Road Trip to Asia to save the OFF Cat
Trigger Warnings: None
Dreaming Techniques: None
This dream was an aborted nightmare, so there's a context shift about halfway through, explanation in the notes.
It started off as a spiritual continuation of a sequence I've been having during the shelter-in-place order, which involves a vacation to a country I've never visited, last time by boat. This time, though, we landed in supposedly China (looked an awful lot more like Appalachia) and started driving.
This early part of the dream was pretty relaxing. Long drive through the woods, stopping off at a few gas stations, a bit of tension here or there from the driver but with scenery to make up for it.
Kept driving for maybe half an hour realtime (supposed to be several hours dreamtime) seeing nonsense sights like three tiny sphinxes in the desert or the pyramids of Giza still under construction. Eventually we reach a hotel. Shabby, simple, outskirts of a big city that was my brain's best mockup of the concept of "city I would like to visit"--low, colorful buildings with tangles of fabric awnings, orange and red, open-air markets.
On reaching the hotel room, my companions change. I'm now traveling with what appears to be Pablo (from OFF) and some kind of vague princess entity. Pablo at least I can show:
We mess around for a bit, heading north towards the Himalayas, stopping to get into some nonsense I absolutely cannot remember. I figure we were doing some freedom-fighting work; during it, Pablo gets captured "in place" of someone, which would indicate a rescue mission with a casualty.
Anyways, the vague princess entity becomes vaguer yet by vanishing, leaving me to rescue Pablo. I arrive at the foot of the mountains and find a strange little house built right into the side, its base maybe two meters off the ground. As I'm studying it, I'm treated to a partial view of what Pablo's going through. He has some innate teleportation ability, and the folks who captured him are somehow forcing him to teleport them for fun. Weirdly, this isn't "teleport me to the Bahamas for half an hour", it's more like "TELEPORT ME TO THE KITCHEN! AGAIN AGAIN WEEEE!" This was
really tiring my catpanion out, so rescue attempt.
I come in through the chimney and find three bowls of "candy." One was full of some kind of blue sphere candy, the other tins of fish, the third ???. I pop one of the blue spheres in my face while studying the tinned fish. Genuinely some of the best-looking tinned fish I've ever seen. The front packaging was transparent so you could see what you were getting, but it wasn't any waking species--they were small and silvery, with plumpy orange whiskers hanging back from the heads. The closest comparison I could make would be really tiny oarfish, though there was a LOT more orange on the face, enough to hide the eyes.
(Don't worry, this oarfish is being released back into the ocean!)
Through the power of dream logic, I'm aware that each "candy" confers a different power, the blue stuff already in the process of giving me enhanced strength. I wrestle with the lid on the tinned fish for a sec (guess that's more a DEX than a STR thing???), then charge a random door like a linebacker. I'm a pretty small woman and it's blocked from the other side, but through the power of jawbreakers or whatever, I manage to stagger the gigantic dude holding it closed. In fact, I think our two perpetrators were
these completely unrelated dudes, both of whom are pretty huge. Anyways, we get in a slap fight through the crack, Pablo makes a run for it, we both exit the house At Speed and land in the snow. He thanks me as I apologize for his getting captured in the first place. I'm still holding the tinned fish as we head towards the car.
Notes: First off, huge nerd points to anyone who can recognize all three of the character images. Second off, this is technically two dreams. The first ended maybe 3-5 minutes dreamtime/realtime after it became a nightmare, because I wake up in response to recurring nightmare elements. Unfortunately the nightmare'd still gotten far enough that I woke up with some bad vibes, so I went back to sleep with the end goal of altering the ending of the dream, something that can be done...I won't say
easily, but with some practice, pretty reliably. This time, that took the form of "undoing" the nightmare entirely by retconning it out of existence, creating what looked like the continuation of a dream.
It's a cool technique I didn't mean to make use of. Hopefully it's repeatable!
