sanity is relative

(This is apparently what happens after I spend 3+ hours on Skype talking to someone I met via Cry's video game livestreams, before going to bed. That someone would be Hiro, who you will be seeing here shortly. O.o )


I was playing some kind of coop multiplayer Amnesia-like game with Hiro via both the game client and chatting with Skype, except that instead of normal Amnesia: The Dark Descent with its medieval castle interior, the concept was to run around a modern day mental hospital plagued with monsters (the zombie ones from the Amnesia game) and avoid being caught by them or the regular staff while looking for books. Hiro's character was an Asian boy in his early teens and I was a girl with long-ish blonde hair; I think I'd gone with Alice for my character's name.

The building's layout was bizarre for an actual hospital. Hallways were ridiculously skinny, had maze-like branches all over the place and interconnected rooms, and you couldn't do anything about the lights that were always on. Everything was painted white, so there was no real chance of hiding anywhere in the open. Not only would the monsters cause you to pass out if they caught you, but doctors and nurses also wandered the hall and any of them including the monsters catching you meant waking back up in your room. I can't remember if the rooms were locked by default, I just remember it being so much backtracking that you didn't want to get caught, plus there was a feeling of impending doom like something bad was going to happen if you couldn't escape the place in time.

The point of the books was that they somehow unlocked doors. The books were hardcover, red, and had gold filigree designs on the covers that were all the same. If I remember right, they all had a four digit number on the first page while the rest of the pages were blank, which had to do with how they opened the doors. Some books were fakes and only the right ones would actually open a door at all, and only the door they were meant to. The books could be found in closets or refrigerators that were otherwise empty of anything else, and if you had one that worked with you when you opened the right door, the door would just automatically unlock itself.

I remember being in a small room that had a fridge and two closets, and Hiro took a book out of the fridge while I grabbed one from a closet. At this point it was becoming real as opposed to a video game, although I still had some odd fuzzy concept of an inventory system so that I wasn't literally carrying the books around (I had several by now), they just vanished but I still "had them." I remember hearing a monster grumbling out in the hall right at that moment. The hall went around the room outside past two different doors on opposite ends. Hiro told me to go one way and he'd go the other and distract the monster.

I didn't like this idea but he was already out the one door so I ran through the other. I realized somehow that he'd been caught by the staff and I kept running, as for some reason they were assuming Hiro was the only patient not in his room. He'd bought me some time, but now I had to figure out how to put it to good use and if I stayed in the halls I still ran the risk of getting caught at random. I found a nurse's bathroom and hid under the sink. The idea was to burn some time so the staff would get complacent and maybe enough would go to sleep after-hours so I could finally escape.

Logic really started falling apart at this point (apparently if you stay in one place in a dream for too long, small constant changes start building up into ridiculousness). What started as a long counter with sinks in it and one big cupboard area underneath with several doors (my hiding spot was as far into the corner opposite the entry door by the far end of the sinks as possible), slowly turned into just a counter without the cupboard underneath, and then finally the counter had some kind of tablecloth which hid me better. I remember spending a lot of time trying to make sure I was as squeezed into the corner as it got, and that the white dress I was wearing was staying hidden with me instead of flared out partly so it was visible from beyond the counter.

This whole time I was dreading that someone would actually come into the bathroom, and yes, eventually a nurse and a nurse's assistant walked in, both women. For some reason, they had a bunch of dirty dishes on a two-tiered rolling metal cart. The assistant started shoving dishes under the counter and it was obvious she could see me, but I sat there and thought "You can't see me, you can't see me," over and over. At this point I vaguely understood that I was in a dream and that logic had broken enough she shouldn't have seen me right off the bat.

She didn't say anything to her superior who was blathering on about various gossip and directions for the next shift or something, and I realized it wasn't because I was desperately trying to insist in my head that she couldn't see me. The assistant wasn't evil, and knew this place was way more than just some honest asylum. She kept glancing at me but only crammed more dishes under the counter (I could hardly move for all the dishes). Suddenly the nurse in charge started saying really crazy things, like she was hallucinating and what she saw was no longer what anyone else in the room saw. The nurse stood still and started staring off at nothing as what she was saying rambled to a halt, and the assistant looked at me and mouthed the word, "Run."

I managed to extricate myself from the dishes without making any noise and ran out of the bathroom, not noticed at all by the crazy spaced-out nurse. I found a new hallway that led to a large closet, and inside the closet was a whole lot of hanging lab coats. I couldn't see the back of the closet, so I kept pushing through and the lab coats gave way to winter jackets and I found myself suddenly breaking out of a very thick display of such coats in a clothing store at a shopping mall.

There were tables just beyond, possibly for a cafe in this same store (logic, what is this concept? we don't do logic in dreams). There were randomly dream created family members there who recognized me and greeted me only like it was any old day, not like I'd been locked away in the funny farm. They didn't know, and I myself wasn't even sure how I'd gotten locked up there now. While they asked me mundane questions I said something to the effect of, "Listen, I've just escaped from a mental asylum up there on the hill," and pointed off in the general direction of where the hospital was (you couldn't see it from inside the mall).

They were all like, "Yeah right, very cute ha ha," and I said, "No, I'm serious, and I'm not even sure that I'm really out of there at all." I had a bad feeling that I was still somewhere in the asylum while hallucinating what I was seeing now, or somehow had my "spirit" split between the places and maybe I could actually tell these people something useful before waking back up in the asylum. I just hoped I was still hidden somewhere instead of stuck in my room again. I remember one dark-haired guy who was a random family friend looking off in the general direction of the hospital, he was starting to be convinced there was more to this.

Then I woke up.

It was night time. I was with my family unit in a well-lighted room, I think the living room of a big house. The family wasn't my real-life family, same with the house, but I guess they were symbolic/generic. I realized somehow that there was a vampire in the house. I don't think anyone else knew. I didn't tell them... instead I walked down the long hall to my bedroom.

It was dark in my room except for a little blue-ish moonlight. I shut and locked the door, never touching the lights. I think I sorta floated gracefully around for a moment; I was wearing this semi-Victorian flowy white dress with long sleeves and a wide neckline. (I believe the dream's timeframe was Victorian era.) Then I sat down on my bed and leaned over until I was laying sideways on it. I shut my eyes and waited for the vampire to bite me.

Finally he did, from somewhere above/behind me... but he wasn't being very nice about it. I realized he might not even intend to turn me into a vampire at all, that he was probably here for a snack. I said, "Wait! No! I want to become a vampire. Please?" He agreed and I remember part of the transformation was becoming thinner for some reason, as I was "well built" in the dream.

That's all I remember.

It was a pirate ship full of evildoers and undead. My companions and I fought bravely (we were the "good pirates" as opposed to the evil ones) but in the end we were captured. Our leader was tied at the wrists with a long rope and hoisted high into the rigging as punishment. He caught a beam high up the main mast and suddenly I was him. The bad guys had left me a simple knife for some reason, or maybe they hadn't searched me well enough, and I held the blade in my teeth for a moment as I maneuvered myself onto the beam better. My friends were now up on the mast with me. I cut myself loose and we went back down the mast, leaping the last several feet to the deck and catching the others by surprise. A bunch of the evil pirates were now undead (must be thanks to the movie Pirates of the Caribbean). I was able to kick or punch some of the undead into smaller pieces and then throw them overboard into the water which was rushing by at incredible speed.

Then I realized that all this was make believe (even though we could see everything as if it was real). I was the father of one or more of the children who were making up this grand adventure, while the evil leader of the bad pirates was the father of another boy who was supposed to be in charge of our capture, and possibly the ship in general.

We were winning the day, and the ship. I found the aft deck, which was a good ten or fifteen feet below where I stood. I saw the "evil" boy down there being chastized by his father for letting things go to heck. The boy who was in trouble was sort of pudgy, and he was being disbanded from the pirates for his failure. I lept towards the deck below...

And turned into a woman in a white victorian dress, floating gently down to land softly on my feet. I seemed to inspire awe and reverence in all the children (the evil father figure had left) and I felt an incredible loving, glowing warmth inside me, like I was the deified concept of "the mother" from Peter Pan come to life. The pudgy boy looked like he was going to cry. I asked him what was wrong, and he said nobody wanted to play with him anymore, that nobody liked him.

I felt so sorry for the little boy (who might have been my son, it was hard to tell in the dream because the players seemed so oddly general), and I pulled him close and comforted him. I said, "Mommy loves you... and Daddy loves you too, when he isn't being grumpy." This seemed to make the boy feel better, and he left, probably going back to playing with the other children. (I'm not sure if the evil father was supposed to be my husband or what... it's almost like this story was seen from the naive point of view of a child.)

There was another younger boy who didn't leave with the others. He was maybe five years old, dressed in a sort of Buddhist monk outfit, probably something he picked out of dress-up clothes. He even had a bald head, and his eyes were sparkling pools of wonder that made him look like the most sweet, innocent thing. He was enthralled with me, and also a thin gold necklace I was wearing. I said something to him, something like, "Do you like it?" and I tried to put it on him, but it snagged and I couldn't get it on him. So I put it back on me and asked him if he thought it made me look pretty. He didn't say anything but I could tell that he thought I was the most beautiful thing in the world.

Then I realized that he only seemed to be feeling the necklace, and not looking at it directly. I wondered if the poor child was blind, or partly blind, and nobody had figured it out yet (he wasn't my child, but I may have known his parents). My fear was that he was entirely blind (how nobody would notice that doesn't make sense beyond the dream) but then he focused on the necklace and might have said something and I was content that he could at least see, even if I didn't know how well. Then there was some nonsense about unrolling a scarf from around a paper roll, and the end of it was attached to the roll with three pieces of duct tape.

Then I woke up.

( dream symbol analysis and thoughts )