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This was a place with a variety of college-age and young adult folks. A fairly well-lit and well-cleaned place, honestly, though still characterized by a very chaotic interior.
What made this place very cheap was the fact that it basically lacked rooms. You could bring your own furniture and create your own "rooms" from what was essentially a large, open space that everyone otherwise shared.
For example, on the second floor (of this building, which was maybe like 3 to 5 stories tall and was a brick building located on a city street, with sunlight coming into the building at an angle from the back of the building so presumably the building's front faced north), one of the areas inhabited by a person was this nook facing a couple windows overlooking said street. This nook was occupied by some sort of metal frame, the height of a lofted bedframe, but the area at the top was used for storage. Instead, the person seemed to sleep in...what seemed like a vertically hexagonal frame of a horse-drawn carriage (minus the wheels), but made of translucent plastic, that was beneath/within the metal frame. There was clearly lots of bedding there, sheets and blankets strewn every which way. Outside of said "carriage", this person's possessions were spread over a large pile, with shoes and shoeboxes and random clothes and other knick-knacks all over the floor and on a desk on the adjoining wall (on the "east" side of the building, perpendicular to the street), which was set up as a place for sitting at a computer.
I seem to have conflicting memories of whether the flooring was a stiff boring grey commercial-grade carpet or simply tile flooring. But I do remember checking out the bathroom, which was shared amongst the residents; it had stuff like a row of many toothbrushes. The bathroom, located at the northwest corner of the second floor, with a few steps up to the bathtub in the corner, was actually surprisingly clean, with minimal mold(? or whatever is that intrusive black stuff that forms on it) in the grout lines. This cleanliness was conspicuous since the bathroom was all lined with white tiles.
The kitchen was on the first floor but I don't remember much of it.
She was in a small futuristic-looking room, with lots of grey/silver metal panel walls with various angled lines running through them (in a typical futuristic-looking art style), and the focus of attention was a conspicuous and large object at the center of the wall the camera was facing. The object, which consisted of a number of cylindrical/conical chunks all arranged along the same vertical axis, was apparently some sort of 'engine' of unknown purpose. It appeared to be some sort of grey/silver metal holder with a large (basketball-size) glowing orb about two-thirds of the way up.
(Amusingly, I have never played a SAO game in real life.)
Some time later I find out that my car has disappeared. So I actually go downstairs to the ground floor, walk past this giant intake driveway, and into the covered outdoor walkways beyond that, to find the offices. I walk up some stairs to the offices and ask around and some lady asks me if my car is "7784" (presumably referring to my license plate or VIN). She told me that, while they didn't know whose car it was, it had been taken to the shop because of a "mop problem", and it would end up better than before anyway. I was contemplating asking for this service to be free because I didn't ask for it, but I was going to wait until I saw the bill.
("7784" is not part of my car's VIN or license plate in real life.)
I wandered the lower floors of the facility for a while. As I walked through the hallways (which seemed to still have interior decor vaguely characteristic of 1980s or earlier buildings in the US, with things like striped wallpapers with warm colors), I was worried I was wandering through places that customers don't usually go to (what seemed like some meeting and party rooms). But I eventually found a rather dimly-lit but very large merch shop (gift shop?) that sold a variety of products, including belts (the kind people wear, not the automotive kind) for some reason. Also, one of the stands in the merch shop had a display with a precinct map showing voting results from the 1984 presidential election, in a small city in the midwestern US (presumably where this facility was located, but this is uncertain). It was apparently there as a way to remember the dominant showing of the Republicans that year, according to text written on the map display.
Eventually, I got my truck back. I had some trouble getting it out of the facility, where I was driving it by remote control. I dented its left side a little bit while coming out, due to the weird physics of trying to back it up and reposition its trailer. I was hoping that wouldn't lose me too many points. It was late afternoon/evening by this time, and I was in a different part of the facility, at its exit.
(Yes, truck. Apparently it was an 18-wheeler all along, and not a car. Also I don't know whether I paid for it.)
Then I woke up. Sorry, it was a heartwarming article but I can't tell you more.
So there's this youtuber who's both a gamer and a family man. He's holding this party where there's a tournament (or co-op event?) going on in some game. Looked like a heavily modded version of Doom, but now that I'm talking about it while awake I doubt it. Whatever it was, it was some first-person shooter or third-person shooter that involved shooting some target. The part that was shown off was some enemy(?) that looked like a very large and fancy chandelier (imagine something like this but inverted) but where all the panels had lots of little bits of treasure, like money and gems, that came loose if you shot at it. So every time you hit it some treasure would drop and people were going crazy having fun trying to pick up all the treasure while also fighting this thing.
While this was going on, the host's wife stepped away saying she needed like ten minutes (there was apparently a closeup of some telltale sign that she was planning something). Now, it turns out she was planning for some other group of people to break into the house to give the guy a special challenge. Cue a montage of people going through underground tunnels, drilling through concrete, tapping through glass, etc. to bring a large bulky package into the house. And this was no ordinary house -- apparently this guy owned something that looked basically like a mid-size multi-story office building. There were also some montages of people (the workers I think?) having fun outside one of the entrances to a foyer (looked like some covered entrance to a side hallway foyer as you might see in a hotel), where one guy tried to do some trick where he'd lean an air bed at a wall and jump/bounce off of it while throwing another air bed on the ground so he could bounce off of that after the rebound. Apparently he messed that trick up somewhat and it hurt.
Anyway, the package eventually got delivered to the guy, and it turned out to be some special version of the game, where there was that chandelier-shaped enemy but instead this time the enemy actually attacks the player very intensely and the result is a very hard challenge that he had to dodge and weave through. (Why a game had to be delivered to him as a large, bulky cube-like package approximately 5 feet on each side, I don't know.)
----
Separately, I imagined that I had some plan to interrupt some lecture with an announcement, but I didn't pick what to say in the announcement yet. I walked into the lecture hall, which was not too big but seated at least 100 or 150 people, was lit by cool fluorescent lighting but at interesting angles that made it reflect off the white walls, and had a pipe organ in the background and very tall gothic windows in the foreground, and announced that I had an important announcement to make. (I stood on a "shelf" of the stairway to the left of the students.) The professor, a middle-aged black man, asked me what the announcement was. At that point, I got to choose what to say, and apparently that determined what would actually happen, so I said that people from Gensokyo were invading us, because that would be more fun or something. In response, all the students started preparing their magic weapons.
This single-occupancy room is roughly square, maybe roughly 12 to 15 feet per side. In the middle of one side is the door into the room; on the opposite side is a wide window, spanning the height from a point between one's chest and waist up to the ceiling, and spanning the width of the entire side, overlooking a bed placed against the far left corner. Sunlight streams in from the window. A desk, along with other amenities such as a desk lamp and shelving, can be seen around the far right corner. Dressers are along the right wall as we return closer to the door. There are a few recessed canister lights on the ceiling; these have a warm-white glow to them. The floor is carpet, a surprisingly thick kind. The room's condition is not new nor newly renovated; it has the appearance (including, to some extent, the odor) of a basically-clean but regularly-lived-in dorm room.
The nearer left corner is the most interesting. It appears that there is a "cutout", represented by a 45´ diagonal line from the left of the door to the foot of the bed, where there exists a small kitchen, with sink, stove, and refrigerator. However, for some reason, this kitchen area is inaccessible, and the light is off in there. Instead, at the mouth of the area, along the "cutoff" line, there is an even smaller portable kitchen, just a stainless-steel sink and stove combo, seemingly placed there to encourage whoever lives there to use that instead. At first I only noticed the portable kitchen though.
I was looking for the fridge, and failed to find it. I eventually asked some building staff member about this, who told me there's a fridge, and we opened a cabinet near the ground between the kitchen and the bed and found what looked like a cube-shaped mini-fridge. He said that's the fridge, but I realized that that was actually the air conditioner. Then I noticed the "actual" kitchen, with an actual fridge. The fridge there looked to be pretty old, with a big latching handle and convex-curved lime-green exterior. Presumably this was original to the place.
Apparently I got roped into joining a fantasy TTRPG (probably D&D or Pathfinder, but possibly not, because I was playing a class called "healer"), by a friend of mine, via a certain Discord server that said friend is not on in real life.
I didn't really prepare well for it, and I'd sorta thrown together a character sheet hastily. I was playing a female healer (not sure if elf or human, probably human). During our first session I kinda had to improv a bit, which was a bit anxiety-inducing. I was introducing myself so I hastily cobbled a quick speech with first a few words apologizing for not being good at role-playing then (in-character) the explanation that I like animals (hence my animal companion) and that I am also knowledgeable about plants so I may be of use to the party in finding healing herbs and other plants of use, because it was just in the minutes before that that I had filled that in on my character sheet as a knowledge skill.
I was then asked to roll a spot check to see if I could see the rest of the party well enough to see everyone there -- since we kinda met on a ledge or a narrow bridge -- and I rolled a natural 1 and a 10 to confirm, so I was thinking of how to improv (OOC, intentionally) saying hi to the wrong number of people then having to correct myself.
(Out-of-dream commentary: the overall concept of this setting and character, including the character sheet, seem to have been largely influenced by standard D&D3.5e/Pathfinder1, but there may have been some subconscious Ryuutama influence there, what with being a healer and knowing healing herbs and having an animal companion. In any case, I might actually want to try playing this combination sometime, since I've never played a character like this before.)
Segment 2: Playing the piano at a hospital
For some reason, I was playing the piano in some sort of hospital or other healthcare facility. It had two floors where I was, with light blue-ish walls and carpeting, and I and the piano were located in a foyer or other space partly open to below with balcony walkways overlooking the lower floor. The piano I was sitting at was at a corner of this roughly square room, and there was a large window with daylight but not direct sunlight streaming in onto both floors, to my right but beyond the balcony.
Despite having various classical music scores with me, I began by doodling a little bit, playing the beginning of "Figure 8" from the Multiplication Rock album of Schoolhouse Rock. A female nurse then came over and commented that she loved the song and thanked me for playing it. I then attempted to actually play a piano arrangement of the whole song, but for some reason, unbeknownst to me (somehow, perhaps because the place was too noisy?), the music never actually came out. And then I realized I hadn't actually played anything. Then I figured out that the problem was that the keys were very stiff in the last part of the action getting the hammers to hit the strings. In retrospect I wondered how I even played it in the first place.
Segment 3: Parking lot with a box
I was in a car in a large parking lot. It was nighttime, with some street lighting. The front of the car faced a building several rows in the distance, apparently a supermarket. I was waiting for people to get back to the car, so I opened an access to the trunk of the car, and began eating crispy snacks out of a big cardboard box (of size similar to what might hold a bunch of reams of paper that an office might buy in bulk). There weren't just snacks in this box but some other miscellaneous junk, including apparently an old Big Y "silver coin". (Big Y is a supermarket chain that used to hand out these promotional tokens.)
Eventually, the people (about a family of four or so) came back to the car, and we drove to the right side of the building. It was raining by now, but I said I had to get out because I hadn't properly shut the trunk of the car -- or, the hatch, because this was a white hatchback station wagon. When I got out, there was a loud noise above, which I thought was thunder at first but turned out to be a loud airplane. We had also coincidentially stopped right below the hotel room (on the third floor of the same building that housed the supermarket) that another family of friends were staying in. They waved at us as we drove away.
Segment 4: Mystery Hunt
The final metapuzzle was upon us. It was getting late. This puzzle involved something having to do with looking at bolded letters in some weirdly ornate lowercase font, seemingly inspired by old Beatles albums.
Once we solved the puzzle, I had to do some sort of activity where I was facing a TV screen and had to move in time like a rhythm game. It looked vaguely like DDR/StepMania but basically had far more contact points than just feet -- like, I had to touch the ground with my hands and elbows as well.
When I was done with it, I found out that the Hunt's winner was just then being announced at an awards ceremony. And it was only like 1 AM or so. We'd finally been able to finish a Hunt before HQ closed!
I may be getting too much into MtG lately. Also I thought about it in terms of Danganronpa though the only relation between the two was being about a death game with highschoolers. Also before all that I was dreaming about trying to receive a package from a UPS-like service.
Also I had this in my draft, I probably wrote it in the middle of the night after having that dream then forgot about it:
Turning back the other way on this narrow white tiled hallway, passing the front door on the right, was the living room, and then the family room. The two rooms, both set a step or two lower than the rest of the house, were essentially combined but at a 90 degree angle to form a reverse L. These had some light orange carpet, and had ample windows looking out onto the frontyard and sideyard. Some pillared doorways, and those steps down, separated this combined room from the hallway.
Following the hallway around, further back, we arrive at the breakfast nook (in a sorta half-octagonal protrusion into the backyard) on the right and the kitchen on the left. The walls are painted a light blue; ceilings are like 10 to 15 feet at times. There are windows to the backyard.
This is overall a relatively small but cozy house.
----
I was at the final boss of a videogame. Located at the top of a tall stone tower, he was basically someone who had usurped a leadership position in the setting. You could use the flight ability to access a doorway at the top of a tall room, or a doorway at the bottom right of it, and that'd take you to the back of the tower, an outdoor room on the other side of this round tower, and the fight would take place between these two rooms. Off to the right of the back of the tower (actually the reverse "right side" compared to earlier, since it's around the back now) there's some sort of very powerful floating crystal enemy surrounded by a lightning force-field. You should try to not aggro it and then just fight the regular boss, but beating either him or the crystal would win the game.
However, that's not the true final boss of the game. To reach that, after going to the back room, go left (try not to aggro the crystal) and start going down the mountain. Follow the tracks, which become gradually clearer; after being just on a bumpy mountain trail, they go through some increasingly strange places, like caves filled with clouds and rainbow starfish creatures.
Eventually you'll come to this indoor area, a large square room lit by fluorescent ceiling lights, where the track does a square loop around a central square pillar. You should go around that.
Meanwhile, instead of moving forward, I checked one of the doors off to the side. Apparently not where I was supposed to go since I ended up running into my parents who were at a buffet on a cruise ship. The door apparently opened into a hallway in the ship's galley, but close enough to the dining area that you could see out to it.
----
The school's library, which had a huge, open, gallery-like room full of study spaces, was having some sort of party night that was beach party themed. I was supposed to meet up with my friends, and I had brought an inflatable raft (albeit still folded up) and some accompanying oars with me. I made my way through the crowds, wondering whether it was okay to go maskless in a world where COVID now exists, going up and down stairs to reach the library, then stringing my way through to the rear stairs of the room in order to get to the second floor. On the way there, I met my friend, Chris, who said he was in charge of the group, and who was wandering around for his own reasons.
I took the stairs but found they didn't go anywhere, and a voice from the front desk (which had been announcing various things) announced that that set of stairs around a central column but didn't go anywhere; only the other stairs actually went to the second floor. So I took the stairs up but somehow ended up walking on top of some...whatever you call that area that's beyond but at the same level as the hand rails of a staircase but is enclosed such that you can walk on it even though you're not supposed to. (These stairs were rectangular and had no central column.) And then something happened and I eventually ended up on the stairs going up to the second floor (which was open to a really high ceiling, domed like a long church. I found my friends, and put down my stuff, ready to get some homework done and then spend the rest of the night hanging out, but realized I was missing something, so I went back downstairs.
I hugged the very wide central column of the staircase (which suddenly had one now for some reason) and spiral-slid down to the first floor, and started to make my way through the crowds again, and a girl of short-ish stature with somewhat-short wavy hair and glasses stopped me, asking me how I slid down the column. I told her that you basically needed just enough friction to slide down but not enough to hurt my fingers, and trying to grip the column along the diameter was better, and I suggested trying it on one of the nearby support columns that wasn't as wide (but was covered in pieces of paper people had taped to it, complete with lots of little strips that you could rip off from the bottom). She thanked me, saying that she'd been trying to figure this out since she was a kid; I told her that I'd done risky stuff like sliding down stair railing next to a 20-foot or at least two-story drop as a kid myself. She introduced herself; her first name was something like Ariadne (or maybe Adriana?), with a surname that started with M or N (but I can't remember now that I woke up, but for some reason "MacKenzie" feels plausible).
At first, I took some guests up to the fifth floor. I was in some sort of formal meeting space, with brown carpet and walls. I showed them the view outside the window, expecting it to be pretty decent. I was surprised at what I saw, though -- for some reason, it was a very irregularly eroded sedimentary landscape, something like the Badlands of South Dakota. Even in the dream, I was surprised to see this.
Anyway, I went out of this room and into the main lobby/hallways of the fifth floor. I was surprised to see some queue-marking stanchions (I had to look up the term for this lol) making like four lines, which currently had no people, as well as what seemed like a central front desk in a lobby. The lobby further continued (with a higher ceiling) to the left, and then further down the hall in front, where I saw a casual indoor swimming pool beyond some double doors.
The walls were yellowish off-white and the floor was smooth and looked sand-colored with some shiny highlights, like an irregular stone pattern. (I've seen this flooring in real life in some buildings, e.g. a local airport, which also embedded some artistic designs into it.) There were classroom-style rooms on the left and right.
I asked the desk what this was about and an attendant told me that this fifth floor was a community center; she pointed me to the list of events posted on a clear plastic wall surrounding the front of the desk. The desk had something of a half-octagon front to its shape.
For some reason I was supposed to join some sort of Zoom or other videoconference call about the board I was on. I did, but important people just didn't show up, so we just kept waiting indefinitely for them.
For some reason I had to go downstairs temporarily, probably to get something. I went down to the first floor, and as I passed the intersection of two big hallways (in the direction opposite to the big lobby above) I remember deftly dodging someone moving some sort of heavy-duty stepladder on wheels. Later, when I passed back, this intersection was now blocked off by a theater group that had lined up some tables to cordon some 5th-graders into going a certain direction (supposedly coming from the direction facing me and going to the right). And people were also waiting here for some reason. So I waited here for a bit.
This theater group was also selling some various trinkets for some reason, and I found that they were mainly individual special cards (like major arcana tarot cards) but with various standard playing card back styles. There were also some blank playing cards for sale, as well as playing cards with some sort of partially circular region cut out of a corner.
After I went back upstairs, I apologized to someone in meatspace that it'd taken me a while. Meanwhile, someone finally said something on the videoconference call, after waiting for like half an hour. And later, for some reason, I poked into a nearby room which looked like some sort of large warehouse that you could walk down half a flight of stairs into. Two grand pianos were set up in there, with their keyboards facing left from the perspective of someone at the door. Someone was playing on the further of the two pianos, and someone else was standing to their left.
Finally, I went back to a room where my stuff(?) had been set up and apparently they were packing up. There was still one long table in it. The lights were off but there were windows and daylight came in through them, not direct sunlight but just an afternoon bluish glow reflecting off the white vinyl tile floor, the white-painted concrete walls, and the dividing wall from the room on the left which was some sort of retractable folding wall (the kind that lets multiple rooms be combined). There was still some coffee on a small countertop with a nearby sink.
I was going to take a picture, but the "stone" several feet to my left suddenly had a jumping spider that started running downward out of a hole. Then there was an endless number of jumping spiders running downward out of that hole. Then some other animal came out the right side of that stone, in a sort of nook area. And then suddenly a panther came out and attempted to eat a nearby stone pillar but then got its mouth stuck on it and so it just froze there like an awkward cartoon.
Why was I down here? That's because earlier I had come down to this slope because someone gave me a skirt. I did not wear the skirt, but somehow, I discovered that this skirt made a great toboggan over grass and mud.
Who gave me this skirt? Well, I was in the office of a professor. The professor had a rack of clothes in their office (I am uncertain of the professor's gender) for some reason, along with lots of books lining shelves. I think I was there to discuss the fact that I needed to write a paper but I was trying to read a paper and really had lots of trouble understanding it.
Before that, I was sitting on a waist-high wall on the side of a frequently-used hallway in some sort of student commons building. I was trying to read that paper. A young man greeted me, and I greeted him back, since I knew him.
There were two friendly soldiers in the same room, but as we heard the invading army approaching in that hallway we started to close the window shutters (which were hinged to open inward) and hide against the wall to avoid being spotted by the enemy. after a formation of them passed, I started to crawl across the floor on my back while holding my laptop and phone, getting ready to escape...
* this one late-game area with a tower where the second-to-top room is this tall room that is the king's throne room, which if you ever enter it you get attacked by a bird who respawns every time you re-enter it
* beneath that tower, there's actually a pit, because the base of the tower is actually kinda suspended over a gray gravel pit, and you have to jump over the pit from the left to enter the tower, and you have to jump over another pit to get into the last area of the game, on the right
* in that last area of the game, the area is laid out a little like a maze but a key feature is that there are two concurrent "hallways", one on top of the other, which you can go between. Entering from the left puts you in the lower hallway first. I went here and was surprised to discover that there are actually these yellow slime enemies that on my first playthrough I didn't even really notice because they come out of the ground very slowly and so I just walked past most of them or hit them before they had a chance to attack, but now that I bothered to look at them, they actually have an interesting multi-directional splash burst attack if you let them actually go off. (This game is probably 2.5D making such a 3D effect possible.)
* Later, I went further, and bothered to fight one of these really annoying flying beetle enemies which takes a ton of hits to kill. I actually messed up and died, and then so I was wondering what progress I lost and couldn't think of any, then I woke up.
Whenever I dream I'm playing a game, it's almost always the latter.
I was sitting at my desk, with that door just to my right. (This was one of the places you could put a desk in a room.) Out of the corner of my eye, I saw that people from the room across the interior hallway were hanging out there. I tried to look at them without them noticing me, so I put my hand on my head and peered at them through a crack between my fingers. But they noticed me anyway, so I went over and greeted them. There was like two guys, one girl, and one pikachu. They were people I didn't know, which made sense since this was the beginning of the semester, and so I greeted them and we told each other our names.
(I immediately forgot all their names.)
I then turned right and walked down to the end of the hallway. There, I walked through someone else's dorm room out to the exterior hallway, which was lit with daylight. This room was unusual in that rather than having two bunked beds on each side parallel to the side walls it had two bunked beds perpendicular to the side walls and all on the same side of the room. Only one person was in that room, and they were still in bed, so the room was mainly dark. (Someone else had set their stuff down and there was a guitar there, among other possessions.)
I walked back into the interior hallway, and for some reason I slid down a small playground-style metal slide into the hallway. As I did that, I saw a mouse, so I started chasing after it. This mouse had a very, very long tail, like over 10 times its body length.
---
I was at a gathering, specifically a rather chill and casual daytime social event at someone's house. At some point, I took a walk around their house with a person named Jennifer Gardiner, a young woman with light skin, a slender build, and straight blond hair in a ponytail. We walked outside to the very large fenced backyard, which the owner apparently treated as something of a low-maintenance wilderness garden. It had lots of low plants and shrubs and a few tall pines. As we talked, I remember that Jennifer seemed to be a relatively quiet but supportive and agreeable person, someone who didn't say too much but had reasonable and meaningful things to say when she did speak up.
We then re-entered the house (this was a very expensive one-story house) and walked into the master bedroom area, where I accidentally walked onto the downward ramp of what turned out to be an indoor swimming pool. This got my socks all wet.
Later, I reconvened with some other people, including a young woman of southeast Asian ethnicity who had dark hair, wore glasses, and exuded a more spunky personality, as well as another young woman with curly hair who was French and spoke English with a French accent.
(N.B. "Jennifer Gardiner" here is entirely unrelated to and looks nothing like Jennifer Garner.)
Being a dream, reading the book immediately transported me to the world of the book which was oddly pleasant and pictureque, but the format of my dream was a racing video game. Being bad at such games, I was run off the road and got stuck trying to go back up some sort of Scottish hill.
Before I could ask him what his thoughts were on the ongoing Russian attempts to curry favor with African countries, the dream was interrupted by a scene featuring two extremely colorful pink-and-yellow flamingos having some sort of race. One of the flamingos kept bumping the other, and which point I realized I was one of the flamingos, and I was getting bumped.
Then I woke up.
Instead, I boarded a train. The train was...particularly interesting. It felt like some sort of theme park ride that made me float over crowds of people gathered in an indoor setting -- something that looked like it had the walls ad windows of a subway car but was clearly much, much larger, and people were using this space like a cafeteria in a theme park attraction, dimly lit with fluorescent lighting as it was.
I was suspicious that I was able to float right above crowds of people (like, about 5 to 6 feet above them). I looked in the windows (they looked dark outside), and seemed to not see my own reflection in them.
When this ride ended, I was in a large room, the size (and interior height, at two stories high) of a ballroom (albeit not a particularly big one). This room wasn't very well-lit, but it had enough lighting to note that the walls were a dull pinkish red, and there were people gathered in different parts of it, in a scattered crowd. Various doors led to other places. There was an old upright or spinet piano in the room, as well as other wooden railings. The walls and railings and floor and furniture (various couches and sofas and coffee tables in some places) showed that the room was well-used, with a somewhat dated vibe. This room looked like it could be on a cruise ship.
After a little while, some musicians entered the room on the second floor balcony, overlooking most of the room, and started playing "Feliz Navidad".
I later asked around and found that the first few rooms that I rode through were just very convincingly crafted simulacra made using optical illusions, whereas the room I was in now was in fact real and filled with real people.
---
Then time reset.
This time, I'm back at the airport, heading to my flight to Alaska. (It's an actual airport now.) There's a ticket counter, though it's in the middle of a much larger lobby, rather than at the far wall as is typical. There's a simple metal-detector security portal next to them. (It all seems pretty small-scale for an airport.) I was just on time.
I boarded the plane. Once we were on the plane, everything floated upward. I had to "swim" downward as there was a downward "ramp" to get down into the plane. This was a very futuristic-looking plane interior, more akin to what you might imagine of a spaceship, with a wide open lobby area (albeit only one story high), surrounded by gray walls with plastic paneling and square/diagonal lines.
Eventually I made it to the front of the train. The train was actually a train of carrier platforms on a track where each platform was made of large numbers of magnetic metal balls, like the kind you'd see in some toy sets. And these tracks were winding through the offices of the MBTA, so this felt like I was riding a cart made of these metal balls through one-story office hallways and offices with white-painted cinder block walls, old 80s dark blue office carpet (with black plastic baseboards), and mottled drop ceilings with occasional fluorescent lights.
Later I changed to a different line and rode that. And then I got off the subway car (which seemed like a normal subway car at that point) and as I did, a string of several extra fare passes (which resembled connected carnival/arcade tickets but in 2 inch x 2 inch soft paper squares printed with a glossy half-yellow half-skyline-photograph design) fell out of my pocket onto the station platform. I picked it up, while a passenger stared at me.
I walked up the platform, and I was in Boston. I was basically on a sidewalk adjacent to / constructed over the Charles River, which at this location was relatively narrow, the width of maybe a couple city blocks (you could easily see multi-story buildings and a sidewalk adjacent to the water, on the other side of the river. Nearby, just around the corner (the station exited not directly onto a street but into a small public square, with water running beneath it), there was a stall selling food, with a huge crowd gathered there. By the time I reached it, the crowd had already dissipated and the food was already sold out, awaiting the next batch.
I continued past it, and up a couple sets of several steps of stairs each, walking up to a somewhat higher level sidewalk, still overlooking the water. The weather was overcast. The sidewalk was these huge cement rectangles at this point, I actually walked onto a panel that seemed transparent -- the railing overlooking the water to the left were visible, as were the pillars holding up this stretch of sidewalk (which was like 30 feet wide). To my surprise(?), the panel was actually nonexistent, and I fell into the water. However, I immediately was picked up, vertically, like a mouse cursor dragged me upward (without regard to realistic physics), and placed me on the wall to the right, which actually consisted of...bookshelf. Specifically, a very heavy wooden bookshelf we have at home, which I would climb on as a kid. I grabbed and simply crossed the gap in the sidewalk by climbing leftward along these bookshelves.
There was more to the dream than that but that's the part I remember.
Unfortunately I had to do this all quickly because that morning I had to go and embark on a trip somewhere. So I met up with my traveling group, which happened to consist of one other guy, a young-ish man wearing military fatigues named Tan who indeed had tan skin, as well as two professional guides. A while later we arrived at a small town somewhere in a cold climate. I was regretting not taking more stuff from the hotel room, while also wondering whether I could buy a towel and some clothes there; I was wondering to ask whether there was a general store, a supermarket, or a discount store where I could find them.
Somehow I also was back in the hotel room. I saw two suitcases with wheels still packed full of our stuff and I was like, we should totally just take that. They basically had sat closed anyway. Then I peered into the adjacent room, hearing some noises. For some reason our room was separated from the adjacent room just by heavy curtains that were kept closed but were only joined by thread at some points, making it possible to peer past where the different curtains were joined. I discovered a secret trash can at the external wall of the room, but anyway, I just saw a neatly made and non-occupied room next door. I then turned back to look at the door to our hotel room, which actually had some two-by-four wooden beams partly blocking the entrance and caution tape marking it, discouraging people from entering our room. There were other people milling about in the hallway of the hotel, which had a surprisingly tall ceiling (both in the room and in the hallway) and basically room doors facing each other. The light of morning daylight was visible at the far end, where there was a secondary exit to the hotel. The people were, it seems, actually dealing with inspecting every room to see if it had asbestos, as well as guests reacting to the fact that their rooms were being checked for asbestos.
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Separately, I was watching a video(?) of some guy who was a rich YouTuber and who was apparently miffed that someone had done some big show-off travel and so this guy decided that he was going to go to Antarctica. And he was going to do so by train, and he had a train of like five cars, including a mail truck at the end, and he showed off how his train basically was able to hang off of rails above the cars and jump the rails after coming on-shore onto Antarctica while dramatically dropping the mail truck into the snow next to the parking lot of this very entrance to the Antarctic underground into which the train tracks continued.
I was a PreCure, and whilst I was away from work somebody had corrupted our adorable mascot. I had to save it by playing a very basic game where pieces of cartoon candy fell from the sky and I waved the mascot around to wherever the candy was.
All this time, I was wondering where my co-worker and co-PreCure was, since she was the one who was in charge of the mascot whilst I was away.
Anyways, the mascot was fine in the end.
The previous day in-dream I had been watching lots of horror films and videos. Later I found myself trapped in one of these movies' settings, a TV studio with me and others being chased by a Frankenstein's-monster-esque creature except female, we were aware that this was a repeat of some of those films.
At one point Bart and Lisa Simpson were involved, they were trying to ambush the monsters using some weapons exactly as in the film, but in reality there were no weapons to do so and so they had to run.
We went up the building avoiding the monster until reaching an area with TV sets, then we started arguing about who would get the "best sets" (for survival but I think that changed at some point), I was jumping around some platforms/catwalks trying to reach a moon-landing themed set.
There was an aesop about trying to become fiction, and then the dream ended.
I only realized it was a dream a few hours after I woke up, though I really should have realized it much earlier considering Ryuji from JSB3 was the checkout guy.
Sometime later, it turned out I was part of the "class" with this dynamic, tough-as-nails lead prosecutor at her practice (I swear I haven't even thought about How to Get Away with Murder in years). We were in court for this very case, and there was at least me and two co-workers I recognized who were in the legal "class" with me.
Anyways, we were getting the sense that we'd fumbled our bit a little, but we were definitely going to get her behind bars for this case.
For some reason, Garry, Tricia, (the co-workers, not their real names) and I decided to go check out where the defendant was staying. We ended up in this abandoned warehouse that was almost an ancient ruin of some sort. There, the girl and her own 'class', who were all dressed in white bandage type outfits, and it turned out they all had distinctive psychic powers.
Anyways, they were all beating the h-e-c-k out of her, and she was bleeding sort of badly, all because she had somehow blown their cover by screwing up this mission involving the idol guy.
Of course it also turned out my side had psychic powers, but also it seemed like the other side was being controlled by at least one of their own because there was this loud buzzing noise and I got the sense they didn't want to beat one of their own into pulp.
I also remember being worried that some of my own team would succumb to the brainwashing, but not me for some reason.
Unfortunately, before anything got resolved, I woke up.