Yup. It’s another entry where I talk about bad sleep and dreams and shit. Sorry.

You know, sometimes having the sort of sleep that I do, namely heavy and intense and with an REM rate approaching infinity (and beyond), is like being some kind of junkie or alcoholic, but without the parts which are fun and feel good.

No, I just get the parts where you wake up feeling like shit like you are hungover and spend the next while stumbling around and moaning like a strung out zombie Nick Nolte and have to fight and claw your way back to the vague semblance of humanity just to get back to what passes for “normal”.

And you know what? “Normal” ain’t that great. Normal, in fact, largely sucks, although there are nice bits and it could be a lot worse.

I am not quite sure I can put today’s dreaming into linear narrative yet, although it was quite interesting and details, so perhaps I should make the attempt.

Earliest (I think) I remember, I was with a group of people who were fleeing a horrible evil catastrophe, like an invasion of some kind. It was night, it was dark, and there was a distinct feeling that we were fleeing something like an invading army, possibly of alien origin.

We were fleeing through an area of fairly close together small villages. At some point, we decided we would rest for the night. As often happens in my dreams, the line between media and reality is blurred, and so for me, it is like I am playing a completely immersive video game, where my mind is entirely absorbed into the reality of the situation, yet I am also aware that I am playing a video game.

At one point, I even say to someone “I hated this part when I played this game on my PC” to somebody who is presumably watching me play, and yet, I am completely in the situation. There is no “screen” or “display”, I am seeing this war stricken world as though I was really there. And yet, I felt the kind of detachment I feel when playing a video game, like my participation in its reality was strictly voluntary, strictly “pretend”, and I could leave whenever I liked.

Talk about virtual reality…. it was so virtual, it was all in my head. On a couple of levels.

Within the game, I was quite anxious and frightened. I had a simple pistol in one hand, and a infe in the other. I was worried I would have to fight and kill. I knew I was more than prepared to kill in order to protect the people I was with, but I was really hoping I would not have to do it.

We stopped in a village which seemed to all be smallish family homes, and it’s night so it’s kind of cold, but we are too tired to do anything but lay down on the ground and sleep.

I should mention that I felt a distinct disconnection from this people, as though I was with them and my fate was the same as theirs, but I was not one of them. I also felt that I was quite fond of these people as well.

So I go to sleep a little off from the rest of them (yup, another dream in which I sleep… how weird is that, huh?) and when I wake up, I can’t find the rest of my group. They are nowhere to be seen. So there I am, lost. Happens a lot to me in dreams.

So I start walking around the village. I noticed that the houses are in rows (no streets, just rows) the rows alternate in orientation between orienting north-south and east-west.

I also start to wonder why we don’t just use the houses for shelter. In the dream, I know they are all abandoned because of the war, so they are just sitting there, open, and we could use them, guilt free. I ponder that maybe the problem would be that if people were inside them at night, they would turn the lights on, and the village would be all lit up and the invaders would know there were survivors there and come kill us.

But surely we could just leave the lights out, right?

Eventually, I hear some noises and follow them to find my group in a pitched battle with the invaders. I know I shoot and kill some of them, but I cannot for the life of me remember what they look like past a vague impression of thuggish stormtrooper type soldiers that were definitely not human.

Then the video game thing really kicks it into high gear, because some kind of “boss” shows up and the battle turns into something a lot like fighting one of those awful multi-stage bosses where you have to defeat all of its various forms and perform a bunch of sudden crazy tasks to win.

There was part where the boss splits into many smaller creatures and you have to defeat them all, and a part where the boss turns into these three holograms to taunt us and demand our surrender, and there is another part, the most visually impressive, where it turns into a dirt shark… a creature that swims through the soil like it was water and all you can see of it when it does so is its single white fin sliding through the surface.

All this time, I am fighting it, and using the same sorts of logic that I would use in trying to defeat a difficult boss in a video game, of the “oh, I see, I am supposed to do this” type.

Near the end of the dream, things go even crazier as it becomes something like a crazy, deadly game show, with me doing weird tasks like trying to find the one little brick on a wall of bricks that opens the next part of the game. (I just pressed all of them, one by one. I suck at searching. )

The very last thing involved people having to catch something like a beach ball covered in glitter.

So in conclusion, I play way too many fucking video games.