Alrightly, I finished typing up about my dream from a few nights ago. I added some numbered footnotes for supplemental information (they usually relate to where I sourced particular ideas or images from), but aren't required for the plot itself. Story goes downhill after halfway because I woke up for the first time and was jumping in-and-out of sleep from then onwards.
Sunday/Monday, 17-18th January 2010
I was playing Warhawk, or more accurately I
was a character in Warhawk. The map was Destroyed Capitol. I was on red team, and was playing near my base [1]. The enemy had just stolen my team's APC, but I was able to get my hands on their APC (which looked more like some kind of scooter; bright blue, two wheels). As I was about to boost to the northeast, I noticed my boost charge attack would not register. I thought to myself
'well that's strange' until I noticed that everyone else was running in straight lines/circles. This is a problem which occurs when you lose connection to the server, and hence other opponents are shown to continue doing whatever their last recorded action was [2].
Normally when you play Warhawk, there are restrictions regarding where you can go on the map. If you go outside of these boundaries, you constantly receive damage until you either die or return within bounds. However, if the server has lost connection, then you temporarily are invincible until the game registers that a disconnect has actually occured (you sometimes get a good 10 seconds or so). It has always been an aim of mine to, if the disconnect happens when I was in a plane, to fly to the outer bounds of the map where you are normally restricted.
In the dream, I still had control of my APC so I decided to see how far I could drive out of bounds before the disconnect registered [3]. The road I was driving on was like a regular highway with the types of vehicles one might expect to see in real life. However, as with my opponents in the Warhawk match, they were non-responsive and driving in straight lines due to the server disconnect, and hence I was constantly watching for cars going to crash into me in my rear view mirror [4]. Eventually the number of cars along the highway diminshed, until our [5] vehicle was the only one on the road. I thought this made sense, as we were so far away from the map that there would be no need to program cars here, and any cars which had originally been on the map had crashed due to the server error.
In the distance though I could see a large structure which I mentally associated as an airport. In the background of the airport was a bright yellow sunset [5.5]. As we approached the airport -- it was beginning to get darker at this stage -- there was a road which veered off to the left [6]. Approximately 20 metres along this other road was a building. The walls look quite weathered -- light-grey paint which was chipped and peeled with wood underneath. I was interested to investigate this building more. In particular, I wanted to know how the programmers had added this object... Was it a fully constructed building? A simple polygon with a complex texture? Moreso, I wanted to know
why this building existed, considering no player would otherwise have access to this area.
As I approached the building, I went to what looked to be doors (they were kind of like large wood panels which I could push inwards. The thickness of the doors was about 2-3cm, kind of like plywood). I pushed them inwards and was shocked that they moved...
Above is the reconstructed floorplan of the building. Rooms are numbered in the order in which is 'discovered' them. Grey coloured rooms were suggested to be there (unstated knowledge), but I never saw them or knew of their contents. To my knowledge, the building itself was not formed from real life inspirations. I must stress that this is simply a reconstruction; there was no minimap as with [1] -- this is simply my best effort to place together the rooms I visited relative to each other. Particular details, such as how the hallway connected them, were never elaborated on in the dream. Also note that, while looking quite complex from the inside, the building was a simple rectangular box shape from the outside.
- (Room 1) When I walked into this room it felt very reminiscent of a hotel lobby (cast your mind back towards the later seasons of Angel if you will). It was very desolate. No people, a sense of everything being covered in dust. Still, you could tell that it was once very regal. I didn't spend long in this room, and my recollection is vague. I cannot tell you, for example what furniture (if any) was inside this room
- (Room 2) This room was an office. (At this stage there were 4 of us). I can't remember how we discovered it, but it was revealed to us that this was basically the equivalent of... the developer's office. Like how you a 'Behind The Scenes' seciton on a DVD, except this was something three-dimensional and, to us, completely real. One of my comrades was flicking through what I gather must have been an index of documents in the room. He wondered how deep the programming was i.e. whether the actual documents had been programmed in as well. Doing something which I'm not quite aware of, he revealed a set of compactus shelves on the left-hand side of the room, full of books [7]. Although I never looked inside, it was unstated knowledge that they contained full text.
- (Room 3) We became aware of more rooms in the building, and continued down what was like a small hall. The room I indicated as 3 was a small enclave [8] where the hallway gave room to what served as a shower with a baby changing table. There was no shower curtain or anything (although there were raised tiles between the room and the hallway so that water would not spill out) -- this was more like the type of shower one might see at the beach for washing sand off one's feet.
- (Room 4) Continuing around to the next room was revealed to be like a giant kitchen. I realised at this stage that this entire building was based on the development offices of the programmers. Down the middle of the room was a giant stainless steel island, and stainless steel benches were all around the outside of the room. Unlike the lobby (Room 1), this place was absolutely spotless, like it had been used just yesterday. We moved over to the right hand side of the room, about 1/3 of the way down. Here I noticed some textbooks on child development and psychology [9], authored by Edward [don't remember last name]. I asked one of my comrades if these were books his character had authored, and he said yes.
The specific events at this section are a little blurry (cut me some slack -- it's been two nights of dreams since this occured), but while in this room I had spilt some crumbs on the stainless steel bench. An omniscient presence ordered me to clean them up. This struck me as awe inspiring. I mean... This placed housed all the documents detailing my (the character's) existence. It was a recreation of the headquarters of my creators. In a place that was practically inaccessible to everyone, they placed this building for me to find. Furthermore, how would they know to include the prompt about cleaning up the crumbs. They must've known I would spill crumbs beforehand (the game was printed long before I played it). Was it predestined that I would find my way here and spill the crumbs? They did create me after all.
- At this stage I started waking up and falling back asleep. When I have an in-depth dream like this one I often resume sleeping to try to continue the dream adventure. This happened multiple times from here on in, and resulted in shifts of content or theme between each segment. It also means that there's often a lack of continuity between different scenes, as I fell asleep and just picked it up from somewhere else.
- The segue between Rooms 4 and 5 was not clearly defined, although I know the general location of Room 5 in relation to the rest of the building. As we were heading there, we felt this vibe that we should leave, like our time was up. We had seen what we were meant to see, and now it was time for us to leave. My female companion [10] expressed a desire not to have to return. In particular, she wanted to see the sunset. When we were in the world of Warhawk we had free-will, but there were certain environmental restrictions. The length of a game match, for example, meant that the game always ended after 30 minutes and hence we never got to experience a sunset for ourselves. I promised her we would stay to watch the sun go down.
- (Room 5) The room was a theatre. There was a stage on the right-hand side of the room, with rows of red chairs facing the stage (except they were the types of chairs where the seats fold up if no one is sitting in them). Throughout this scene I was standing towards the bottom side of the room, such that when I was looking at the stage I was looking upwards on the map. On the stage were three people. Two were girls, with metal collars around their neck. Metal chains led up to the hands of this tall creature... More than tall, it was gigantic. It's crooked knees were the height of the girls, but I never saw enough of him to be able to describe him. I don't think the girls in the collars were human either (they were also quite tall themselves), but likewise I never focused on them enough. One of the girls got of the stage and faced us as a group. She started to dance, as if for us but it was really for her master. For reasons which I'm not aware of, I needed to make them go away. I focused on the girl, and she was replaced with this outline of herself, with her insides obsidian in colour, almost like Dark Matter from LittleBigPlanet. And then brilliant flames erupted from within the shape and she was gone. I turned my attention to the master and the remaining girl to do the same to them. In hindsight, I think I had to make them go away so that we could see the sunset, although I can't explain the rationale behind this.
We were leaving to return to the Destroyed Capitol map when a car passed us, headed towards the building. This struck me as odd, given that we hadn't seen any cars in this region before. It's unclear how I knew this, but it became apparent they we attending the wedding of the things I had destroyed in the theatre. I realised that my creators would be mad if they found out what I'd done. I don't remember how, but I reversed my earlier actions. In the hallway of the building I was once again talking to my female companion. She once again iterated her desire to see the sun setting, and I informed her that we already had, but I had to turn back time and that she no longer remembers seeing it. But I assured her that we had seen it and it was beautiful.
In the next jump of story, we were leaving the building once again, but rather than heading back to Destroyed Capitol we headed to the 'airport'. After another waking up/falling asleep, this is where our story continues. I was walking along what was (unstated knowledge) basically a demos section on the disc.
At the start of this section we came across a giant exhibit [11] for a demo. The particular demo was for an agricultural spreadsheeting/accounting program (once again, unstated knowledge). I expressed surprise at this, given that no such programs have been (or would be) released for PS3. I therefore concluded that the demos contained on disc must infact be multi-platform (or, at least, not necessarily available on PS3 platform). The exhibit itself, by the way, was on the left-hand side of a road [12]. There was a giant tractor, green with yellow grill... It's wheels were more than twice my height... I remember running my hand across the tread.
The next part involved being in a warehouse... (New floorplan!)
I use the term 'entrance' tentatively because there was no specific entrance into the building (possibly another awake/asleep jump, or simply an internal transition that occured without me being aware). The roof was enormously high, with metal shelves (indicated in grey) stretching high in the air. No longer about individual game products, these shelves seemed to be like a warehouse of trinkets that had at one stage been given out to visitors for free. My comrades [13] and I split up looking at the various wares. At one shelf I found bottles of pedicure cream, and on the shelf above it were pink bottles of perfume (most were about 1/2 empty, with slight variations in pinkness colour. I managed to find one which was 3/4 full and pocketed it as a souveneir). On another shelf, I found a plastic takeaway container of biscuits [14] and took one for myself. I didn't number the shelves, but the cream and perfume were on the right-hand wall shelf near the top, the biscuit was on the top horizontal shelf, left hand edge when viewed from the top wall. Occassionally my comrades commented on something particularly cool they came across.
We finally made our way into the room at the back. It turned out to be part of the MAG beta, now closed down. First thing to notice was the room was so dimly lit. There was a single light fixture attached to the wall on the bottom left corner as shown on the floorplan. It was hard to see most of the room because it was so dark, but there was an in-built brick fireplace on the left-most wall, various chairs in the middle. The designs of the chairs were pretty fancy... short jarrah legs, red felt... [15]. Covering everything were these massive cobwebs. The beta was no longer running (hence this place being in the dark) and it was abandoned. There were all these documents on the tables though, and I wish I could've been able to read them. I felt that there was so much history and information that would've been contained in this room, basically lost for all eternity because the beta ended.
I also got sick of the biscuit I had half-eaten and tried to find a bin in the room to put the rest in. I think I got on somewhere near the upper right of the room. I then felt really inappropriate because amongst all of the dusty cobwebbed furniture was half of a bright pink biscuit. And being a fake environment I knew it would never break down... It would just linger and never decompose, evidence of my late presence.
(Then sometime here I finally woke up for good because I was thirsty.)
Reflections:
This was actually quite a powerful dream for me. I mean, the consistency of the plot went downhill once I started awakening all of the time, but before that it was really quite solid. The most profound part was (as the character) finding all those documents detailing not only my creation, but the creation of everything I knew about the world. I am not a religious person in the slightest sense, but the feeling of being faced with solid evidence of your creation is quite honestly mind blowing.
Also significant was the feelings I experienced looking through the closed MAG beta. So much information lost to time. Memories lost, thoughts lost... In a way it's kind of like this dream itself. There was so much which I saw in this one dream alone -- things which I wasn't able to translate into words for a GAF post -- which will become lost forever. And there are thousands more detailed dreams from my past which become at best a fleeting glimpse. I seriously do wish there were a way to record dreams, because the immersion and creativity of some is like nothing else you can experience. Your mind can generate elaborate worlds, peicing together memories and fragments from your entire life, generating new images entirely, shaped by your personality, your thoughts, your aspirations, your fears... There is honestly nothing else like it in the world. And yet those entire worlds get overwritten almost instantly by your everyday life... It really is quite a shame.
Footnotes:
[1] My location (and direction facing) are shown here with an orange arrow. The orientation of the minimap is how it was displayed in my dream. Regular Warhawk players may note that the map is rotated 90 degrees to how it appears in game.
[2] When you lose connection like this, it means you cannot enter or exit a vehicle/plane, as registering a vehicle change requires a response from the server. In reality, it would not affect my boost charge ability if I were already inside an APC.
[3] The road lead from the south east part of the map, leaving in an easterly direction. The road itself was based on memories of a main road near my childhood home. The actual Destroyed Capitol map features a city suspended in the sky, and there are no roads on the real map.
[4] Cars drove on the left-hand side of the road, as is standard in Australia. The driver's wheel was on the right-hand side of the car. Although I still considered to be driving the blue APC at this point, the visuals are more reminiscent of my own car.
[5] At this stage I had realised there was a female accompanying me. This was the kind of an unstated knowledge that one just has in dreams though. I had not seen her or been introduced to her, but I knew she was there. Later I would be also accompanied by two male figures in a similar fashion. These people were always considered to me as having originated from the game like I had.
[5.5] Just realised this would make the sun be setting to the east according to the orientation of my map in [1]. Ssh.
[6] At this stage the road was a dark red colour, similar to dirt in outback Western Australia.
[7] The spines of the books were aesthetically based on that of
"CRC Handbook of Terpenoids", CRC Press, Boca Raton, 1982. Murkey green spine colour, dark rectangle, gold print.
[8] I'm sure this is the right word for what I mean, but Google's definitions only refer to it in a politcal, societal or cultural context.
[9] Two possible reasons why this content would have appeared in my dream: I've closely been following the
Prop 8 court challenge, and some of the expert witnesses have testified about the psychological well-being of children raised by gay and lesbian parents. In addition, this year I will be doing a course in high school education, and speaking to someone else in education they mentioned one of the topics as being child developmental physchology.
[10] At this stage, myself and the female character had somewhat assumed the identities of Neo and Trinity from The Matrix. Nothing specifically from The Matrix was ever introduced, but it was assumed knowledge when I looked at her during the conversation. This may, in part, have been inspired by personal revelations in the past room regarding creation, pre-destined, etc as well as the overall theme of a constructed digital environment
[11] An exhibit like the type one might see at an Australian
Agricultural/Royal show
[12] Based on a particular main road of my hometown. This road is in the middle of a semi-industrial area. I grew up in a rural town, so trucks and agricultural equipment in this area would not be unexpected
[13] I should mention that, except for [10], at no point did any of these secondary characters have a strong identity. Other than [10], I never looked at them when talking to them and didn't see their faces. There was very rarely verbal communication between us. Mostly they were just a presence in the background.
[14] I'm thinking of a particular brand, dunno if they are sold worldwide or just in Australia. Flat biscuit, circular, solid pink coating on the front, hundreds and thousands on the pink bit.
[15] God I can't draw for shit, but here's my sketch of what the chairs looked like. Possibly a bit taller and less fatter, maybe slightly deeper). Similar in motif to the photograph here:
http://www.moonshadowsbb.com/Tour_Page/chair_by_fireplace.jpg, except the arms are different and the chair is red. Also there might've been fancy dimpling of the material on the back of the chair.
