Dreamtime Dreamscape: Video games

I had this dream a while ago, but it's stuck around long enough that I figured I should write it down.

Now and then I have dreams that are heavily based on video games and TV shows.

This one started out with me in a race. I don't run in real life, I'm slow and clumsy, but for some reason I was fit and I was going to run a marathon. The gun went off and I started running hard, and in seconds I had out distanced everyone in the race. It didn't make sense, until my inner dream narrator told me I was doing the race wrong. It wasn't about running, it was about twitching each muscle of my body from top to bottom in sequence. Only then could I move forward.

I told hubby about this part of the dream later, and he said it sounded like a video game. Thinking back on it, it was like some terrible NES game where, instead of just running, you had to punch buttons in order to get your runner to go forward. Push left leg, now right arm, now right leg, now left arm, over and over. Terrible game!

It took me a bit to get used to the muscle twitching, enough time that everyone else in the race twitched their way in front of me. Seeing as I wasn't going to win, I decided to look around.

I was going through a perfectly square cooridor of a kind of castle. It immediatly reminded me of what I would imagine the castles Mario went through in the old NES Mario games. "Your princess is in another castle, but wander down this perfectly straight hallway first!"

I wanted to keep going, but there was a moat in the way, and I couldn't run over it. The viewpoint of my dream shifted and I was looking down on my dream like it was an old school RPG map, and I was a sprite. I could see the castle, and my goal, and I was myself as this glitchy sprite next to a moat of 8-bit rendered water.

I could see a bridge over the moat but I couldn't go over it for some reason, so I went back to where the race began, and my point of view shifted to first person again and everything was no longer 8-bit graphics.

I was in some deep swamp area, with some old huts and campsites. I'd visited this area before on other dreams. It's at the end of a massive lake I tend to have nightmares in. When I have dreams about this area, I'm always searching for something and it always gets hot and miserable.

It was no different this time. I looked for whatever would get me across the 8-bit bridge, and slowly I woke up. I woke up in the midst of finding a canoe to go out onto the swamp part of the lake to search the cattails for whatever I was looking for.

It was a dull sounding dream in a way, but it was also unsettling. I saw myself outside my own body, and I ended up in the list part of my dreamscape. Also, I must be obsessed with old school games for some reason. Weird.