June 12th, 2002 CE

Many chunks of many entertaining if not very interesting dreams last night.

In the first dream I remember clearly today, I was involved with something which - in retrospect - seems like a live-action roleplaying game in which the players actually looked exactly like the characters they were playing, regardless of the fact that these were video game and anime characters. The only reason I say it seemed to be a roleplaying game at all, in fact, is the fact that I was verry much conscious of the surreality of the situation, and was merely going through the motions of acting as though it were real because that seemed to be the done thing.

As the dream began, there were 10 of us, exploring the ruined remains of some kind of a scientific complex of ambiguous purpose. It was clear that some bad shit (probably involving rampaging monsters) had gone down here, and we were somehow personally mixed-up in it. I think we were there looking for some specific piece of evidence or information from among the files stored there still. In true video game fasion, I sent all but two members of the party away, keeping just two of them with me. The remaining eight were divvied up into one group of three, and two groups of two, after some arguing. One of the characters with me seemed to be Final Fantasy 7's Vincent Valentine. The other, I'm not sure of. She seemed to be a fairly generic japanese schoolgirl vidoe game character, of the sort that you see in almost any game which involves 7 or more characters these days. I'm not certain of who I was supposed to be, but I think it was Laguna Loire of Final Fantasy 8. There was much pointless though entertaining battling of easily disposed-of opponents, and at one point, I remember looking accrosss the hallway, to see The Dragon Ball Z character, Gogeta, who was a member of the party at the beginning of the dream smashing through a window, flying around and killing things. I was pleased to see he was doing okay on his own.

At some point, I got separated from my party, and found Vincent's cloak laying in a pile in a hallway, and picked it up. Now, I was fully aware that he had taken it off so that he could transform himself without wrecking it, but at the same time, I knew that for the sake of the story, I had to act as though I didn't know he could transform and that I was just worried because he'd left it lying around; perhaps something had happened to him. when I found him, he had turned into some great bloody brute with yellow hair, and I had to feign ignorance until he explained himself to me, at which point I gave a show of being surprised by this, and then gave him his cloak back.

If anything else happened in this dream, I can't remember it.

The one I remember most vividly came last. I was the video game character, Bass, fromm the Megaman series. The whole bloody dream looked and felt like a video game; 2 dimensional, and I was watchhing myself from profile as I raced through this enormous, obstacle and enemy-ridden landscape on the way home, so that I could phone the bank before it closed for the weekend. "Home", in this case, was this outrageously sci-fi looking structure with a communications array which looked much like a giant satellite dish with a seat mounted on the back of it and some kind of holographic video interface. It was pretty nuts to look at. When I came blasting through the door, I lept into the seat of this giant communicator dealy-thing and dialed up the bank, only to find it had closed mere moments ago. Placing my hands on my helmeted head, I screamed with anguish in a really silly, melodramatic way, as energy flared out of me all over the place. Then I woke up.

It's worth noting that in reality, I really did have to phone the bank before it closed today, and ended up waking up from this dream just half an hour before it closed. My subconscious mind does the strangest things to remind me of stuff.