Why can't I have normal nightmares?

[flamingsword]

When I have dreams that are trying to tell me something, they are hyper-real. Every color is rich, every edge is sharp, every person has depth and autonomy. It's quite nice that I dream mostly in fantasy/sci-fi. What's not nice? Is that I have hyper-real dreams that are calculated to upset me using a wide variety of weaknesses, of which fear is the least part. If the dream bothers me, I'll be more likely to remember it. Yay for the ruthless logic of the unconscious mind.

Last night's dream featured me sneaking into the underground base of a lunatic who's breeding giant snakes that he can train to destroy cities, myself intent on stealing the regulator box of the catalyst/device that makes the scent hormones he uses to control the snakes. Without control of the animals, all I have to do is collapse the entrance, and the rest of the problems will take care of themselves. :j

The interesting twist this time is that I'm stuck in an ouroboros loop, because even in my dreams the plans never go smooth. I'm tense and sneaking around in the pre-dawn quiet, and it takes about five minutes to get from the compound wall to the tiny entrance. When your senses are that stretched out, five minutes is a long time to be sneaking around patrols and ducking behind things based on the sound of quiet footsteps. When I get into the entrance to the tunnels, time loops back to the beginning. And every time it loops, things are a little different. Patrols are in different places, or going different directions, or I have a cut that's leaking blood, and the patrols dogs can smell me, and they sound restless. Every time I get to the carved stone entrance and slip inside the tiny 4' by 4' aperture, stone slick and cool beneath my palms, it all restarts. Eventually I woke up, but my shoulders were so tense that they still ache, because of something I thought I was doing in my sleep.

Now I just get to figure out what it means.

Comments

[raasalhayya.livejournal.com]

It means there is some sort of security device in that aperture and you should either find a way to disable it or find another way in.

[lord-of-entropy.livejournal.com]

That you see yourself making progress against a fundamental, universal threat (categorical/compartmentalised thinking? The prison industrial complex? Flying dinosaurs [I'm not talking birds here, people]?) but feel that at the cusp of real progress, you are forced to restart?

That your dream is the action-adventure version of the existential parable of going out & cutting the cane, even knowing that it will inevitably grow back and thus undo all your efforts?


Or, the Freudian stand-by, that the snakes symbolise the masculine principle that you wish to free from puritanical repression?

Heheheheeeeeee.........

[xenoix-13.livejournal.com]

Maybe your dreaming in my universe, and have spent too much time being close to me. Maybe you're playing video games in your head. The scenery sure sounds like my head. We have had a nice harmony lately......

So my Xenoixian analysis is:

What matters is that you're hunting. Time, or continuity, is not necessarily a stable factor. You may have reached your goal (the tunnel) once, but you haven't reached it in a parallel universe with different variables yet. The joy is in changing the variables, and reaching that goal again. If things don't comply with normal laws of physics, it's even more fun. If reality isn't "behaving" then maybe you don't have to either. Turn on god mode and stop sneaking around those fucks and smash their head in with a hackey-sack! Open a level editor and put The Necronomicon in a crate, load the level again and use the Nec. to steal everyone's soul and send their corpses against the lunatic with the snakes........ Or go have sex with a hot zombie and make cute zombi-kids in Hell.....

The tunnel is just a tunnel, no matter what universe your in. It's boring, and not worth remarking upon. There are no variables to change. It's a waste of video game time, and only transitional to the plot. I bet the level designers got bored designing the graphics for this space......

The crazy person with the giant snakes is a cool plot add-in, like the end-game boss. It's not that much more complicated than the tunnel, though. Really, only four things can happen -- you defeat the snakes easily, they defeat you easily, you struggle a bit -- then die, or you struggle a bit -- then win. It really only takes one guess to find the path any decent video game would take (it's the last one). Besides, boss-fighting is not that fun in the long run. It's much more fun to fight a legion of various things than a monster of ginormous proportions with maddeningly few useful tactics at hand.......




Honestly, often, when I have dreams in a setting and with a plot like yours, I go back to sleep, and rerun the scenario again.....and again.....and again.......and again.......and do a lot of the things I suggested you do with such dreamlands.....


....My Matrix Has You....

/resets Heidi's dream