My dreams last night appeared to be a particularly nasty survival-horror game set in Gearworld. All these rooms of cracked concrete and  peeling paint, some of them full of broken junk, some of which was Probably Symbolic and a lot of which was just plain junk.

Most of the rooms were full of people–mostly teenagers–and in each one, there was this kind of freakish game of blindman’s bluff going on, where a person (or a monster, or an adult) would be chasing the others, and if you got caught…well, you didn’t want to get caught. And so in each room, some of us were trying to find ways to kill the monster, while staying out of its way. Tearing open a gas main and setting the monster’s head on a fire was a favorite.

The weird thing was that if you did something like climb completely out of range, the monster would complain bitterly about people not following the rules. It was all tied up with some kind of bizarre status game that the teenagers were playing, and rather insanely complicated. Many of the teenagers had rows of hooks set into their backs that they wore little signs on, indicating what clique they were in.*

I wandered through three or four of these rooms, avoiding or killing the monster, and finally one of them, a rather alarming little girl, started chasing me through the rooms. I climbed up into the tops of a room full of junk and pushed a shelving unit over on her. “Not enough!” she said, wiggling out from under the pile. “Aw, crap…” I thought glumly, “I’m being chased by Goldilocks. Whatever I push over on her has to be just right.”

Fortunately I found it not long after–there was some kind of Significant Junk, but I can’t recall what it was–and I dropped another shelving unit on her and ended the matter.

Then it just got freakishly strange and incomprehensible. Well, moreso.

On the bright side, Angus slept with me for most of the night. (Ben got miffed around 3 when I got up to work on a painting.)

*More easily changed out than tattoos, when you think about it.