I was playing a video game, and controlling my character from a third person, slightly top-down perspective. He was in a fighting arena and had just defeated a number of challengers. Since my character was so powerful, the organizers (who were bad guys) got angry and decided to send a few dozen guys at me at once. As they came, I executed all the maneuvers, watching him tear people in half with kicks and punches. It was all digitized violence, so not very gory; still, I remember thinking at the time that I might have to censor it if I ever wrote down that part of my dream. Ironic.

Turns out he's a superhero who specializes in strength and speed. Suddenly, I'm him and walking inside of an apartment complex. I'm in an open middle section with railings surrounding overlooks to the first floor. There's a small noodle bar in the corner, where the owners smile at me as if they know me. Four aliens pop up around me and I take them out with a futuristic machine gun. I close in on my target apartment and kick the door in, not certain what to expect inside. A supervillain in all black jumps down from the second floor landing and I pull out a sword when the gun is ineffective. We trade blows, but he heals up from any cuts that I land. Finally I realize I have to go for the head, and do a fakeout in one direction while swinging my sword in the other. After his head comes off, a small black spider scuttles out of his body and disappears. The game then goes to a cutscene, where the spider is inside of a lab filled with scientists. It's a very indistinct spider, more sort of a black void with a body and spindly legs. It gets herded into a small pen with a few others, and then it cuts back to me standing inside the apartment.

The family that lives there starts to open the door, and I dash upstairs to hide. Just to the right, there's a small closet, with just enough room for me to sit down in. I hear them outside, just the mom and two kids at the moment, and wait for things to calm down before I make any movements. But as I look around me, my curiosity and wonder widens. There's a ton of stuff in there, and I love nothing more than to poke around for loot in a game. So I start rummaging through bags, literally scrutinizing every single item I take out to see if it's worth taking. I'm working systematically from the right to the left, and the first dozen bags just hold clothes, makeup, and various other boring daily items. When I reach the left, I see a bunch of books lying on the floor, and I wonder whether the game designers bothered to code anything inside them. So I open a particularly thick one up at random, and am amazed when I see not only text that makes sense, but also figures when I flip through all the pages! I even see a book from a series that I recognized, on Chinese folk lore. I thought about how much time it must have taken for the programmers to scan in real books; I also fleetingly thought about how it was possible for me to generate all these detailed writings in my dreams. Finally, in the last place I look, right next to where I had started of course, was a snug rectangular black bag that held a futuristic yellow Nokia phone, a headset, and two AA and an E battery. I grabbed them, knowing that this was what I must have been looking for in the first place.

Finding the phone triggered the game to send home the dad, who came upstairs right outside the closet. I could see through the slats that he was talking to his wife, who was sitting at the family computer in a den-like area. They both started looking at my direction, because I couldn't keep totally quiet. As they started approaching, I had no choice but to run out and jump down the stairs as fast as I could. I literally jumped the entire flight in one go and was just about to open the door, when I heard the dad call me by my name and say that he's going to call the police. I realize that if we know each other, there may be a better way to do this. So I reload the game and I'm back in the closet from a few seconds ago. This time, I walk casually out, and both of them greet me. The dad says hey neighbor, just let us know ahead of time when you're coming over next. I wave goodbye, we laugh, and I head out the door.

Outside, the area had broadened into a large bar and dance club. I was running out quickly to make sure I escaped with the phone, when I ran past three superheroes with their arms crossed, trying to talk to me. As I tried to slow down and turn around, four supervillains burst in through a door on my left, and time slowed down to let me pull out my sword mid-lunge. My friends leaped into action, and I faced the first guy, who had one gigantic eye that took up most of his face. Figuring it was his weak spot, I cut it off, only to see the slice drip off as ooze and his eye unharmed. I remember thinking that I had very little time before hitting the guy to decide what this guy's superpower was going to be, seeing as how the dream depended on my creativity. In any case, I kept the eye-man distracted while one of my allies hit him from the back and took him down somehow. The next guy had a hook on top of his head, but I don't remember what superpower I gave him. I tried cutting off his head, but it took more than that to get him down. I looked around and the other two bad guys were being trapped in place by my friends. Suddenly, they dissolved and once again we saw the spiders come out and disappear to the lab. We had won, but we knew they were just waiting for new bodies to come back again.

posted by Larry at 10:30 AM