Nocturn Core (Abridged)

The dream began with me driving home in Texas, reportedly from my job. My parents still lived in their old house, so that was the neighborhood I went to. All of the stores in the small shopping center clustered around the Subway were gone. In their place was a huge supermarket. The parking lot was a mess of broken slabs of concrete. I went into the store, and Nicole called me. I could hear the cast of Glee in the background; she was watching it while talking to me. Just from the actors’ voices, I was able to reconstruct the episode in visual form in my head. I laughed when Will suddenly swept Emma off her feet in a rare moment of manliness. She giggled and pleaded with him to let her down. When he did, she calmed down a bit.

“What was that?” she asked. “Some kind of… fatherly instinct, Will?”

“I’m gonna beat my children…” He said it so calmly, so unabashedly! It was almost as though this was supposed to sound romantic. I cracked up laughing. The show went to a commercial break without a comment from anyone else. Nicole didn’t think it was funny at all, but I was enjoying the chance to see how pathological Will’s perception of life had become over the course of the show. I grabbed a can of pasta off a shelf and waved it around in the air as I joked with Nicole about how that was the best line in the whole episode. The can was covered in something sticky like orange juice, so I switched it with another one. I went straight to the checkout. I guess pasta was all I needed… A plump, black woman waved me over to her register. She swiftly processed my single item. When she printed a receipt for me to sign, I just wrote my first name. I carried my one grocery item in a bag back to my car. Instead of getting in the driver’s seat, I climbed into the back of the car… The air conditioning turned on as soon as I closed the door.

“I’m so glad it does that,” I murmured to myself in relief. It was a warm, humid night in Texas. I wondered briefly how it was possible for my car to do that, but I didn’t worry too much about it. I locked the door. I didn’t want to get mugged. Only then did I lean into the front of the car and turn it on. I quickly flipped on my lights and popped the car into drive, then spun around to the only exit onto the road I could see. My side of the exit was horribly ruined; huge slabs of concrete blocked the way. I swerved around it and angled the wheels so I could easily turn that way. I made a right onto the street once it was clear. Basically, the street was divided by a huge median with trees growing all over it, so in order to get to the correct side of the street, I had to make a U-turn about thirty yards down the road. I must note that this U-turn was impossibly tight; my car pivoted around the narrow, three foot wide tip of the median without any difficulties. I found myself in a turn-only lane going left and had to switch. Then I saw a yellow light.

Yellow, I thought. Yellow, yellow, yell – oh! I realized I was supposed to stop at the intersection up ahead! The light turned red, but I was still going too fast. I slid right into the middle of the intersection. Oops. I figured it was better to just keep going, so I put my foot back down on the accelerator. Almost as soon as I passed through the intersection, I saw a cop coming the other way. I was horrified. He must’ve seen me – how could he not? I knew he would pull me over as soon as he could turn around. I had to act swiftly. In order to evade the police, I planned to take an unusual route back home. I turned left onto a small street, disappearing from the main road before the cop could find me. This road bisected another in a place that looked like the suburbs of Chicago. I started talking to Ben on the phone. I didn’t have to hold it up… I could just hear his voice. This is probably a fortunate side-effect of using headphones when I’m on the phone lately. Anyway, Ben complained that it was snowing in Australia, but we somehow determined that it was actually raining because it was forty degrees in Brisbane. Ben pretended to be confused about the temperature. He said it was 40 to 100 degrees outside – first in Fahrenheit, but then in Centigrade. That didn’t sound right at all. If he was using the Celsius scale, much of that range would be intolerable, even lethal. I turned onto the next street. Traffic lights and driving in general were beginning to pose crippling difficulties. I couldn’t focus my eyes properly on the lights, and some kind of weird, yellow dot appeared in my field of vision to direct the car. On top of keeping the wheel straight, I had to keep this light in the middle of my perspective with my mind in order to keep the car going straight. Anytime I looked away from the middle of the road, the car turned in that direction. The only way to counter it was to turn the wheel in the opposite direction at the same time. As one can imagine, this wasn’t easy. It was incredibly difficult for me to multitask in this dream on top of everything else, so it’s no surprise that I went through three red lights in succession before finally stopping.

Ben explained that he needed help with a quest. The road took me along the edge of a massive, red curtain – the kind used in theaters. I knew there was an abandoned hospital inside. Ben needed to get into the hospital and retrieve something. I stopped the car, got out, and slipped under the heavy curtain. The hospital was dark, and many of the doors and windows were boarded up. Ben transformed into Goofy (Mickey Mouse). He started going to the main entrance, but I insisted that I knew which entrance was the right one to use. I had done this quest before, I said. Actually, I was just attempting it for the first time – but with Ben’s help, I knew we would be fine. We circled around the building to a small back door. Inside, we found two elevators and a door to a stairwell. The stairs were the obvious choice… The building probably wouldn’t have any electrical power to spare, considering the state it was in. Despite that, Ben went for the first elevator.

“I don’t think that’s going to work…” I said. He pushed a button. The elevator dinged at us as it opened. Nervously, I followed him in. “What if we get stuck in here? This is a bad idea… I hate elevators.” The door slowly closed. Ben picked a floor, and the elevator began to drop. The walls were made of mirrors. Staring at reflections of reflections of myself wasn’t helping my sanity. Ben apologized for choosing the elevator; he hadn’t intended to disturb me. We would take the stairs back up, he promised. When the elevator stopped, I stumbled out. Moving was difficult down here for some reason… Ben didn’t have any trouble, though. We were inside a small Minecraft level. The path curved around a pit of sharks before coming to a slide. I almost slid straight down, but there was a lava pit at the bottom! That would have meant my death. I had diamonds and quite a bit of iron in my inventory, so I was glad I hadn’t fallen. I had to slip into a tunnel on one side of the slide. I found it difficult to make any progress… I got my legs in the tunnel, but the rest of my wouldn’t move at a normal speed.

Ben started arguing with another guy in the room with the shark pit. The guy said that the official Minecraft system made dirt grow infinitely high over time, simulating growing grass. Anyone who still played the old Minecraft was in denial, he claimed. Ben made jokes about dirt reproducing like guinea pigs as he hopped across the shark pit. He ran past me into the tunnel. I followed him as a point of awareness as he jumped skillfully across a couple pools of lava, then trudged right through a tunnel half full with lava without taking any damage. I thought he was doing this because he had food to heal himself afterward, but I realized after he emerged that he was wearing chain mail. He was invincible! He came across some kind of harpy woman and didn’t realize she was an enemy for a few moments as she slapped him with her wings. He killed her in a few seconds.

My awareness returned to my body, and I followed after Ben. Since I didn’t have anything to protect me from the lava, I planned to build a path through it. When I got to the tunnel of lava Ben traversed before, however, I saw that it was just steaming water. I figured I would probably be okay… I waded to the other side without taking any damage. A puddle of water on the ground just past the tunnel (where Ben encountered the harpy before) took the shape of a woman. It was a water elemental. I struck her with a bolt of lightning, but the damage was paltry. She was resistant to magic, being a creature of magic herself. I knew cutting her wasn’t going to do me any good. What did I do in the past when I encountered these, I wondered? I vaguely remembered running. I considered calling Ben for help, but he was way ahead by now.

Nicole and I were playing on a Minecraft server together. We ventured into an unexplored area and found some strange, circular platforms floating in the ocean. They looked like targets. Assuming the administrator had plans for these, I decided building on them was pointless; the buildings would just get destroyed. We walked back in the other direction, and I found an old cabin I had built previously to survive a night. I decided I would stay there until morning. I was glad I found it when I did since skeletons were already patrolling behind it. I looked around the cabin and quickly discovered the basement. I couldn’t remember why I abandoned the cabin… Until I saw the creepers hiding in the basement, that is. There were at least seven of them, and they all noticed me. Only one jumped up to the ground level, though. I backed into a corner to try to force it to blow up where the damage would be minimal. I knew I couldn’t fight a creeper in this small space. Unfortunately, the creeper knocked out nine blocks on the south wall, exposing me to roaming zombies! The open space was three blocks high, so I quickly placed a line of wood across the middle to keep the zombies and creepers at bay. This didn’t protect me from skeletons or spiders, though. I tried to find materials to use without going into the basement. I tried typing “/give Nephanim diamonds” to see if I had operator rights on the server for whatever reason. The dream didn’t seem to care that I typed the command incorrectly. As I worried that someone would see the request for items and complain that I was cheating, I got a red error message back from the server. It said that I had received a warning from the staff, and the item request had been denied. Boo… I decided to brave the basement for some dirt. To my surprise, it was now empty. Dirt was better than nothing… I don’t know why I had thought to put diamond blocks up instead of something less valuable. Anyway, while I was down there, I found these long, skinny lego blocks and put them together to form a red and yellow striped wall. It still wasn’t wide enough. The corners of the hole were still open, and skeletons were shooting me. I saw that my health was empty. I was alive, but not for long. Another arrow hit, and my items burst from my body. Apparently, my spawn point was close tot he cabin even though I expected to have to run across the island. I carefully returned to the building, collected my belongings, and went on my way.

I met up with Nicole again, and we found a water purification plant beside a street. We filled buckets with water from the clean end and sampled it. The water was horrible… On top of that, we were stealing it. We laughed about all of this as we roamed some more. We found a car, I guess… Some people called Nicole and told her to pick things up from Chick-fil-A. We went there, but we didn’t buy anything for these people. Nicole spent $14 on something applicable to her diet. I saw that $5 of it went toward adding extra bacon. That plus my food and two drinks came out to $21.45. I misheard the amount, so I only pulled out a $20 bill. The drive-through was reversed as if we were in Europe, so I had to pay. To my immense surprise, when we pulled up to the window, the cashier handed us $21.45 instead of taking our money. Speechless, I put the money away. She passed our food over and closed the window. As Nicole drove off, we argued about what just happened. Nicole seemed to think she had gone to the wrong service window, but there was only one.

“They just paid us to take their food,” I said. “That’s all there is to it. It’s not really stealing if they don’t ask you for money… They didn’t ask you to pay when you ordered, right?” Of course not – the woman just said the total was $21.45. It really was our lucky day! Free water, free food, free money! As we continued driving, I became aware of another reality overlapping with this one. I was on a modern pirate ship as we sailed away from the coast. The farther away we went, the more I worried about dying and being too far away to retrieve my belongings. I remembered that I could set up to ten warp points, though, so I kept resetting one warp point as we continued south of the shore. My crew mates discovered stitches on my arms just below the elbow. I explained that I cut them off in order to switch my arms with Nicole’s. I would probably have scars for the rest of my life. For some reason, my crew decided this was traitorous, so they dragged me toward the back of the boat. I was shoved overboard. As I flailed in the ocean, I returned to my former reality. I was in the same car, but my mom was driving instead of Nicole. Nicole and I moved from the middle seats to the back and sprawled out on top of a bunch of Chelsea’s stuffed animals. I kept lulling Nicole into sleep so I could carry her. It worked. She almost fell into a sea of stuffed animals behind the seat, but I caught her.

Meanwhile, I swam back to the ship in the pirate reality. I don’t know why I bothered to go back there, but it was the only place I knew to go. Once I was safe, I switched realities again. Nicole stirred. She looked like she had lost all sense of time and place. She wasn’t wearing a shirt, either. I told her about the overlapping realities. She seemed impressed. I tried to have my way with her, but she refused. I kept asking until she suggested something else. She turned me into a child and herself into a babysitter (although we were like small action figures instead of people). We were going to roleplay. While we entangled ourselves together under a thin blanket, I began to wonder where we were going. We had been driving in one direction for a while. I looked at my mom beyond the shadows of the blanket. She made eye contact with me in the rear view mirror. I saw an infinite stretch of interconnected highways in front of us. There were street signs all over the place, and no matter how far we drove, the dream was always able to fill in the space with the same amount of detail. It could continue indefinitely, I realized. We were in a dream. If nothing changed, my mom would keep driving forever! I tried to use my intent to bring us to WritersCube’s canvas void by car so could get out and try teleporting to his Monolith Gardens dreamscape. I didn’t want to bring the car along. Strangely, I lost some time here… That doesn’t happen very often. The next scene I remember was non-lucid, but there wasn’t a rough jump in the dream like there usually is.

I sensed that a police car would pull up beside us on the highway soon. I was lying across the area behind the back seat with all of Chelsea’s stuffed animals. I knew this wasn’t legal – for one, I didn’t have a seat belt on – so I tried to keep still to avoid drawing attention to myself. Sure enough, a cop car merged onto the highway right beside us. My mom ordered me to come sit in the middle seats once we passed the patrol car. She explained where we were going at last: to a mental hospital. I understood immediately that I had been tricked. I grasped at fleeting questions in my head, but I didn’t know how to respond. I would be kept in solitary confinement for my own good, she said.

“This will keep you from polluting your mind on the computer all day,” my mom continued. “Think of it like this: you’re decontaminating your mind and body until you can function like a normal person in society. You don’t need all that bacteria.” I wasn’t sure I agreed (if I even understood what she meant). It didn’t occur to me that I was free to say no. Rather, I wondered how I would finish school… We pulled onto the side of the road beneath an overpass where a bunch of other cars were parked. My mom and dad got out of the car (when did my dad show up?!) and started moving luggage to a man sitting on a white couch. My dad put all of Chelsea’s stuffed animals in a suitcase.

“Do you really need all of this?” he asked me.

“Those are Chelsea’s, not mine. Ask her.” I looked over and saw that the guy on the couch hand his hand on a zipper. I thought he was opening a suitcase to see what was inside. “Don’t screw with my stuff!” I yelled. Everyone stared at me, clearly prepared for me to attack one of them. I realized the guy was just zipping up a compartment in the bag that had been open. “Sorry. I thought you were going through my stuff.”

“Don’t you want these gloves?” my dad asked, showing me a pair of new winter gloves. I saw an old pair of gloves on top of one of my suitcases. “Those old gloves are falling apart… These are flame-resistant, too, so they won’t burn in the summer.” I quietly accepted the gloves. I still felt awkward because of my previous outburst. I walked over to a woman sitting in a chair. She had a computer monitor for a head. She asked if I had any questions about the hospital.

“Yeah, will I have internet access…?” I asked. No response. “Because… Well, that’s how I keep in touch with people… And I keep a dream journal online.” At least one good thing came of this, I realized. I would be able to devote most of my energy to dreaming. I had argued briefly with my mom about this in the car, but the more I thought about it, the less I felt like struggling. If everyone felt I belonged in a mental hospital, I wasn’t going to fight it… The computer woman still didn’t respond to my question, though! I scrolled through a list of frequently asked questions on her screen. It seemed the hospital made every effort to provide patients with internet access, so I was basically content. An IRC window popped up. I saw “Tande” at the top of the chat and thought Kelsey was running the hospital until I scrolled down and saw Nicole’s IRC username in the user list, too. “Oh… IRC just recognized me as Elita.” I closed the chat and walked away from the computer woman.

I heard a girl screaming behind a closed door. When I opened it, I saw a large rat jumping around in a garage. The girl was terrified of it. I grabbed a broom and said I would save her, but I had to wait for the rat to move away from the door so it wouldn’t see me. The rat chased her into the corner. Then, it came back toward me. I slammed the broom down on its back, pinning it to the ground. If I could just hold it there, I could kill it with something… It was a perfect hit, but this rat was tough; a broom wasn’t enough to bash the life out of it. The rat squirmed free of the broom. It went straight to its attacker, jumping onto my chest and sinking its teeth through my clothes. I swatted at it. As I awakened, I sat up frantically in bed to get away from the dream rat. I did this twice before I realized I was in a different reality.

I logged onto a Minecraft server and built a strange bridge. It went in loops and snaked around instead of following the most efficient path. I seemed to be limited to a fairly small area, but the buildings reached much higher into the sky than normally possible. After completing my bridge, I returned to the ground to prepare a new weapon. I wondered if I could make a crossbow… I tried a bunch of combinations of items with no luck. When I arranged five normal bows in the rough shape of a crossbow, I was able to make one. I sensed that, like in Ragnarok, I could refine the weapon if I found the necessary ore. I went looking for phracon to use on it. MadMonkey from Dreamviews walked up to me, and I thought he was going to kill me for my items, so I shot him three times and killed him. He didn’t lose anything, so he didn’t seem to mind. I wandered around a bit and got into a fight with another player. He had diamond armor, but I was still able to kill him. The problem came when his friends teamed up against me… They started using super powers – shooting beams of blue light at me, moving at twice normal speed, and absorbing my health, for example. I tried to activate my own super powers, but it seemed I didn’t have any yet. Lame! I decided I would log off before they killed me rather than lose all of my belongings. Unfortunately, I died just before I disconnected. I saw my stuff spill onto the ground before the client closed.

The dream jumped. I logged back onto the server in a safe area at the top of a gigantic skyscraper. I started jumping to increase my acrobatics skill (as though this was an Elder Scrolls game). I thought that if I leveled up my skills, I would be able to use super powers like the others. One of the guys I fought earlier mentioned my name in the chat.

“Nice fight!” I said to him. The people who killed me seemed friendly. The only one I didn’t get along with was the guy who attacked me in the first place.