let it leave me like a long breath

xax: ugh so incidentally i had this succession of weird architectural nightmares
xax: anyway basically in the dream... there was this mountain base w/ hidden doors and it was just like. uncomfortable. the theme of the dream was (to synthesize here), like, automated processes gone amok. there was this doorway that... i don't even know how to describe it. in the dream it was like, this door opens into a hallway that was machine-designed. and the hallway is like, banded back and forth in two colors, and each band is maybe like, 6-12 inches wide, and it has some like, inspirational aphorism or command on it? like it is the Progress Hallway, and you self-actualize and get another commandment on the wall and go do it and return, or something. that's not the point. the point is that it was warped and decaying and the stuff on the walls decohered into incoherent or grotesque messages and the hallway itself narrowed and shrunk and twisted until it was actually more like this tight, narrow slide. pretty much literally like the holes from the enigma of amigara fault
xax: also there was this lower level that was just awash ankle deep in blood
xax: leading to a vast vault door that was like, on a central pivot
xax: labeled
xax: i don't remember the actual words, but like
xax: GOD ENLIGHTENMENT PROCESSING
xax: or something
xax: full of corpses & meat
xax: w/ pillars blocking the view of whatever was extruding the corpses. but like, reachable if i had just gone around the corner

ugh it's been 90 degrees here so i have the a/c in again. last night i had two distinct dreams that i remember, which is pretty uncommon. one was... idk, some stuff, and i'm too lazt to recount it b/c i already wrote out the second dream here, so:

the second dream was like... i was a kid sneaking around a school, which was constantly framed like a movie. uh the school had a sensible above-ground layout but there were these big metal doors that opened up into a switchback stairway that went down one floor as like, wood, and then a second one as concrete, and then ended up running along these dark, narrow, long corridors that were more like utility tunnels than hallways proper. it was like some abandoned fallout shelter kinda space beneath the school. it was super dark, with the only light being at the stairwells, so the hallways themselves were dim and dingy. and the first part of the dream was just like, going down between stairways and walking along the hallway to get to another stairway up, with the goal of using that to get into... some other part of the school i guess? but i could never find the right door out.

anyway the place had all these branching hallways too, that just kinda went off into darkness, and i went down one. it was completely choked with dust, like wading through a waist-high snow drift, and it just went on and on until there was another stairway up.

(also at some point i can't really chronologically place i was down there and there was another switchback stairway down at the end of the hall all lit up with dim red lights, and it was like DISEASE RESEARCH LABS and there were things that looked like giant spiders kinda growing out of watermelons scattered around the hallway floor, not moving always with the potential to move. but this never came up again.)

and that other stairway up lead into... like a playroom kind of deal? there was an entry room with a doorway into a rectangular playroom that uh extended further to the left than i could see, so there was part of the place always out of frame. and on the left, partially in frame, there was this guy sitting there. with something like clown makeup on? white base and then black circles around the eyes and a big black curve over the mouth. like literally a :). but directly in front of the door there's this tv. and on the tv is basically the exact same view of the room, but there's this little kid playing with the toys. the tv display is all grainy and distorted sometime, w/ buzzing audio. and the guy and the kid are talking to each other, back and forth.

i don't really remember how the next bit went but the kid was doing the Standard Creepy Kid thing of like, "come play with me :)" and eventually he ended up tearing his way out of the tv. there was some bit about like, me trying to explain other people are not just puppets to your will and that it's not nice to use creepy kid powers to make them do what you want. maybe? anyway this ends we me uh, killing the kid. and at some point it's imparted that the kid has like, nine lives and will keep haunting me until i manage to kill him another eight times.

anyway i end up running back into the underground maze and finding the old path i pushed through the dust to get there, but i get super lost and can't find my way back up, and end up going up another ramshackle staircase that goes up and up and up and eventually... like i guess it thins out as it goes? by the end the 'stairway' is like a few inches wide, with a railing that's like an inch or two, in a square with this pit in the center going all the way back down, and i'm mostly climbing up it like a ladder at this point. and it surfaces above ground, but with windows on the walls only -- it's at this point like some thin tall outbuilding, way outside the school itself. and i pry this dessicated interior windowbox off the inside and bash open a window (it's cheap plastic that just kinda falls out of the frame) and climb out

and then it's like, also there's a crowd of people there? a bunch of ne'er do well punk kids who i guess spend their time at the edge of the school's property, throwing things onto the grounds?? and i crawl out of the window and kinda collapse among them and that's when i woke up.

last night i had a dream about playing the new sonic game (not sonic mania; it was 3d and more in the vein of sonic adventure 2) and i kept clipping through everything and falling endlessly through the floor, etc. one of the levels was like this partially-open quarry/mine and the boss was at the bottom so i ended up falling into the boss trigger

then i stopped playing the game and that had like, transferred outside of the game, and i was in the actual house i live in but half the walls were shifted a few feet over, leading to one stairwell being impossibly-narrow and the other having huge seams open into nothingness

then i woke up

last night i had a dream about somebody giving me a macaw and me not really knowing how to take care of it so i just gave it nuts and seeds sometimes.

also it could talk. i mean, like a parrot talks.

there was other stuff but i kinda woke up like 'oh now that i'm awake i can look up bird care tips' 'wait'

last night i slept for like six hours and had a dream that i lived with haat films (along w/ a bunch of other people i think) in a sprawling "house" and had to help them move out and their room (they only had one) was just completely full of trash. then at the end i showcased a game that was about... like a 2d platformer, and the entire level was full of horizontal lines that you could hold onto and ride, and the point was if you did it right you would go really fast and also the motions of yr movement jumping between lines would make music.

then i took a nap and had a dream about... a game like cave story? visually. but w/ intentionally super opaque mechanics, like, there was some way to "capture" enemies and like decompose them down into bolts and parts (since they were all robots) which you could then use. but it involved holding down the "fire" button on some gun for several seconds so that the front part would come off and leave like a plasma highlight for a few tiles ahead of you, can if you managed to keep an enemy in that highlit area until the front part retracted that captured them. also there was some way to teleport around the (gigantic and difficult to navigate) levels using the level editor gun, which was also totally unexplained. i think the game was described as "being about tensions between the us and china in space colonization" but on playing it i thought that was dumb b/c there were basically no story elements.

i just woke up. from the nap.

lots of dreams about game design lately huh