Also, the environment changed again - all the trees and greenery turned into distant buildings fitting the same general mold as what had come before. I seemed to be the only one that noticed.
The reasoning was then left to me, because I was the only one who had any idea about what "phrygian" meant. I thought that perhaps, as pleather is fake leather (i.e. not really leather), and phrygian is not really a scale (a sort of fake scale...ish), that perhaps the lion had been giving the crocodile back one of his scales. Or, perhaps, he had been disguised as a crocodile (in a skin bag) and was giving it up (sort of like a wolf-in-sheep's-clothing revealing himself amongst the sheep). Or maybe he just didn't need a purse, which was my initial reading of the riddle. Of course, after I'd read it and found the WHY? hidden between the trees, it all disappeared leaving a box with a lid and no adornments. When M answered, the troup leader pulled a slip of paper from the box (perhaps the right answer) and then gave her her punishment.
All I could think from that point on was "I have to get through this with my team - the two guys and the girl. Especially [the guy I was flirting with]."
Sadly, I woke up before I could find out the answer and complete Trial Three. Does anyone else want to try and answer it? It's sort of like "Why is a raven like a writing desk?"; Alice never does get the answer. I really am curious as to why the lion dropped the pleather bag though.
I realise the whole thing doesn't sound particularly death-fearingly horror movie-like, but there was an undercurrent of it throughout. I knew what the consequences were, so I knew to fear them.
Now I just want my answer. That and to know why I'm having batshit crazy dreams with this level of detail and reality.
*** actually, there was something about a train... lots of us were on board, including Nick (yes, you) who was told to dance and I was rather unimpressed (I expected more from you Nick), and there were a couple of little kids too. There was some huge fight between people, there was a bar, there was also a teacher (that's who told Nick to dance! in an attempt to break things up, I think? Or to calm people down after?) who I had to call over to get him to stop the fight. He wore a purple robe. After the fighting was done, nearly everyone literally went home - one of the little kids had to get a plane home with his guardian (another non-human I think), and he was running out of time so he ran away but came back saying he'd missed it because he'd been in the bathroom when they'd called it. Apparently he couldn't wait to go on the plane because plane bathrooms scared him for some reason. I think my friends on the elevator were therefore remnants of the train people.
***** to get to the stone courtyard, I'm pretty sure that we had to go through a section of land that rather resembles a part of Uni. The bit where the Transient Building ends and you can turn right and go up the stairs to the Paved Walkway or keep going straight and curve round the next building next to the car park. There was a similar sort of junction with the same question I always ask "which is faster?".
I would label it a nightmare, because it wasn't really the sort of dream you wake up from in cold sweats shouting "OH GOD, THE BUNNIES!". It was more the sort of dream in which you fear death in a semi-detached way.
The bits that I remember start with me on a ship. A big ship. A glorious old ship. And by ship I do indeed mean water ship. A ship with gardens and foutains and an immense library (I suspect it was somewhat based on Uni and/or the Women's College, but don't ask me why; I couldn't pinpoint it if I tried). A ship with 'god' knows what sort of specs for the dream that ensued. Then again, it did become one of those horror movies based on puzzles and getting ALL the answers right, because a wrong answer does of course mean death; that's how you find the winner. Thankfully the game didn't get quite that far, but the fact that it was like a horror movie (and, you know, a dream) meant it had licence to change any and every spatial spec at its whim.
I was walking up to the front of the ship, up one of the fountains (we can't go under it, we can't go round it, we'll have to go
I didn't go in through there, though, because the guards would have killed me or captured me or both. So I went to the other door, the one that led into the great huge library. This was also rather nicely labelled for the dummy dreamer who can't find their way out of a chalked circle, and in the same oddly curved font as the other door's. So, again quite instinctively, I knew that the library was going to be a challenge - it's probably at lest owned by those guys, if not run by them. Again, dream logic.
I went in. Instead of it being the library, it was paths leding to the library that I first saw; an antehall, I guess, with two halls to choose from to get in. I chose the left with the reasoning that the right would be in the direction of the cult-ish group I was trying to defeat, just in case they had a connecting hall that ran right to their hideout and by going that way I would alert them to my plans. It was a smart move, but it didn't really help.
As soon as I was in the library, I realised something was wrong. It was dark and there were lots of places to hide, and given that I was pretty sure someone else was going to be coming in and that I would need to listen to their conversation, I hid behind a collection of ancient urns; possibly Egyptian, possibly Greek. They at least felt Egyptian to the dream logic I was using. Also, at this point I'd like to explain why it is that I thought it was a horror movie I was in - at the time I didn't realise this, but looking back on it, I realise that I knew what was going to happen before there was anything to react to and draw conclusions from. Clearly, I was watching from a distance like it was a movie and was therefore able to predict what was coming in accordance to the Rules Of Movie Plots, while linked via a shared brain to the i that was in the movie. Super Ego and the ID, perhaps? Two separate consciousnesses linked and team-working to MarySue/Hero-like results. Except, you know, it was a dream so I was probably just making it up as I went. :P Still, any chance to sound smart.
So I'm trying to hide behind the urns, but I keep sort of... missing? This would be the influence of my Listening requirements for Music in the Sixties this week seeping into my dreambrain - Pulse Minimalist Four Violins is a piece that sounds like electric bagpipes just missing the note their supposed to be playing, repeatedly, sort of just sliding off it and hitting somewhere close but not correct. Like two magnets of the same pole sliding off each other's magnetic fields before they actually touch, striking the air/ground/surface just next to the magnet instead.
As I'm trying to hide behind the urn, someone comes in. Someone who's looking for me. Someone I'm trying to hide from so I can watch them and listen to the inevitable conversation, assuming I can learn to hide behind urns and not disrupt their plans to reveals... well, their plans. I'm sort of successful in hiding and not breathing heavily in the semi-light, but then someone on the level above us on a sort of balcony that overlooks the library from somewhere else... their hideout?... spots me, calls out to the monster-like plan-revealer (I've only just noticed that he isn't human; I blame the semi-darkness of the library) and I have to run away. Past him, of course, but then again, he seems to have the same problem with Running After Plan Wreckers as I did with Hiding Behind Urns, except far worse - he sort of keeps missing the movement in my direction and keeps just ending back where he starts. I guess the two of us are the anthropomorphic representations of Pulse Minimalism and Glitch Music respectively.
Somewhere between running away and getting to the elevator
Then things got interesting: the platform dropped. Not 'went down', dropped. Physics would tell you that we wouldn't have been able to stay on it, it went that fast, but dream logic meant we could grab hold of the platform and each other before we were left behind to fall comparatively slowly to our deaths-on-impact. Of course, physics would also tell you that when the platform hit the bottom impact would still be a problem, but just before we reached the bottom, the platform swerved to the side that the girl was not on (the shadows that concealed someone side) and I guess our momentum shifted sufficiently so that we didn't die. Trial One. Influence: House on Haunted Hill, the new one with Jean Grey, that Old Guy Who's Pretty Cool, and Nikki from Heroes.
When we got out, we were on another shelf, and we had to start moving - there were zombies coming. The shelf we were on opened onto sky (odd, for being deep down in/below a water ship, but whatever, more will change) in which structures hung from nothing. Structures composed of multiple yellow platforms, possibly bound together by bamboo and vines, but again yellow. There were three separate structures across, and I don't know how many deep, but we knew we had to start going across otherwise the zombies would come. Then they started coming anyway. We took the middle set of structures and tried to cross the expanse on them, hoping the next level (because it all seemed rather Mario/Zelda/Super Smash Bros-esque at this point) would appear sooner than zombie. However, no such level appeared - as soon as were we all on the structures the zombie turned around, hopped over to our line of structures and started making their way to us. Trial Two.
At his point, Steff (she's appeared in dreams before, though none of you know her) who is an expert on the undead told us that the zombies wouldn't do anything as long as we didn't look at them. Sort of like not aggravating bees, I guess. The swarmed around us, but then left. Once they were gone, one of their troup leaders (not a zombie) had joined us and was introducing the next Trial. It was a riddle: a small wooden box with no lid. The top was divided into two sections - one was a line of small models of African animals and terrain at the top, the other was text burnt into the wood (in the same font!!) at the bottom. The text was something like:
the lion holds a pleather bag but drops it
and when you turned the box around to have the text upside down at the top, the spaces between the trees and animals read "WHY" and something that could have been a question mark. That's the bit I noticed; I found the actual question. Someone else, possibly the troup leader, pointed out that pleather was a synonym for phyrigian (a musical mode, similar to a scale, hence the musical references before). I didn't understand that until now.
Somewhere between exiting the elevator shaft and now we'd picked up the rest of our contestants - you can't have a horrific reality-bending puzzle game with a penchant for blood if you only have four contestants; they'd die too quickly. We ended up with 12. Also, we were no longer in the sky, we were in a stone courtyard, surrounded by trees and green and beauty*****.
One of the women, her name started with M, came up with an answer, or an almost answer - it was more a thought that she didn't want to finish in case the answer was wrong. I was pretty sure she was wrong. Anyway, the troup leader asked if that was her "idea", and she shied away from it, pointing at someone over on my side of the circle. Everyone then started pointing at me as if it had been my thought and my answer. I refused to be their scapegoat though, and said so. M then had to take the blame for the answer she almost gave, and was penalised. She wasn't killed, because she hadn't actually given an answer, but for trying to get around The Rules she was given "a little bit of pain in her thumb". Clearly zombie troup leaders have a different idea of "little", and possibly "pain", judging by the look on M's face - she was in agony and her whole left hand was going grey and swollen (which I'm pretty sure is how my dream logic represents death). At that point, she must have been "evicted" though, because we all went back to reasoning and M sort of disappeared. Also, the environment changed again - all the trees and greenery turned into distant buildings fitting the same general mold as what had come before. I seemed to be the only one that noticed.
The reasoning was then left to me, because I was the only one who had any idea about what "phrygian" meant. I thought that perhaps, as pleather is fake leather (i.e. not really leather), and phrygian is not really a scale (a sort of fake scale...ish), that perhaps the lion had been giving the crocodile back one of his scales. Or, perhaps, he had been disguised as a crocodile (in a skin bag) and was giving it up (sort of like a wolf-in-sheep's-clothing revealing himself amongst the sheep). Or maybe he just didn't need a purse, which was my initial reading of the riddle. Of course, after I'd read it and found the WHY? hidden between the trees, it all disappeared leaving a box with a lid and no adornments. When M answered, the troup leader pulled a slip of paper from the box (perhaps the right answer) and then gave her her punishment.
All I could think from that point on was "I have to get through this with my team - the two guys and the girl. Especially [the guy I was flirting with]."
Sadly, I woke up before I could find out the answer and complete Trial Three. Does anyone else want to try and answer it? It's sort of like "Why is a raven like a writing desk?"; Alice never does get the answer. I really am curious as to why the lion dropped the pleather bag though.
I realise the whole thing doesn't sound particularly death-fearingly horror movie-like, but there was an undercurrent of it throughout. I knew what the consequences were, so I knew to fear them.
Now I just want my answer. That and to know why I'm having batshit crazy dreams with this level of detail and reality.
*** actually, there was something about a train... lots of us were on board, including Nick (yes, you) who was told to dance and I was rather unimpressed (I expected more from you Nick), and there were a couple of little kids too. There was some huge fight between people, there was a bar, there was also a teacher (that's who told Nick to dance! in an attempt to break things up, I think? Or to calm people down after?) who I had to call over to get him to stop the fight. He wore a purple robe. After the fighting was done, nearly everyone literally went home - one of the little kids had to get a plane home with his guardian (another non-human I think), and he was running out of time so he ran away but came back saying he'd missed it because he'd been in the bathroom when they'd called it. Apparently he couldn't wait to go on the plane because plane bathrooms scared him for some reason. I think my friends on the elevator were therefore remnants of the train people.
***** to get to the stone courtyard, I'm pretty sure that we had to go through a section of land that rather resembles a part of Uni. The bit where the Transient Building ends and you can turn right and go up the stairs to the Paved Walkway or keep going straight and curve round the next building next to the car park. There was a similar sort of junction with the same question I always ask "which is faster?".