sanity is relative

A strange title for a strange dream. It started in a canyon-ish cave system, kind of like the red rock area in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade where the hidden temple was at the end of the movie. It seems like I and some companions were hiding, but I don't remember what from. I found this smallish critter that had a really fat body but was very agile, and it climbed all over me. I was worried because it was a wild animal and wasn't sure what it was going to do. It seemed quite taken with me though, and when it reached my face, it started licking my lips like there was no tomorrow. At least it wasn't trying to kill me... it was almost like a mother trying to wash a kid's face. I managed to get the thing off my face and it contented itself with a deathgrip on my hand and licked my fingers instead. Guess it thought I needed a bath.

The next thing I remember was later in the dream, don't know what happened to the licking-happy critter. I was standing in a stone courtyard that appeared to be in disrepair. My brother Jamie was there, and we found a turtle near a round stone fountain that was set in the middle of the courtyard. The turtle was all green, like he had been dyed or painted, and the color itself seemed to inhibit the turtle's movements. Then his shell started to fall apart, it came off entirely and broke into pieces. Either me or Jamie put them back on and they seemed to refit together and begin healing. I think we left the turtle on the ledge by the water, afraid that putting him in the water would mess with his shell.

Then I remember playing EverQuest, as my dwarf warrior, but it was like I was really in the game. I was killing stuff by myself for fun, I remember being in a cave dungeon (I though it was a redone version of Sol B if anyone plays the game and knows the reference) and I killed three orcs. They considered green (easy fight, no experience), light blue (fairly easy), and green (but the last one still gave me experience, which happens rarely in EverQuest). The loot on the first one was a +75 mana necklace that looked like the platinum sapphire necklace in the game. I was very happy to find that, because the odds were good that it was way more mana than the necklaces on most of my caster characters, if not all of them. The second orc's loot was one spikey shoulder pad armor piece, I remember thinking it must be fairly new but it was probably crap even though it looked cool. I took it.

The last orc had a couple more pieces of the funky spikey armor, and also a complete set of white cloth armor obviously designed for a wizard. In fact there was a hat in the set that looked kinda Gandalf-ish, but more like the wizard hats from Final Fantasy XI (or the one Black Mage wears in various FF games). I was thinking the stuff may not be worth hauling around because it would take up a lot of inventory space and I was sure it wasn't worth much... but then I thought I'd make a new character, a wizard. I'd make Kaesora (my multipurpose roleplay character, she's an albino elven sorceress) and she'd be fun to dork around with since there was actually some all-white gear I could put on her (in my stories her normal outfit is white).

So I had just finished deciding to take all the loot when I heard some friends yelling at me, they wanted me to come play with them, so I should meet them at the entrance to the dungeon. I thought I knew the way... I jumped down further into the dungeon and ended up on the goblin side (apparently there were two factions ruling this dungeon, orcs on one side and goblins on the other). Crap! I knew this meant I'd gone the wrong way, and the stuff on this end was higher level.

The dream gets sort of fuzzy here, it seems like I met up with my friends just in time to fight some sort of big boss monster. But now the game changed and it was a quasi-table-top RPG, but we were still actually IN the game. Like, little people moving along a messed up chessboard-like playing area. I knew we were on a table though. Some pieces of the chessboard stuff floated here and there by themselves. We used the squares marked out by the chessboard pattern to count how far we could move each turn. And if you pushed a bad guy off the board and onto the floor, they'd die and not come back.

I made it to the big boss's area, which was half way between the floor and the table (I jumped down to get there). My buddies were trying to make it to me, and I remember Jamie rolling dice and hitting the boss (so he was now part of the game). The boss lost a bunch of pieces of himself, he was sort of a weird 3D bubble man thing. As the other parts of his body slowly came back towards him, all that was there at the moment was his torso. I was now Kaesora, the version I'd been planning to make for EverQuest, and it's like when we started the table-top RPG we'd all chosen mid-level characters instead of starting at level 1, sort of a test run for later games.

I used an ice spell against the boss. I rolled a bunch of dice (and I mean a bunch) and I remember some of them were pink. My total roll was 57. Then we had to look up the rules to figure out what my spell had hit for... and eventually figured out I had to multiply my roll by 105. Dang, nice hit! But right then the boss pushed me off the board, and I fell. I remember hitting the floor and dying, my body got all tingly and faded away and I remember what I could see faded to black. But I wasn't worried because it was like I had several lives (like a video game) or maybe even indefinite lives, and that I'd be respawning on the board, but probably back at the beginning, on the far side of the table from the boss fight.

Then I woke up.

( dream symbol analysis and thoughts )