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.

Programming and Dancing

I had a dream that I was working on a challenging computer programming problem at the end of an enormous golden ballroom. I looked over my shoulder and walking toward me were two of my friends in beautiful gowns. One of them (who I only knew through the internet) was wearing a dark red that glistened and swirled with a satin shimmer. My other friend was wearing a deep black that seemed to annihilate the light for several inches around it. The sleeves and neckline were lace.

After crossing the empty ballroom to get to where I was, they tried to get me to stop working on the computer problem. They really didn't understand how important it was, and how close I was to having a breakthrough. I really needed to concentrate and began to feel a little sad.

The girl in black wanted me to dance, and although I didn't want to dance, I did want to spend time with her. I told her that I would catch up with them after I finished, which could happen any moment.

They walked away, and before they had crossed the midpoint of the ballroom my debugging had finally come up without any major errors and to my surprise the sample data had gone through properly and the file it exported matched the expected output perfectly.

I walked away from the computer, my footsteps echoing a contrast to the tiny pecking sound of retreating high-heels. The girl in red whirled around and shuffled as quickly as she could in her dress toward me. While the girl in black walked at a regular pace toward us, the girl in red made a running jump into a hug and latched on.

The girl in black stopped a short distance away and crossed her arms with an expectant look crossing her face. That moment, the vision of her, a beautiful darkness against the sunset amber shades of the ballroom, hung in time. I started to feel embarrassed with the girl in red in my arms, and I woke up.