Dream Theatre Re-re-redux

My doctor warned me that Effexor would give me weird and vivid dreams. I patted her hand and said “Believe me, I’ll never even notice…”

And indeed, my dreams are always so weird that I can’t tell if there’s been any influence. Last night I wandered a post-nuclear holocaust set of buildings overrun by jungle and filled with mutant animals. It had a very video-game quality, and by that I mean at one point some idiot wiped our entire party by stumbling into a classroom full of albino kzin-like aliens, and I said “Damnit, the last save point was miles back!” There was much creepy atmospheric gearworldian-settings–I went through dozens of paper-thin lockers, opening each one, finding increasingly strange keys to other lockers, opening those, until the keys didn’t resemble keys at all but twisted bits of metal wire, and I would have to sit and puzzle out how to fit each one in the lock. (I don’t know how you’d do that bit in a game…it’d make a kick-ass art installation, mind you…)

Finally the cute mutant animals attacked, and I was forced to defend myself with a trenchcoat and a boxcutter. (Understandable, as the boxcutter has become my weapon of choice of late in real life. Alas, my masterwork one got left behind in San Jose, but if I unpack any more, I’ll just take the weapons focus feat in it anyway.*) 

In order to get to the post-nuclear holocaust, I had to actually witness the nuclear explosion. I saw the mushroom cloud starting to go up, and somebody with me yelled “RUN!” I turned around to explain the complete impossibility of running from a nuclear explosion, for god’s sake, we probably had less than a second before we were reduced to ash and all they’d find would be our shadows permanently seared onto the walls. Which is exactly the sort of the thing I WOULD stop and do under the circumstances, but apparently my brain has seen too many B-movies and allowed us to escape anyway.

I’ve never believed that if you die in a dream, you die in real life–I’ve done it a few times, and am still here–and still less would I believe that if you were vaporized in a dream…well, anyway. Still.

*Yes, I am so very, very lame. I know.

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