WhyAmINaked

Oof, a long one.

I dreamed I was reading a comic -- the art style is very detailed and "serious," kind of like a Hong Kong comic, except redone through Illustrator/Photoshop with color and detailing effects -- about a series of vignettes involving a fire demon(?) that took shape as a large snake. I distinctively remember the text was gibberish symbols, kind of like the ZOSO symbols Zeppelin used. I kept flipping through the book to get to cool parts that I knew was there, but I can never get to the page I want to. But eventually, I get to a particular scene, where the snake demon is in its pit-cave, and it is coiled around a Warrioress who, presumably, was there to vanquish it. She laments "hundreds of years of training... for nothing?" which is the first time I can recall dreaming of legible text. She was dressed inappropriately.

This somehow bleeds into a DOS-era graphics character-select screen, and the warrioress was one of the 8 or 10 fantasy-setting characters you can choose. But after browsing through them, the characters came to life (looking like real people), and I'm suddenly also with them in a Shenanigans-styled restaurant where we are all the staff. A Pixar-animated bird was flying in the ceilings, and the lighting was dim, but pleasantly adequate. It felt like we are in a Seth Rogen comedy, but Rogen is nowhere to be found. He is the luckiest one of us all.

It felt like we spent a long time preparing the menu, which were things that you'd find in a Whole Foods. I know the vibe of the food -- salad bars, soup bins, etc. -- but I don't know what specifically they are. But after wandering around the restaurant, I somehow end up in an apartment that I knew belonged to me.

The apartment was in a small city like fucking Wenatchee or Monroe or something, but it also felt like I was in a city with a cool arts and culture vibe. Anyways, my apartment is sparsely decorated, and is quite spacious. I recall a main room, a bedroom with a bathroom (or, bath "space," as there are no doors between my bedroom and the bathroom. I don't notice this part immediately, by the way.), and a kitchen. I don't have the lights on, and I entered alone, but then I walk back out to the main room/kitchen and I see a conflux of my mom and L from work playing Hexic, and having a ton of trouble "getting" it. But just as it looks like Mom/L is about to achieve something my dad comes running in and presses random buttons to cause Mom/L to lose. For the lulz.

When I look out my bedroom window, I can see that I'm in a mid-sized city, and it's night out. Suddenly, I'm on a motorcycle down those same streets, going at a nice steady clip. I think I was looking for somewhere to get a bite to eat, and I'm travelling down a really, really long road. I zip past huge buildings, hotels, structures, and at one point a walled-off medieval European castle that also resembled Jabba's Palace a little. I eventually end up at a University, and after riding past the quad, I end up in a grass field that has a steep drop that leads to more grass fields, and the rest of the/another bigger city can be seen in the distance. I now have my comforters with me, and I wanted to lie down and sleep under the stars, but I chose not to because I know students will come by in the morning and it's gonna be awkward to see a guy sleeping in the middle of the campus.

I immediately end up back in my apartment, and this is when I noticed the bathroom. About this time, I wake up and actually have to pee in real life.

I dreamed I was a sloth (or a sloth-like creature) in captivity, possibly a zoo or a laboratory. I'm sharing food with my captive neighbor, a slow loris. Call it a leap of logic, but I'm going to say spending Saturday watching videos of slow lorises with R may have influenced this dream, because I knew it was the same, sad-looking slow loris that I'm slowly handing food to. Except in this reality, the slow loris is genuinely sad, and I felt an immense desire to free it from its predicament.

Scene change, and I'm suddenly a fugitive in the city that looks like it was an animation background from the 90's Batman cartoons. Though I know we are the same "person," I wasn't a sloth anymore -- in fact, I am exceedingly fast and agile in this scene, parkouring my way across rooftops, wall-jumping up buildings, and flipping over signs and billboards. At one point during my joyride around the city, I found the time to dunk a basketball on a hardwood court in the middle of a game that I was playing in, even though I'm being supposed to be fleeing.

Speaking of, I don't know who/what unseen forces are pursuing me, but I know that I'm running into a bottleneck, and I'll eventually be caught. Only my incredible dream-athleticism that would get me killed in real-life is saving me, but all I'm doing is delaying the inevitable. I eventually wake up before I know what happened.

I'm in a court of some sort, and I am arguing with what must be the judge (or some sort of authority figure of the law). It was a heated or acrimonious argument, nor do I think I was in any sort of legal trouble (I think. I vaguely remember I wasn't. I think I felt like irritation more so than confrontation in the argument, but, no, fuck that guy).

The scene changes, and now the judge is a warlord from an ancient Chinese setting, and I was one of his generals. Eventually, I deduced that I was the general Zhao Yun, a historical person who has more impact as a literary figure than actual. Either way, it's kinda great, since he's kind of the guy I read most as a kid and grew up wanting to (and still aiming to) be like. The judge/warlord and I aren't fighting now, but I suppose the lingering animosity from before made it uncomfortable now that I'm a subordinate. So, no, fuck him again.

I don't know when I got an army, but all of a sudden I'm leading an army. We land on a beach, and the setting is like a watercolor illustration of a mystical, divine realm. The setting reminded me of pictures in a storybook, and suddenly, I realized that not only am I a character IN a storybook, I also have Dream Knowledge that I come out winning at the end of this story. So I set off on my journey (my army disappeared now, by the way. Way to ditch me, guys) towards my inevitable destiny(?), but after a long build-up preparing to set off, I wake up and the story ends. I assume this is what the first Hobbit movie was like.

Now that I have time to think about it, I'm not sure if, when I was a general, I am leading an army to conquer a peaceful land of mystical creatures (like Avatar), or am I providing reinforcements to said mystical creatures (like Avatar after all pretension that a story exists is over).

This is the first time I'm attempting to consciously remember and record my dream. I'm treating this as both an experiment and an experience into existen... fuck it, I just wanna record this.

I can barely remember my dream, but it was colorful. That's... about it? It was like walking through a mist in a horror movie and looking at streetlights through foggy lenses. The edges of my vision were foggy like I'm looking through goggles. The difference is, streetlights don't pulsate ever so slightly, with each pulse emitting a small tuft of light that explodes in a yellow flash, but slowly fades into the darkness while fading into more somber tones that match the black background.

My friend once had a bad trip, and said at the time, he felt like he was riding a roller coaster, and there was a being made of light that he knew was me. I like to joke that he discovered my true form as a Helix of Light guiding him like Virgil through a chaos-hell of seizures and infinite time. It made me feel like a Final Fantasy End Boss.

ANYWAYS, that's what I thought of when I recorded this.