This morning, I had a dream in which I was involved in a sort of Game in which real life happens, and IS happening, all the time. All the characters and I age slightly, in this game. I start out as a junior high kid. Each choice my friends and I make has consequences, or benefits, a short while later. I’m walking along, trying to meet a specific person, but I don’t really know who. Each ‘Section’ of the game seems to have an ethereal ‘loop’ quality to it. Things will happen two or three times, but in minutely different ways, so if I don’t learn what I’m supposed to learn or make friendships I’m supposed to make, a different (incorrect? hard to tell) outcome will occur.
The game starts, and I’m standing in a soccer field, filled with a marching band and a bunch of people milling around. It’s a beautiful sunny day. If I make it past the Marching Band section, and meet the people I’m supposed to meet, I can progress to the Outdoor Market section. If I make it past the Outdoor Market section, I get to the Street Fair section. . Each section is perhaps a hundred yards across, separated by a paved street. But when I’m in each section, I don’t see any of the other sections until I’m ready to move on to the next one.
I walk through the Marching Band, and I meet up with one of my friends. We narrowly miss the opportunity for him to introduce me to a girl he knows, so we wait for a few minutes until the ‘loop’ repeats itself, and she marches back by us again. This time, we match her stride and he introduces me to her, and she steps out of the Marching Band to join us. Her clothes change too, and now instead of a band uniform, she’s wearing jeans and a hoodie. She has very short hair and plastic-framed glasses. She joins me and we walk to the Outdoor Market section of the game together.
We meet up with a handful of a different and slightly older group of my friends, who are unusually tall, athletic and good-looking. We’ve become slightly older ourselves; perhaps early high school age. We sit and join my friends at a table. One of my friends is laughing in a very strange and evil way. In slightly slow motion, the dream’s “camera” zooms in on a gold coin that he’s holding between his left thumb and middle finger. The light reflects off the coin, the camera pulls back, and he uses his right hand to flick it directly into the eye of a girl across the room. I’m horrified by this, but I notice that she doesn’t seem to be hurt in any way, but it seems to make her slightly less attractive somehow. The guy who is talking to her ends his conversation with her, and walks away to talk with someone else instead. I get up to leave, because I’m afraid of the “consequences” this will have for me in the Game if I stay with this particular group of friends. The girl I came with decides to stay. I get up from the table and walk from the Outdoor Market section, through the Street Scene section, and clear over to the Waterfront Park section of the game.
This section looks a little like the RiverPlace Marina. There is a wide, short sidewalk with small circular tables on each side. There’s a grassy area that goes down to a river, and this is one of the boundaries of the Game. I walk down the sidewalk and along the river, sort of looking around, and just before I move back into the Street Scene section another girl joins me. She is slightly taller than me, and she has a similar look to the earlier girl I met previously, with very short hair and glasses, except she’s slightly better-looking and a little bit older—late high school or early college, as am I—and she seems a little bit like a Guide. We silently walk together, side by side, into the Street Scene section of the game.
As soon as we walk into the new scene, we are in our early to mid-twenties. We see people we know all around us, but this Section of the game feels more oppressive and slightly Orwellian. There are military guards walking around everywhere, and there are many streets down which we are not allowed to walk. It’s also different in that we can see the other Sections. If we look to the left, we can see the sunny soccer field where the Marching Band is walking in the distance. The soccer field morphs into the Outdoor Market, which is next to the Street Scene, and to our right we can see the Park, back the way we entered. Some people we know (two or three of whom I know from college in real life—Pat L. and two or three I wasn’t friends with, but I recognize them) are hanging around on the street corner, dressed like thugs, threatening people. They’re making jokes and speaking crudely, both to other people and to us. One of them is throwing a tire high in the air and letting it roll down the side of a fence, where it rolls back to him. We don’t know if we can trust them or not, so we decide that we can’t. This is all unspoken between the two of us, by the way. We can each sort of tell what the other is thinking, and if we can’t, we can gesture or guide each other through various scenarios.
We are starting to become anxious to leave this Game. We are now in our middle to late twenties, and we are now the same height, interestingly. Our relationship seems to have changed by now as well. It’s slightly unclear if we are merely companions or something more, because we hold hands sometimes as we walk, but we’re anxious and intent on leaving. We walk down one street, and are stopped by guards. We turn back and walk down another street, only to find that it has been blocked by the canal that becomes the River in the Park Section. The bridge between the two Sections is out and we are trapped. We look across to the Park Section and see people–Extras in the Game rather than ‘real’ people–strolling lazily in the sunshine. We turn and see another exit near a railroad crossing and start to run toward it. Two guards, then more and more, yell something to us, the crossing arm starts to lower, the bells start ringing and the red lights start flashing as we approach, but we make it across, moments before a train comes rushing by behind us. We smile, squeeze each other’s hand and breathe a sigh of relief.
We run along the edge of the Street Scene section, clear around to the edge of the Park Section, past a bunch of people who see us but who can no longer reach us. On one side of us is the Game, on the other side is black, empty space. We are unsure what to do. We can’t find an Exit, but we don’t seem to be part of this Game anymore, either.
* * * * *
Very strange and life-like dream, in that each person you’d meet would affect not just you, but lots of other people, and that would affect the choices you would make. But nothing you would do would have an effect right away; it would take a while before you realized if you had made a good decision or not.
The ‘action’ was very slow and deliberate, but I always felt detached from it, at least in the early parts. (Gee, I wonder if that’s a metaphor for my childhood. . .) The later parts, when my female companion and I were trying to leave the Game, were very fast-paced and tense, and it all felt a bit like the Truman Show at the end, where things start happening randomly, just for the sake of stopping us and trying to keep us in the game.
I woke up at 5:15 in the morning, and I instantly went to the computer and started writing this down, to make sure I got the feel of this dream right. It was a very interesting and vivid one.
