Virtual Insanity

I dreaming that I was in a virtual reality world. I was on a dock in a dark room that opened up to other rooms on all sides. Each of the rooms around it were exactly the same except rotated at random 90 degree turns from each other. The rooms continued infinitely in all directions.

There was a merman at the end of each dock sitting on a comfortable custom seat, and there were lots of people coming through this world to see.

After becoming bored of the merperson I asked a girl to dance. She stepped up on to one of the dock's wooden pegs because she was pretty short and we began to dance. She kept her face away when I went in for a kiss so I decided to progress more slowly. I held her close with my hands at the small of her back, and after a while she pulled me even closer and grabbed my ass with both hands. I copied her and we danced a bit harder with our hips locked.

Eventually when she had her head up I kissed her on the lips lightly and we continued dancing. We were interrupted be a fight between two people happening nearby. The person who won the fight was being obnoxious and disruptive so I stopped dancing, grabbed a trenching tool from a hardware bag on the dock and swung it horizontally at his face. It dug in deeply, and he fell off the dock in to the water and turned in to an underwater plant. I went in the water and dug the shovel in to it, slicing it in half, and it disintegrated in to a green haze. When I got back up on the dock, the people watching were concerned that I might have done enough damage to hurt him in real life, even though I had only killed him in the virtual reality game. Either from greater knowledge of the game or cold indifference, I wasn't concerned in the least.

It turned out that the person I had just mercilessly killed was in control of the server and he came back and charged after me with a crazed, illogical intensity. He threw spells at me that melted the parts of me they hit with a kind of space-warping shock wave. It was as if they rearranged the matter in a golf-ball sized piece of me, and created a large visual distortion like I had been hit with a ball of semi-transparent mercury that splashed where it hit and left a dark cloud in its wake. I decided to switch to another server that was running the same map.

The one I went to was mainly empty, but there was a list of pictures on the wall of non-player, simulated characters that could be summoned as friendly adventurers to accompany you. There were three long rows, and the bottom halves of the faces of the people on the list were obscured by a large blue cloth draped across the entire row. In one of the pictures the girl had a sparkle in only one eye and I recognized her immediately, but I decided that summoning a computer simulation of her would be just too creepy, and I decided to walk around the server to try to find a real person.

While wandering, I ran in to the guy who had attacked me earlier. He was following me across servers, and had control over this one and all the ones running this particular map. For some reason I was unable to disconnect, and he changed the map to something resembling a prison compound. I ran out the door of the main building immediately, and on to a long set of wide steps that led in a curving path to a different set of buildings. The steps were red clay, and the sides were white adobe topped with bright green plants. It seemed that the entire path was cut through dense foliage on either side.

He attacked me on the stairs with a new array of projectile spells that shot at me extremely quickly. I could only move a few inches in the time between the flash of the shot and the time it hit me.

I ran in to the nearest building and it was filled with giant boxes of office supplies. One box was full of note cards, starting with the small 300 packs, which were grouped in to bundles of three, which in turn were grouped in bulk-shippable bunches of 18, and so on until it was a unit about thirty feet square and one story tall.

The revengeful maniac sent four people after me. One was too slow and stayed behind, but the other three began to catch up with me. I convinced them to join me, and we hid on top of one of the latge boxes by lying flat. The many was far off, wandering around and coming closer, wondering where everyone had gone.

I left the three there and made my way across the tops of the densely-spaced boxes toward a wall. When I got to the wall, I saw a 2ft gap between the boxes and the wall, so I got down there and followed the wall away from the entrance and toward the back. On my way, I passed a clear box filled with old televisions with giant gray curved glass fronts, fully three feet diagonal. Once I reached the back corner, I saw a small gap I could squeeze though to get outside. I went through and, finally safe, woke up.

An Uncharacteristic Dream

I was playing a video game and quickly became a part of it. I was soaring through a huge city at night in torrential rain. Everything was in foreboding shadow, lit only by the people who were still awake in the dead of night, and even then the light was muffled by curtained windows.

I landed silently on the second story of an apartment high-rise and looked in the window. My goal was to kill everyone in the room, except a woman who was sitting on her bed. Maybe the woman would see the world as I did, after searching in futility for a meaning and eventually finding no answers, only an enhanced sense of cold reality. There was a man inside, dressed sharply in a suit as if he had just gotten back from a date somewhere nice, and the woman had a small living doll at her feet.

I burst in through the window and whey were so stood perfectly still, paralyzed with fear. I had no weapons, so I looked through the drawers in the dresser and found a knife as long as my forearm in a shallow drawer, sitting in foam shaped to fit it snugly. I turned and lunged, burying the knife upside down just above the man's belt and wrenching it upward to the base of his ribcage in fluid succession, causing him to lurch off his feet. I then spun around, knife tearing crookedly from his body, and beheaded the doll as the man spun off his feet into the floor, sputtering unintelligible last words.

I left the woman in shock and tears, and glided to the balcony where I had landed. I stood there, soaking in the rain, until I saw the woman run to the phone in the kitchen to call the police, and began to climb the building. They would be here any minute now. It made sense to me that going up the building would be a much less obvious way to escape.

At the top of the highest balcony, I armed the grappling gun I was carrying on my back and shot it up toward the top of the building. It slipped and fell off the top ledge, but caught on something on a landing four stories above me. I pulled myself up onto the ledge, and saw that some villains I knew were in an alcove talking and taking refuge for the night.

There were seven of them, four female and three male, with me making eight villains in the city in total. One of the villainesses had the power of ice. She had wispy white hair and other than a shattered white scar one side of her jaw line, the rest of her was translucent as a dark crystal glass, and parts of her shone with sparkling highlights against the shadows like a black polished stone with distorted lights from distant windows passing through her as she moved. Knowing that I had no powers of my own, she gave me an assault rifle as a gift.

We took a group photo and started talking about our motives. With the sirens below beginning to converge on the building, I stated, "I feel no joy in killing. I do it for the chase," and I took a running jump off the edge of the landing.

I hit the pavement solidly on my hands and feet. Surrounding me were not the police as I had expected, but a band of thugs. The ones in front of me drew their knives, and began to close in. I drew my loaded semiautomatic weapon and began to shoot the ones behind me so that I had a direction to escape. I took most of them down as I retreated from the initial ambush point, but several of them continued after me no matter how many rounds I fired at them. As they got closer I began to panic and fire less accurately, blowing off the skin from arms and shoulders where I had previously embedded bullets in their heads or body. The ones that ceaselessly came after me were missing skin on their faces, blood soaking their clothes, and several were missing at least a hand, but they came after me with their knives regardless. I threw my gun at them, since I was out of ammunition, and it collided with one of them with a sickening crunch and scream as it broke his fleshless jaw. This bought me some time to gain some distance on them. I ran into a nearby residential building to hide, and suddenly the dream shifted viewpoints.

I was now an old man who long ago was the leader of a gang like the one outside. I hid the woman who had just rushed into my home on my balcony by having her lie flat. The balcony was very old and poorly constructed. When it was built, the balcony was mainly intended for growing plants, so it wasn't really large enough for anyone to step outside on to. I had a vase with bamboo growing in it and some miscellaneous junk from the house rusting out there, but I shoved the vase to a corner and there enough room for the girl. The floor of the balcony was several inches lower than the doorway leading to it, so she could lay there with a the mat over her without being spotted. The gang searched my house, but they knew who I was, and out of respect they didn't ransack the place. Eventually they left, without finding my new guest. When the coast was clear, I went to ask her what had happened.

Master of Time

I had a cool dream where time slowed down when I tried to do stunts in the air. I would jump up and then have time to figure out what to do.

After doing flips over things and spinning wildly in the air for a while, I raced my friend to class. I ran low to the ground, using my hands to pull myself forward and up if I stumbled forward on the slippery ground. My friend said CH2CHCOOH and the formula appeared on a bus that was blocking our path up ahead. We went around it in different directions and arrived at our destination nearly simultaneously.

Once, there a familiar looking kid said, "You know what else (referring to the chemical my friend brought up) makes you run fast? Nutella." I said, "that's ironic, since I didn't eat breakfast." I opened the door and my friend pushed me through the halls at lightning speed to a door labeled PSY. I knew I didn't have that class, but he did, but he continued to push me into the dry brown room and I saw a man who must have been the teacher.

Gambler

I was playing cards with a man at a party in a large, luxurious house. I put down a card and he became angry and in an instant kings, queens and jacks rose from the table and filled my vision in a flurry of cards. From the floating orb of cards before me an ace with a picture of a black lotus worked its way to the front, staying stable in the center of my vision.

A bullet came whizzing through the very center of the card and narrowly missed the side of my head. The cards fell away and the man was standing with the long smoking barrel of a gun aimed just above my left ear. I bolted for the door and made my way outside and ran to the driveway when an automated voice said, "Warning! $500,000 in the truck!"

I noticed that truck was red as I dove under a slowly opening garage door to hide, but the door snapped shut quickly behind me to prevent my escape. The man in his black and white suit opened the door to the garage from the house looking for me, and I ran to the door to the side of the house with the man coming after me. To get to the back of the house would be a long, straight run, and I would surely be shot, so I went to the front of the house to see if I could get back in the garage and into the truck. The garage door was open again, but I heard the man inside and woke up.