Bubble

My dream starts as sort of a nightmare. The nightmare itself is jumbled and confused - there's not a clean narrative. It's mostly short, quick clips of action strung together and viewed from a 3rd person POV. Mud and rain; earth sliding into a river, pulling people down with it... switch to what seems like a motel and some sequences that seem like they're out of a slasher horror flick, people running in fear, and severed limbs and blood everywhere. It mostly seems like it's just my brain tossing up whatever seems disturbing and frightening at the moment.

Because of how disjointed it is, it's failing to really frighten or disturb me. My mind starts to get more and more distanced from what's going on, and starts paying less attention to it. I gain lucidity in one of the motel/dorm rooms while two women are arguing with each other. They look straight out of the 80s - one has bleached hair teased up a mile high and fake orange tanner, and the other is a brunette with a ponytail and teased bangs. As soon as I realize this is a dream, I am no longer a disembodied observer. There's an oval mirror on the wall - I run up to it and look at myself in the mirror in order to reaffirm that I now have a physical presence.

I immediately crouch on the floor and start running my fingers through the carpet in order to solidify my surroundings. Things seem to be fading, so I stand up and produce a hand mirror from behind myself and examine myself in it. The two women have stopped arguing and are looking at me. I feel embarrassed about them potentially thinking that I'm just extremely vain (despite the fact that they're just dream characters), so I shrug and tell them, "I'm just making sure I still exist."

They lose interest in me, and I lose interest in them, because I've decided that since my scene changes haven't gone so well lately, maybe I'll just mold my current surroundings into what I want. I pull up the software interface for 3D Studio Max and start modeling furniture for the room. Despite being a motel room, it has no bed, so I decide to experiment with creating one. I begin working on it as if it's a 3D model for a video game.

The two women have faded away. I minimize the "software" I'm working with to check and see if the bed has appeared. It has, and looks very solid, but it's the plain solid white of a 3D model that has been imported into some engines but doesn't have a texture linked to it (or the texture isn't loading).

I decide I'll texture it later, once I've gotten the hang of this, and decide to start working on one of the windows. I "import" it into my software and begin tweaking it. The window is a little bit tougher - it resists conforming to what I want.

The dream fades. Eventually, another one starts, but it's non-lucid. I'm watching a bunch of characters in a video game and "piloting" some of them, and the game is sort of Harvest Moon-y but instead everybody is little Lego people and they're going to classes at a university. One of the landslide scenes from the prior nightmare replays, but with little Lego people instead of realistic people. The character I'm piloting is supposed to get a date for a festival coming up and has until 5 a.m. the day of the festival, but because of the landslide, I don't manage to complete the objective and watch the festival play out without a date. The characters go to class, and the professor is very boring. The textbook is 900 pages long, but the professor is focusing on a 4 page section of it. The students have smuggled some pot edibles into class, and when the professor goes to another room for a few minutes, they all leave class to get high. The character I'm piloting stays in class. When the prof gets back, he seems bummed that nobody cares about the lecture.