Crazy Dream (Part 1)

Last night I had, perhaps, the craziest dream I have ever had. It involved copyrighted video game characters, strange rooms, Halo 3, and my father. The dream started roughly around 12 o'clock and seemed to last for several weeks, although in hindsight, it probably only lasted a few seconds. The dream combined vivid imagery with intense and profound symbolism, leading me to question the true meaning of the dream. But not before I took some time to recreate one of the characters of my dream in Microsoft Paint.

That's right folks. I dream I was Mario last night. The moustachioed, overall wearing, Italian plumber with a predilection for strange tubes and mushrooms (that last bit would sound really weird if Mario was a less known video game figure). I dreamt I was Mario last night, in Mario's 2D world, jumping from box to box, battling those strange blob shaped enemies and gaining a lot of strength from mushrooms and crazy glowing flowers. If you thought that Mario was intense to begin with, imagine living in a world where everything is flat. And I mean everything. No exceptions. Those Japanese video game creators were sticklers for that. But you know what? I didn't mind it that much. I'm not sure if it was because I was Mario or just because I was dreaming in general, but the world being flat was not high on my list of things to worry about. Death by turtles was. That is, until I stumbled upon the magic 3D room.

Alright, imagine this. You're calmly eating breakfast on a weekday morning before going off to work or school or any of your daily activities. You turn on the TV to watch the weather forecast for that day. But when the weather forecast comes on, instead of a map of the United States there's simply a large image of a cantaloupe on the green screen behind the meteorologist. And HE'S talking in Cantonese. And you look down and suddenly your plate is full of pancakes when seconds ago it was full of toast and eggs. Imagine all of this, and then imagine how much you would freak out. Well, if you took all of that and multiplied it by 5 times you would have some idea of the sort of manner in which my mind was blown by this. 3 dimensions? I think I may have said, "What the f*ck?" out loud, while I was sleeping. That was how amazed I was.

Anyway, it was a tiny room, hidden inside the back of one of the many little boxes that you have to jump to and from to get coins, shrooms, etc. in the game. It wasn't very big, but certainly bigger on the inside than one of those boxes was on the outside, which led me to believe that a certain degree of magic was involved in its design. When I got inside the box, a little message appeared to me. "Press X every 30 seconds for a 20,000 point bonus." Now, this struck me as a little odd. I'm not sure if original Nintendo controllers had X as a button, I haven't used one in a long time, but the strange thing about the message was that it was written in the same font/color/style that is used to tell you in Halo 2 when to pick up a new weapon. I was slightly bemused, to say the least.

By this time, the wonder of finding this strange new 3D box started to wear off. Suddenly the entire world was 3D, and if that was so, quick math revealed there was a lot more of the world to discover, so it felt dumb to stay for 30 seconds in some stupid box. Plus, at that point I think I realized that I wasn't playing the game anymore and the points didn't matter. I did notice one interesting thing before I left the box, and that was the names carved on the inside walls. I can't remember any of the names now, but I remember thinking it was funny.

This is turning out much longer than I expected so I will break into sections and post the next installment later. Don't worry, I won't forget how th dream went, as soon as I woke up this morning I told my brother all about it (with embellishments of course), so I've remembered it pretty well.