DarkestDarkness

2022 June 20th

Some in-line notes too.

Dream:

I'm walking through a small town that could be somewhere in my native country. Small houses, ground floor only. Trims and so on as expected. I'm with dad and cousin T. It's daytime, probably morning. Dad is taking photos and as we get to the top of a hill in the town, I see a somewhat breathtaking view of distant rolling hills much like this one, with pink cherry tree plantations here and there, interspersed with some vivid green leafed trees of similar size.

I tell dad he should hurry up to get to where I am, so he can take a photo. As time passes, the landscape or the point of view seem to change (I might be walking down the other side now) and I fear he won't be able to get a clear and unobstructed shot anymore. I lose track of my cousin. At some point she was telling dad about these aliens that live here with the villagers, whom she calls "Aarkvaads", but dad misunderstands that those would be the villagers rather than the aliens.

(recall gap)

Me and dad arrive at some rustic old restaurant. We climb up some stairs and take a seat at a table by the stairs and by a window. Daytime seems consistent with before but it's relatively dark in here due to the windows being a bit short in height. A guy that reminds me of G from school but who is a unique character, comes up to the table; he's our server. (Can't recall the dialogue)

I need the bathroom now and make my way down two flights of the wooden stairs. At the bottom, I'm not sure if I'm getting into the kitchen area by accident, but I go a bit further and find it is indeed the bathroom area. There's no outside light here, it's dark apart from some poorly placed and dim fluorescent tubes that are clearly too old. I think dad comes down too also looking for the bathroom. I go into this somewhat overly large and polygonal shaped room past a glass door that is barely frosted for privacy. The toilet is adjoining the doors' wall and the area feels dilapidated and unclean. I get ready to have a wee. I'm wearing my normal grey work trousers and it feels cumbersome to deal with everything.

Then I somehow start worrying about the fact that dad can probably see through that pointless frosting. I think I have a short wee and then give up, then leaving the room with dad going past me to use the room himself. Something happens and he slips I think? (Mostly comical in nature if anything)

Then, I'm at the mid level of the building, where the entrance is. I think I want to go outside? It's bright and different from before outside.

(recall gap)

I am outside and the restaurant is located at a sort of edge of a sedimentary cliff. Yellow-ish sandstone. It's sandy out here and there's no vegetation to speak of. It's an immense valley with sharp sand-dusted peaks. The server from before is out here, having a break or a cigarette. He's some kind of furry "bat boy" now, slightly taller than me. At some point earlier, I think there was something about a UI thing about choosing how he looked. Red is heavy to his colour theme and his fur almost looks soaked in dark blood, but not wet.

We talk, or I overhear something. Something about a rebellion? Other locals that are with him have assault rifles, Kalashnikovs probably.

Before this I think I actually had a bit of a walk around. There's this large plaza and some kind of Christian procession ritual is taking place. The entrance to the temple is where they want to go, and that's also (an?) the entrance back into the restaurant? They are standing still enough and I make my way through the very dispersed but neatly laid out small crowd, though as I get closer to the large doors the main ritual seems to be moving forward too. Not wishing to interrupt anything, I stop myself next to a tall older woman. It's daytime, about noon. The plaza reminds me of that in front of church of L. The walls to the side of the entrance are smooth eroded sandstone which bulge out every so often. (In retrospect, some of this sandy/rocky scenery reminds me of James' realm in Sacrifice, and as a God, James is perhaps more Christian in a sense than the other four)

Now, when the rebellion thing is starting, the sky goes dark and there's a heavy blue tinted atmosphere, and for lack of better description, the stench of magic is in the air. I'm in a party with sibling T and notice he's at a location called "Crystallarium Caverns", not at all the valley location I'm in. He doesn't realise that we're in different locations when we talk via chat. Fighting happens around me and I look up over the temple/restaurant and see there's a female spellcaster. She seems to be wearing something slightly harlequin-like. She has an enormous book that in width would be the height of four people, and I see her enounce some kind of runes which make a visible effect coming out of the book as she speaks each one. She throws down fire magic at the rebels and around me.

I start to get sick of her spellcasting and somehow reach my way up to her book (distortion of scale/point of view?) and then I hurl it down toward a much lower tier of the valley, intent on making it land in some water. But she uses some kind of TK to slow the books fall and it doesn't reach or touch the water. I think to myself that I should have jumped with the book. But as it rises back up, I can read its runes on a page now. Each page is organised as a kind of mandala with a number of circumscriptions for each rune. I try to read them aloud myself but I'm not sure about the pronunciation.

I think eventually we beat the spellcaster woman, but the rest of the dream recall is lost after this point.



Notes:

- This dream was particularly vivid and part of that may have been due to the fact that I barely managed to sleep the two preceding nights, on one of which I felt to have had a brief dreamless sleep, which always makes me feel odd for the rare times it happens.
-- Not sleeping was mostly on account of being ill.

- The runes in the book remind me a bit of the node tree in FFX, which I've seen recently after this dream, but given that they appeared more like mandalas it may have been an intrusion either from a discussion I had with my mom or from something relating to Jung. Whatever the source, I have thought about trying to replicate the layouts I saw in the dream.

- G and his bat form reminded me of Troy from BL3 for some reason. I think something about the posture and a drawing I did of Troy some time back. It's odd that it's the second time in not too long that I've dreamt about a bat character. Part of it may be an intrusion from the fact that someone's character I'm drawing lately is a bat, but it didn't feel especially related to that. (Different gender, different morphology/species)

- In the second half of the dream, there was something about the Aarkvaad aliens that was relevant to the context, but through my recall of the dream, I couldn't really pick it back up and so I'm not sure how they actually related. Searching for Aarkvaad online didn't really yield anything interesting and past the dream's context is probably a mish-mash word that sounded alien enough.

- The temple plaza felt very much like being in front of the actual church that it likely had inspiration from, which is interesting for the fact that I had that dream not too long ago where I was at a much more accurate version of said plaza/church. There was something more ancient and mythological about this dream's temple and the procession ritual that was taking place seemed to relate to that. In the dream part of my modern waking behaviour took hold where I was able to just go through the group without caring too much about the effect I might have on it, but as the ritual seemed to begin, my behaviour reverted to something more alike what I always learned to do, which in a sense is to give them space and not get in the way. I think as I walked there I thought about people who are careless and those who care too much, perhaps partly reflected in my responding behaviours.
-- Also curious to the ritual aspect was the fact that I was an outsider to it, even though to me it felt very familiar and normal. I just had no place in it myself; perhaps a symbolic expression or metaphor in itself.

Non-dream stuff: Woke up and got up at about 9:20. Remembered a few segments from the last dream I was having.

---

Sequence 1:

I was looking at an interface for picking a map in a real-time strategy game, for some sort of Command&Conquer game. I remember my partner being next to me and as I generated a random map with a "continental" style, I thought it looked a bit different and too small compared to most, but my partner said "no, have a look at the preview, it will be fine", so I clicked on preview and then my vision went into the screen and the map thumbnail image; as it zoomed in, the map became detailed and I viewed it from above but my vision kept zooming in closer and then there were 3 player factions, one being mine, another being my partner's, and the last one being someone else or an AI. We all started with some vehicles specific to our factions and the cars were racing through beaches and roads, with my vision still zooming now on a car I had, which looked a bit like something out of 1940s Germany, with white/grey colours and chrome accents. The AI had some military trucks, including one with a mounted gun, and they were chasing me and gaining speed, but I overtook my partner's cars and they blocked the chasing trucks a bit.

I remember now seeing in first person, and the car was stopped near a road tunnel that oddly enough was just after an intersection with a main road and a road that went around a bend behind a hill. I remember it was a clear sunny day and there were tropical forests.

Sequence 2:

Then I was at an area with pavement in a town, this was an open area on or near a quay and was reminiscent of my native country; there were subway entrances and this was all still part of the game somehow, I felt. In one of the subway entrances some gangsters were running up the stairs with sub-machine guns and I threw grenades and rockets at them, watching them not blow into pieces but fly around with wonky physics, just as one would expect with most games. Their "AI" was also poor; they ran against walls and corners sometimes and just idled even though I was being aggressive. Then I noticed I had a toolbar thing on my interface and picked a massive plywood plank item, and placed it over the entrance; for some reason it was steady standing on its own and was large enough that nobody could pass; I read a little tooltip on the interface saying I'd recently placed a blocking barrier and could not do so again for 15 minutes, but that I could upgrade any existing ones to increase their duration; this barrier I placed was going to last for 1 hour, apparently. The people that showed up the steps from behind the barrier, that I could still see just over the top, looked a lot less threatening, and in fact some were complaining like "hey I gotta get to work, come on!". I pretended to not care.

The dream ended at some point soon.

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Some notes:

• Although I separated both sequences into their own parts, they were part of the same dream, I just can't remember what went between them exactly; I don't remember a sudden transition from one to the other.
• The RTS map interface looked a bit like C&C:Generals and Warcraft 3; I remember the players had assigned colours and numbers, like for teams.
• The other generated maps were more representative of real Earth continents, picked at random, but the one I thought was odd just looked like a coastal section of a place.
• The fact that the whole of the sequences took place in a game context makes it very difficult for me to remember to question reality. Even when I am playing games in waking life and remember to do reality checks, it is difficult for me to pick good moments, i.e. weird ones, because games are generally very predictable and the only "weird" things that ever happen are bugs, the frequency of which depend solely on the specific game.
• The vehicles in the RTS were supposed to be base-starting vehicles, so in a way I should have remembered to do a RC over this, because in the dream context, the dream-awareness indicated something different from what actually happened.