joeseph

The challenge with this dream will be remembering how it started.

I went to see Brendan at his house. I had made an arduous trip to get down there. I showed up at his house with my stuff, my backpack, my cellphone. How's life going. Good, you know. We start playing some videogame and end up smoking weed, with the Tall Man. I'm kind of pressured into it. Of course, Brendan's dad comes in. He's furious. The other kids around the house have decided to hide; they're sticking out of little nooks and crannies like lemmings, poking their heads around corners and ducking back down again. I hide too, lying behind a blanket and underneath some a big teddy bear. It doesn't work though. His dad pokes me on the head, gets me up, and starts to yell. You have to go. Are you kidding me? There's apparently a zero-drug policy in the house. Lame. It figures that the only time I've smoked weed in several months this would happen. I gather up some of my stuff and walk out.

I go to his dad's house, where there are more kids. I've left my phone and some other things over there. Can I go back to get them? Nope. He won't let me. Fuck, then I guess I'll go back home and have Brendan mail me my phone, and just not have it for two weeks.

There are brief intervals of blankness. A recurring image where I try to make a climb up the side of the house, grabbing onto rafters even though my fingers have rips on them, getting up to a higher rafter and throwing a heel over to pull up on to the roof. The house has turned into Jon/Greg's house. It is constantly under repair. As soon as I get onto the roof, they join me up there. Greg seems careless, bouncing around on creaky planks of wood. Watch out dude, that doesn't seem safe. Just weeks ago, Jon says, his cat fell through the roof and fell all the way into the "sauna." He's hurt now. The sauna is this layer of (lair in) the basement, I will soon find out.

I crash through the roof, and there's a hole in the ground that goes through several floors. It was way more than just the roof and the floor below. I fall and feel myself getting hurt, smashing around on the edges of the pit as it goes deeper and deeper, through 5 floors of the house, getting more and more janky, repairman status, with unpolished wood sticking around everywhere. Sawdusty, carpentry. Whoa, what the hell is this. I warp back up to the roof (cuz I don't wanna die); I have to go in for a cleaner ascent to check it out.

I jump down again; Boom, one, two, three, four, five floors. It gets more chaotic. Enter the "sauna."

The sauna is really the Gauntlet, the Final Boss, hidden level of Greg's dad's design. It's the "running hell" of this whole world. I crash down on a beach. I've been here before! This landscape is unreal. There is a gigantic man telling a false story in the corner. There is a midget running around chasing you. There are big boulders flying towards you periodically, slowly. Like somebody shot them out of a cartoon cannon, but it's not hard to avoid. It's a game world. The giant man is trying to lure you in, so you get permanently stuck there, listening to him, like a siren song, or the lotus eaters. I see someone's older brother from Moorpark, a burnout in my mind. He's sitting there entranced. He has been sitting there ever since I last heard of him, I guess. I go over and see some text/dialogue, as in an RPG, and I can remember when the branches you choose in the dialogue will result in a game over, when the giant's story becomes purely fantasy, and you get caught in the falseness. I pull away and look around, at the cliffs, at the ocean. There's a sliding section of a prison wall that you can close to temporarily protect yourself from the flying boulders and the midget (who, as far as I can tell, will actually only annoy you to death if he catches you). I gain my thoughts.

I've been here before. These are challenges. I feel, at least in this moment, that this is a place I used to go to all the time in my dreams, a virtual challenge that I have mapped out, and nearly made it thru. I have different "save files" that I will find later on in the dream. It seems, for now though, that if you die then you have to start it all over from the beginning. This is something that requires perfect play.

So I start to run. I run away from the giant, the myriad of strange other creatures on the beach, from the belligerent midget. I get out of range of the boulders. I take big loping strides, bouncing over the water, but I'm also pleasantly surprised that I can run faster, faster, when I want to. There's no phenomenon of not being able to stick to the ground. I am capable; I am fast. I run past Christie from high school, who is wearing a beautiful turquoise, cream-colored or lavender dress. She looks incredible. As I run past I shout to her "Christie! You're still the best." I'm on my way now, but I can acknowledge the impact she had. She responds: "I know!! You too Joe!" "I love you!" and then I keep going. I'm not sure why she was there. Not an obstacle, definitely. Had I stayed with her I wouldn't have been caught by the midget (he's really tenacious). She is a stage of her own, I guess. But I'm not there anymore. The dream gets less vivid after this. It has almost been consummated at this point. (I used to dream of her sooooo much. She might be the most important dream symbol I have)

More water starts appearing; I have to time my steps to get over it, and see the shallow sections which I can step in without getting stuck. I'm moving. It's always a speedrun, whenever I play, whatever I do. I still feel like I'm not as intimate with this whole setting, with this game, since I haven't explored all the variables which result in me dying. But what will you do? I've got places to go. It feels like I can't really afford to tarry anymore. I have a drive now, which has been continuously pushing me forward. I found myself in this arena by circumstance, and now that there's nothing to do about that, I need to get through it and get out again. I need to play.

It becomes a maze, after I finish jumping over the lakes and the course moves inside. This is definitely more Counterstrike graphics; the hallways, the doors, the angular geometry. The pathways of the labyrinth cut off at right angles, and there is a granular "stone" texture over the walls. It's sick, actually. A voice starts to narrate what I do. "After going through the labyrinth, you must escape and enter a new phase...." Vague stuff. "But not that way!!" I run into a dead end. Stupid voice. I need to backtrack to get to the other door. Luckily, I was far enough ahead of the midget that it didn't really matter. This happens two or three times. After I go through the final door, the environment changes. It's cloudy. I find myself at the end of a rock. The character that I am has transformed. More like Tomb Raider. I have to hookshot to a spot in the water. Things are getting very blurry again. I "die" when I miss and hit the water. FUCK. Well, this is lame. It brings me to the start menu, now that I am more removed from the game; there is less of MY awareness in the simulation. It's third-person now. I peruse my old save files. Where was I? How far have I gotten? This run was about halfway through the gauntlet, 40%. There's another one a little further along. After some more time spent in this realm, which is now really really foggy and indeterminate, I pull back to the real world. I talk to Greg's dad. I've seen that this is his creation; I have a flash of a gigantic server outdoors next to a house. A big clean blue electrical box, running the length of the driveway, pure processing power. This is his friend's house, and she hosts it. People all around the country come to run the gauntlet, however they get to it.

Time skews, or maybe my recollection just isn't as good. I'm back at the house, and I throw a heelhook to the RIGHT this time to get onto the roof. It's easier, after all. It's way lower than the rafter I was hooking to on the left, which left me almost upside down.

I had more dreams but I don't care to decipher them. Plus it's been nearly an hour writing this one out already. I feel like I need to WANT a lucid dream more, instead of merely remembering the intent to write them all down. But I made sure to "remember" the arc of these dreams put together, insofar as it led to the gauntlet, so that worked pretty well. But it's more about discovering myself in my dreams now, as opposed to chronicling it like a book or a movie transcript. You've gotta want it. Lucid living, baby. Let's go