Into the Whirlpool

(July 11 2012)

I'm playing Spelunky again. The background of the level shifts with my character's movement: if I walk or run a single step, a tile in the background changes (explodes?) into something else. Thus my movement is key to escaping the level, since only by sufficiently shifting the environment will I reveal the exit.
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I'm dreaming about Persona 5. There are at least three acoustic (voice and guitar) songs on the soundtrack, supposedly sung by Eri Kawai even though the vocalist doesn't sound like her. I see some music video clips of these songs, and "Eri" is in them - she's a short Japanese woman with bowl-cut black hair and a nice smile that reminds me a little of Makoto Ogawa from Morning Musume. One of the songs is called "The Full Moon Song"(?) and is apparently played during high-tension scenes.

The game itself involves terrorist attacks and actually feels a lot closer in tone to a mainline Shin Megami Tensei game. One attack involves giant globs of poison that are dropped from the sky and become poison rain; once they hit the ground they instantly turn into rivers of poison that burn through the cityscape like acid. I can see people scattering, and there is a car whose driver somehow loses control to such an extent that it goes careening down a roadway, taking out a whole bunch of people. There is a second attack that I think involves gangsters? and a third attack I don't remember anything about.
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I'm at an office party where I'm saying goodbye to some coworkers who are leaving the company. The party is actually being held in my apartment, though. I'm sitting by the door watching people leave because I don't feel like being social. I know that most everyone in the room is going to an afterparty once this one's over, and (since I know I should probably go to it) I'm hoping that someone will reach out to me and ask whether I want to join them. I'm aware that I'll need to take the initiative, though.

Kept seeing fragments of the mines in Spelunky, pixels and all. There was a female character and I kept wondering if she was a dream guide, but I never really got a good look at her.

Walking through the hallway of my middle school, past the library. I know I'm an adult but still find myself a little confused about whether I'm attending classes here. I reach the front hallway and head down to Miss Powell's room. There's a kind of eager anticipation at the idea of seeing her again after so long.

I'm inside the classroom and I don't see Miss Powell, but on a desk in the middle of the room is a shallow plastic bowl filled with chocolate-frosted cupcakes. I take a couple and see that there's also some kind of additional chocolate topping in the bowl that's meant to go on top of the cakes. I start to take some of this, but as I do I realize that there's actually no topping in the bowl; I'm just picking up more cupcakes. The bowl's almost empty, and I'm not even sure I want to eat any of them.