Gaming in My Sleep.

        I dreamed I was playing WoW with N and MS and a couple of other folks I’ve met online. We were in some sort of huge ice cavern, fighting a frost giant. MS was a paladin (in my dream I editorialized: Of course.) N was a Moonkin (Druid) and I was a gnome, we had a hunter and another paladin with us, so it was a 5 man instance. We had a tough time of taking out the giant, but managed. While we were all sitting and healing up, a large slug like creature appeared on a ledge far above us.

        I targeted it to see what it was. It had half a million health.

“I think we should stay away from that,” I started to say when my portrait appeared in its targeting area.

        “Oh, RUST!” I shouted, but everyone had gone AFK. I knew we all had an item in our inventory that was supposed to help contain this creature, freeze it in place, when all five were used. This was an encounter that you could use items to avoid. Problem was, if you didn’t use all five, you could root the boss, but then it would start spewing out little copies of itself. I tried kiting it away from the group, my health kept having huge chunks taken out of it. I managed to go invisible, but it then just switched to the next closest party member, N, who happened to be in the bathroom. I pulled out the relic and trapped it. Of course, it started spewing out little grey shimmery sluglets.

        Good news, they weren’t elite, bad news, they were popping out about one a second. Good news, the boss wasn’t directly attacking me anymore. Bad news, the sluglets, though not very healthy, hit hard.

        I was down to about a fifth of my health and mana, and dropping fast. Running to get them grouped up so I could AOE them in batches then run from the next batch. I was keeping alive, but only barely. M got back on microphone and asked what I was doing.

        “Trying to stay alive, this thing spawned right after the giant died. I didn’t provoke it intentionally, really!”

        “Let’s just wipe and come back for them.”

        “They’re not the problem. I had to use my relic to keep the boss from attacking N.”

        “Get everyone back on line, now, we need to do this before your relic times out.”

        N shouted that she was wiping, the bathroom kind, and would be right there.

        MS started helping take out the sluglets, and tossed me a heal at the same time.

        “Should I use my relic?”

        “Not yet, it spawns one a second for each relic on it until it gets all five.”

        We started taking turns killing the sluglets in groups of five or six until the rest of the party could get on. I would bandage M and he would heal me.

        “I need to save enough mana to AOE down the last burst of sluglets!”

        “Moonkin can hurricane,” M suggested.

        “It’s on cool down, M; N used it on the last boss.”

        “We’re all going to die.”

        At some point during that exchange it went from playing a game to being a real experience. I was a little unhappy that I couldn’t see from an overhead view, but at the same time, my view was much wider and I could move my head and eyes far faster than I ever could my mouse. So it seemed like a fair trade off.

        N was hitching up her leather pants as she rounded the corner of a boulder, her long pointy ears turned into tufts of feathers as she took on her Moonkin form after healing us.

        JL, the other paladin came running down the ravine and into the fray next to M. I didn’t know where the hunter was located.

Ad astra per technica,

FF