This dream is jumbling up rapidly. It involved, not necessarily in this order:
– a male harpy with a penis on his forehead. He pressed it into a guy’s forehead, slowly, and stayed there for a while; when he drew back there was a bloody hole and his victim was dead. “Don’t worry,” the harpy said. “He’s safe inside me.” (There was an implication that this skull-fucking involved completely copying the personality, in a rather rapey way.) Then he was coming at me. I was holding him back with one had, as the other fumbled with a rusty revolver. I pulled the trigger several times but to no avail. Fiddled with the magazine, then suddenly pulling the trigger took a LOT more effort. Over a half a minute or so I managed to squeeze it, shooting this mind-fucking harpy guy dead. This bit, I think, happened on a train.
– reading a couple books with accounts of this whole dream in them; one was a sequel to the other but was also just a slightly different account of the same events. I put a marker in one and put it down on the nightstand beside my childhood bed, while leaving the other splayed face-down atop some of the piles of miscellaneous stuff that was also beside my childhood bed. (I was a terrible slob for years.)
– drawing diagrams of the shape of this dream’s narrative (which I saw alternately as a video game I was playing, and as books I was reading) that took the form of zig-zag arrangements of rectangles moving upwards; there was also a zoom implied, such that the whole thing would never be higher than about the height of the first panel times 1 1/3.
– hunting for some important data, in a skyscraper full of red herrings. I got as far as maybe a dozen 3.5″ floppies in one box from one office. My companion told me to abandon the box and move on, but there were a few discs in it that were in sharper detail than the fuzzily-rendered sepia discs that mostly filled the box; we hadn’t looked at them but I was pretty damn sure they were important. I think I grabbed them. They had cryptic hand-written labels, and were black plastic.
– that companion seemed to be Ashy; we moved into an elevator and went into a different segment of the game/dream. It shifted from being some complicated riff on the old Activision game “Hacker” and segued into being a book I was reading; there was a dialogue between Ashy’s Dr. Wednesday character and another mad-science vixen I know of from online named Phorm, in which Phorm had been programmed to be an assassin, and Wednesday was pulling some mental triggers to make her forget. She said something about how she’d forget by the end of the page; I turned it, and Wednesday’s dialogue continued with the end of a lengthy sentence about some of the things Phorm had done, then there were lines from a very confused Phorm who had, as promised, completely forgotten the previous pages. It was then that I closed the book and put it on my nightstand.
I also remember some sort of circular symbol on the page I stopped on, though I think this is something my brain is editing in now? Not sure.
– also there was something about running, though sadly not the awesome super-slow-mo perception of running I had in a previous dream. I had a companion in this part too, some bulky black guy I think, who was acting as my guide.
– some parts of this dream had me hanging outside my avatar, controlling it in a comedically awkward fashion. At one point I had the controls turned around; fixing this involved taking my blouse off, turning it right-side out again, and putting it back on.
The whole damn thing was just so meta. It was a game, then it was a book I was reading, then it was TWO books I was reading with different takes on the same plot. I also seem to have gone through both versions; I only remember the second one, but there was a strong sense of deja vu running through all these episodes. Except instead of “this exact thing has happened before” it was “ALMOST this exact thing has happened before”.
When I woke up, it was quite cold. I was shivering as I made a trip to the bathroom; I’m lying under the thick comforter now as I type this on the iPad.