Well. I’ve never had a dream end by having everything go pixelly, then bring up a LIVES REMAINING: 2 screen.
So let’s rewind. How’d I get there?
I was riding my hovering cardboard tube through a narrow, dimly-lit underground tunnel. My three companions were all clustered on one tube ahead of me, urging me to move fast. I got hung up with navigating the obstacles, in part because I wasn’t anywhere near as skilled with riding a hovering cardboard tube (they could stand on it like a skateboard, I was sitting on it with my legs dangling off the sides), so they pulled ahead and vanished round a turn. Then the lights came up and there was a mass of children screaming from above (or at least I was told it was children, I couldn’t see them at all) and an absolute rain of little wrapped-up candies. I pressed forwards through this, ducking to get under some of the stone arches that made the passage more complicated.
Then the water rose. It was black and cold. Evidently my tube hovered at a modest height above the GROUND not any surface, as I was now waist-deep in water. And the lights went down, replaced by guttering candles above me. I slowly came to a stop because, well, freezing. And my viewpoint lifted up to third person. Which evidently now was of a squat little cartoon character. Who kinda reminded me of Cerberus the Aardvark, so I will call this character that.
There was cheesy hair metal playing in the background. I recognized it but didn’t like it.
Cerberus looked up at one of the candles and it started to go pixelly. Then this amorphous low-res black blob reached out for him, surrounded him, and drew him up off the submerged hovering cardboard tube. I said, “Elk-elf! Come back into the panel!” – and then everything went black, except for the low-res text with the lives remaining counter.
And then I woke up.
—-
Before that things had been much more fun. There had been, in reverse order, zooming through the city on these hovering cardboard tubes with a cute nerdy lady and two cute guys, there had been lying on a couch tangled up with said lady and flirting with her (and examining her huge, intricate in-progress tattoo – it was going across the back of her neck and shoulders, and was this complex thing with heavy blacks and bright colors, kind of abstract shapes with jungle cats emerging from them). There was an advertisement for some projection rig that covered about 180° of the room in front of you, though only a couple of the games for the video game system plugged into it could use that whole display. There was a movie I was going to see that was advertised as combining some philosopher with cute animated antics; for a bit I was running around trying to avoid its hummingbird-winged main character, who was pursuing me trying to give me an advertising pitch. It was perfectly polite when it finally caught up with me despite me swatting at it with a book.
Also at some point (I think before I went in to see the movie, with the woman I would later be flirting with being one of two people behind the ticket counter) I was emptying out my purse. Which held about four times as much stuff as should fit in it, including an ELECTRIC DRILL that ran even though it had a long cord that was plugged into nothing. When they saw that they took me down to the special MAKER LOUNGE instead of the movie.
I kinda want to go back to sleep and see if I can get back to flirting with the lady in the blue dress and the abstract jungle tattoo, but last night I told myself that I was going to quit sleeping all damn morning like I’ve been doing for a while. It’s almost eight so I guess I’m gonna get up.