I’ve had this dream repeated over several nights, although not in a row. It takes place in Brazil, and although I’m writing this in English, the dream takes place entirely in Portuguese, which I can apparently now speak fluently.
It’s the middle of the night and in the backroom barracks of the Heineken store the houseguests from Big Brother 9 are arguing about sleeping arrangements on the many too-small cub camp bunk beds. The screech of tires and a Heineken delivery truck pulls up in front of the store. Did I mention the store has a front lawn? And is on a cul-de-sac?
Nikki and Paolo from Lost jump out of the truck, and run up to the house, carrying cardboard boxes of money. They drop them in the store, and start gathering myself and some random local boys who I can only imagine are from City of God. They begin doling out the money evenly between us for safe keeping, in case the cops show up. There is much scrambling for shoes and shoulder bags and other such things, and in all the chaos I somehow end up having sex with Nikki in the front window of the store.
Then the cops show up. Nikki disappears and Paolo leads us boys to a man hole cover, telling us to wait in the pipes below until it is safe to come out. It should be noted that as I drop into the abyss, the Del Segno alternate endings begin; more on that later. It should also be noted that from the Segno our money has turned into three-hole punched reams of white paper.
Now we’re in Matrix underground style pipes, and have to run a short distance down one of them to get to the underground mall that is apparently made up entirely of escalators, glass-walled railings, and guard posts. We hurry down an escalator clutching our stacks of paper, shoving them into our sweaters, bags, behind our backs, anything to keep the guard at the top of the escalator from seeing them.
Suddenly, the Rio SWAT team shows up and we’re surrounded. I hop over the railing and land on the shoulders of some punk standing around with his friends, three floors down. The SWAT team saw me jump, and now they’re after me.
The bottom floor of this place looks like a mix of high school grunge and university bureaucracy. Between spacious and extravagant frosted glass-walled conference rooms are mazes of dirty beige lockers. I turn a corner and drop my paper, because I just got shot by the SWAT team. That’s ending one.
Back to the Segno: now we’re in Matrix underground style pipes, and the same scenario repeats itself. It seems my dream is giving me the chance to escape, like a save point after which I must succeed or end up returning to it, and to before which I cannot return. I’m glad I mixed musical and video game analogies, aren’t you?
Several attempts later, having tried jumping down the escalator, kicking out the guards, breaking the back of the poor punk on whom I drop every time with several different styles of fall, I always end up turning that corner and getting shot.
On the final repetition I find myself making fewer rash decisions, and seem to take things better than I had before. First of all, I drop the paper in the pipe, because I know it’s only going to weigh me down and identify me without a doubt as one of the thieves. Next, I try to blend in, and instead of running with the City of God boys, I leisurely join the other customers, although I can’t figure out why they’re here or how they even got here, considering there are no other entrances besides the man hole, not to mention the fact that there’s no stores or things to buy; I’ll still call them customers. So I’m blending in with them, and as I ride the escalators down to the bottom floor, I wave at the punk whose back I’ve broken so many times, and he flips me off, making all his friends laugh. I let it slide, because he can’t possibly know the fate he’s thwarted by mere chance.
Next I get myself lost in the maze of dirty beige lockers, and it is at this point that I become aware that I’m dreaming. Now for some people this is when the lucid dreaming would kick in, when they’d be able to control their own dream self, as opposed to me who can only ever passively watch as my dream self makes a fool of himself over and over and over again. Now I’ve tried to keep in the dream when I reach that point of awareness, but I always find myself both aware that I’m dreaming and simultaneously aware that I’m sleeping, and I can’t seem to separate myself from my sleeping form, which leads to me inevitably waking up. Not all is lost, though, because as I have this dream more, I become increasingly more able to hold on to that last fleeting moment of awareness, and maybe one day soon I’ll be able to grasp it firmly and stay in the dream, and hopefully finally defeat those damn Rio SWAT goons.
DFTBA
It’s the middle of the night and in the backroom barracks of the Heineken store the houseguests from Big Brother 9 are arguing about sleeping arrangements on the many too-small cub camp bunk beds. The screech of tires and a Heineken delivery truck pulls up in front of the store. Did I mention the store has a front lawn? And is on a cul-de-sac?
Nikki and Paolo from Lost jump out of the truck, and run up to the house, carrying cardboard boxes of money. They drop them in the store, and start gathering myself and some random local boys who I can only imagine are from City of God. They begin doling out the money evenly between us for safe keeping, in case the cops show up. There is much scrambling for shoes and shoulder bags and other such things, and in all the chaos I somehow end up having sex with Nikki in the front window of the store.
Then the cops show up. Nikki disappears and Paolo leads us boys to a man hole cover, telling us to wait in the pipes below until it is safe to come out. It should be noted that as I drop into the abyss, the Del Segno alternate endings begin; more on that later. It should also be noted that from the Segno our money has turned into three-hole punched reams of white paper.
Now we’re in Matrix underground style pipes, and have to run a short distance down one of them to get to the underground mall that is apparently made up entirely of escalators, glass-walled railings, and guard posts. We hurry down an escalator clutching our stacks of paper, shoving them into our sweaters, bags, behind our backs, anything to keep the guard at the top of the escalator from seeing them.
Suddenly, the Rio SWAT team shows up and we’re surrounded. I hop over the railing and land on the shoulders of some punk standing around with his friends, three floors down. The SWAT team saw me jump, and now they’re after me.
The bottom floor of this place looks like a mix of high school grunge and university bureaucracy. Between spacious and extravagant frosted glass-walled conference rooms are mazes of dirty beige lockers. I turn a corner and drop my paper, because I just got shot by the SWAT team. That’s ending one.
Back to the Segno: now we’re in Matrix underground style pipes, and the same scenario repeats itself. It seems my dream is giving me the chance to escape, like a save point after which I must succeed or end up returning to it, and to before which I cannot return. I’m glad I mixed musical and video game analogies, aren’t you?
Several attempts later, having tried jumping down the escalator, kicking out the guards, breaking the back of the poor punk on whom I drop every time with several different styles of fall, I always end up turning that corner and getting shot.
On the final repetition I find myself making fewer rash decisions, and seem to take things better than I had before. First of all, I drop the paper in the pipe, because I know it’s only going to weigh me down and identify me without a doubt as one of the thieves. Next, I try to blend in, and instead of running with the City of God boys, I leisurely join the other customers, although I can’t figure out why they’re here or how they even got here, considering there are no other entrances besides the man hole, not to mention the fact that there’s no stores or things to buy; I’ll still call them customers. So I’m blending in with them, and as I ride the escalators down to the bottom floor, I wave at the punk whose back I’ve broken so many times, and he flips me off, making all his friends laugh. I let it slide, because he can’t possibly know the fate he’s thwarted by mere chance.
Next I get myself lost in the maze of dirty beige lockers, and it is at this point that I become aware that I’m dreaming. Now for some people this is when the lucid dreaming would kick in, when they’d be able to control their own dream self, as opposed to me who can only ever passively watch as my dream self makes a fool of himself over and over and over again. Now I’ve tried to keep in the dream when I reach that point of awareness, but I always find myself both aware that I’m dreaming and simultaneously aware that I’m sleeping, and I can’t seem to separate myself from my sleeping form, which leads to me inevitably waking up. Not all is lost, though, because as I have this dream more, I become increasingly more able to hold on to that last fleeting moment of awareness, and maybe one day soon I’ll be able to grasp it firmly and stay in the dream, and hopefully finally defeat those damn Rio SWAT goons.
DFTBA
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