Fevered Dream

Started with our little community theater group in Dream City, I'm in the second seat of the first row. The show is going, the audience is full of former cast members and parents, and friends, and the recently homeless, watching, and singing along. It is a run through, working rehearsal, but with a few stops as possible. It is going well. familiar music for everyone.

Take the stage with your friends, the writer and director urge, looking at me for permission. Who am I to deny these people, all these talents, their fun?

There is the digging to enlarge the stage, mounds of stored flats and frames and crates,
Lead down below the hall to the back of the ruined temple on the other side of the block.
And an exterior door.
Street Level.
A short walk to verify, Ware house of house of storage for house of horrors. (See us in Octobre)

It is one of my warehouses, holding a now defunct show's sets I cannot make myself evict.
I smile.

I walk through to a street, a band was set up,
Streets blocked, then been told their promised gig could no go forward.
This City must Move
Without them.

Pack it all up.

Interrupted Nuptials, famous vocal cords grown old, but still grasping at the youth promised of wedded bliss. Fran-San Cisco will not have them.

Take the stage, both of you,
Join the show,
Take the stage with our little community of performers, we're moving the audience into the ground floor,
Opening all the crates.
Under UV lights,
The faded sets like cartoon fireworks, all horror long faded.
We perform the Entre` Act
The choreographer adjusts.
Then a Wedding
Then Act II
Dizzying effects,
Unforgettable Nuptials
A community restoration
"Hallelujah" sung by hundreds of voices.
"We can't sing that, we don't have the rights!"
"I wouldn't worry about that," the silver-haired groom, and owner of the song smiles. "It's meant to be sung. Just, like, this."
He smiles.
"We have three more nights..."
The band, smiles.
My director and choreographer smile.
The excavators smile,
The bride and groom look at one another, all honeymoon plans fled, they take the stage.
And smile.
We finish the song with the crowd.
And smile.

I awake, music still thundering in my ears.
I smile.

Crimson Bullfinches

Several dreams last night, one where I fell again, and this time scraped up my knee as well as twisted my ankle and banged up a hip. But the worst part was that I tore holes in my favorite pair of pants.

The last dream this morning found me in my VR rig at the office, logged into Steam Trunk with my non-development character trying to replicate a teleportation game bug that had been reported, but we were unable to reproduce it with the development accounts. (Probably because they had a different teleport/instance tracking system.)

I was playing in a high mob intensity area, working on a king of the mountain scenario, one of the slightly more common reported trigger areas, when I overlapped the bounding box of an "Extra Large" wolf mob. The sanity teleport kicked in. Then all the teleportation gizmos in my inventory, one after another, began to fire. I was suddenly at the bottom of the hill, then on the edge of some violet and blue cliffs, about seventy clicks away (one of my "vacation" teleports had fired.) Then to a sandy beach, then to a portrait mobile device view of the minimalist map (low bandwidth, icon based for mobile devices) then several others, including the holding area for one of the more popular team sport gauntlet arenas. When I appeared there, I was also in my Crimson Bullfinch uniform, so at least the uniform widget part of that teleport charm was working along with the teleport. The uniform was a sort of padded striped looking armor with a catching mitt on one manipulator and a ranged thrower on the other. I also had the wide angle /medium range helmet. I could see the top down gauntlet overlay showing a match in progress. I noted that both teams were advancing off center from each other in a four by four square, and had passed one another, but just before the match turned into a straight race the cowboy hats at the top of the leftmost square snared the top four of the opposing team and then their strikers opened up, knocking the other team's cargo tokens willy-nilly across the narrow field of play. A sneaky maneuver well executed. As I blinked away from that location I got a message from another player complimenting me on the outfit, and asking what color it was. The last couple of teleport gizmos fired and I was left sitting on the top of a stepped pyramid overlooking a jungle. I made a note that the text communication overlay needed to be improved in the VR interface.

Before debriefing with the debug team I searched back through the messages to respond to the player who asked about my gear. I explained that it was my "Gauntlet" scout/striker uniform, and the team colors were dusky maroon with black pinstripes.

Then I went back to the VR to try to figure out, with the bug fix team, where the heck I ended up, and how the bug had fired not only the usual teleport gizmos I had in my inventory, but even the unopened charms in my mystery loot trunk. The Mystery loot charms weren't even supposed to be generated until they were opened. I looked in the "Mysteries Trunk." All of the items were still there, and all indicated that they were still unopened.

The detail on the "Gauntlet" map was amazing. Also, I seemed to know that Gauntlet Matches were played in teams of Two, Four, Eight, Twelve or Sixteen. The Crimson Bullfinches fielded all of the team sizes. In the top down map, each player was indicated by a top down view of their headgear with their number below it and their cargo token in the center (if it hadn't been displaced yet.) Little icons next to them showed what type of manipulator they had and if your range and sensitivity were enough, you could see active charms by zooming in. The Crimson Bullfinches B-Team was one of the open teams used for pickup games, their uniforms were white with maroon pinstripes. Don't know why my brain thought it was important that I knew that.

Dream City Moviplex

I was visiting the owner of the Dream City MoviPlex, located in the Old City Center's now aging mall. The carpets were starting to look a little worn, hundreds of thousands of eager steps, spilled soda and popcorn as well as the occasional toppled rope stand had taken their toll. The sound of kids eagerly headed to the latest big screen entertainment hadn't changed, though, and the place was filled with happy voices and the hubbub of pre-movie preparations and after movie celebrations.

I went up to the show office with the owner and we were conversing about the place, and the renovations he wanted to make. He knew I had some warehouses recently repaired, and wanted to move his theater equipment into storage during the renovations (as my warehouses were the closest ones to the theater.) I told him I would love to rent him the space, but perhaps he might be willing to make a different deal. I wanted him to give me a couple of passes that would allow me and a guest to attend any show that wasn't sold out when we arrived. While he was thinking about it I bumped the play button on his messaging machine. An old man's voice rang out of the office speakers with measured cadence and a sort of delightful passion - reviewing one of the theater's most recent offerings. The audio review was not particularly flattering, but was delivered with a great sense of respect and humor about the film, its director and actors, and the theater in which he saw it. I understood why the owner wanted to renovate. I then realized that the caller was actually me... True to this type of dream, once the recording was started, I couldn't find a way to turn it off. Though profoundly embarrassed, I also found the audio very entertaining, then felt guilty at my narcissistic pleasure. The plots and images of dozens of other films I'd seen there flashed through my mind, good memories, all of them, even the bitter-sweet memories of good times with past loves.

I suggested that the owner use the review of the theater as part of his web site explaining the need for the renovations, as well as capturing the lure of the place and the love for the whole enterprise. He admitted that he'd kept all of my reviews and suggestions on tape. I was flattered.

He actually wanted to put them up as a podcast about the theater's history, as my "reviews" apparently went back a couple of decades... I had no idea.

When I woke I was actually sort of stuck on the idea of the podcast, not so much for the theater review, but for the reviews/descriptions of the movies I'd seen there. They weren't anything like any movies I've actually seen in my waking city.

I wish I could recall more of the stories I'd seen on that big screen (realizing, of course, that the memories whether real or dreamed, would all be of stories that I created, remembered, or modified from my waking world.)