Crazy Dream

From Telkoth.net

I had a crazy dream just last night. This is my last day here in Fairfax, but the different location is probably what inspired me to remember a dream. I've remembered other dreams better when I've slept somewhere other than my own place, so I'm wondering if sleeping somewhere else has something to do with it.

Anyway, so, this dream.

[edit] The Dream

It started with me in class back in high school. Some math class. A friend of mine - played in this dream by Scott from work - also attended this class, but he always had to miss it for some reason, so he was allowed to come in and catch up, or something, which somehow involved him plugging in a computer, and I think a projector was involved...

After class I went outside, and there was another friend there. I don't think he correlated to someone in real life. He wanted to teach me this card game. The "story" behind the game is that we were two princes - brothers - vying for power over the area. The way we gained this power was to have the support of the people, represented by the cards.

The cards had different values, and two sides - one side was colored red, the other blue. One prince was the red prince, and the other was the blue, and you knew you had the support of a person-card if the side with your color was turned face up. So the cards were placed in a ring, some 6 or 8 feet in diameter, and the two of us would run around as fast as we could, flipping the cards over in our favor. Somehow it was recorded how long each card was flipped over, and you would accumulate support by having the same card flipped over for long periods of time, though I'm not sure how that worked out, since the other prince and I were just running around. I remember keeping a notebook and pencil to do as much recording as I could, but since I didn't know what the other prince was doing, it was hard to do accurately.

Why couldn't I just look at what the other prince was doing? Slowly, the scenery around us was changing to make the card game real life... eventually the field outside the school was replaced by an expansive, rolling plains, with woods and mountains in the distance. The cards moved further and further apart, and eventually assumed the form of the people they represented. Farmers, pikemen, etc. Also, as time went by, and while you weren't looking, new people would come on the field in areas where a single prince had a lot of support, automatically supporting that prince. The larger that area of support, the more powerful the unit.

Rather than flipping over cards, we now talked to the people, but we also would mark whose side a person was on by taking this flag from a pole, or pike, or staff the person was carying, slide it up off the top, turn it around, and slide it back down on the pole.

Another element was added to the game: I - or the other prince - could build structures that would encourage new units to come into areas of high support. You could build barracks and mills and things like that, but you had to have the resources to do so. There was stone, and probably wood and something else, but I remember stone mostly, because of an encounter I had with a peasant. This peasant was one of my high school friends (dream-friend, not real-life-friend), a girl dressed as a peasant. I asked her if the people in the area needed anything built for them, and she said no, but that due to some strange magnetic properties, or something to do with field lines, that a special kind of stone could often be found in the area. This was clearly too advanced for a peasant to be talking about, so I told her so, and also asked some other dream-friend - if he was anyone in real-life, I'd have to think Stephen - if he agreed that she shouldn't be talking about magnetic field lines, and he agreed. So basically we scolded her a little, but I thanked her for the information, because I definitely was interested in this special stone, turned over the flag on her staff, and moved on.

I also remember briefly getting a kind of birds-eye-view of the area. There was a still a very ring-like structure to how the people were arranged, but now we had buildings, and walls and such. The inside of the ring was much more defined than the outside, I think... like, it was very clear where the inside of the ring stopped, but the outside would taper off more with people.

Anyway, I ran around to one part where I had fairly good control, to kind of check up on it. It was... there were these two large bleachers, I guess you'd say, made of wood, facing each other, so that there was this rectangular area they were on the sides of. And many people were lined up on these bleachers, talking, and arguging, etc, etc. They were all in support of me, save this one row. I couldn't imagine why the other prince would only convert a single row of my guys, so I went to check it out. They were apparently a row of priests, or clerics, or some such, with fancy robes, and big, ornate staffs. These were obviously cool units, but would be very difficult to convert to my side, since their staves had all these bits on them that clipped on, preventing me from flipping over the flag piece. I would have to un-clip them all, slide the flag up, turn it, slide it back on, and then clip all the pieces back on. I figured that, with my overwhelming presence here, they would get converted to my side eventually, so I left them be and went on to solidify my support in other areas.

Things seemed to be going pretty well, but when I got back around the ring to that bleacher area again, things had gone wrong. It was growing more into a castle/stronghold, and influence for the other prince had grown. I think his priests were converting all my guys, and clearly there had been development here. More and more higher units were appearing - templars, and court... people. Bishops... all that stuff.

Eventually I had lost - the other prince was to become king.

So, there was to be a large feast, and the people who were on the winning side at the end were going to get some kind of prize, or something, and there was a line set up for them. I remember this line well, so I'll try to describe it.

So... imagine a wide hallway... wooden and stone... you're looking down it towards a dead end. But now put a small passage that leads off of the dead, and next to that, still along the dead-end wall, is a bench. People line up on the right side of the hallway (again, as you're looking down it), turn around at the dead end, and come back along the left side. Now put a wooden divider between the two sides (except at the end, of course, to allow people to turn around). The divider is kind of that cross-hatch wood stuff, probably with little windows and things in it. Anyway, I don't know what was at the end of the line, and it was for the winning side, but I was hanging out, talking to some people in the line, so I kinda' went with it. As I neared the end, with the bench, I saw there was some guy sitting there, and he wanted to talk to me, so I took a seat near him. I don't remember what he told me, but he thought there might be some kind of thing I was interested in... something to do, basically, even though I wasn't to be king. Some adventure, or game.

It was about this time I woke up.

...

[edit] Conclusion-like Thing

It was pretty cool! The card game evolving into real people... and the scenery was awesome. The rolling plains, and the forest... it was a really neat location. Very real. Lots of it was very detailed. I went to this new grocery store here in Fairfax - Wagners, I think is the name - but the line inside the castle, before/during (I don't remember which) the feast kind of reminded me of that grocery store, with ivy crawling on the stone walls, etc.

It's hard to tell what real-life things inspired the dream. As I typed it up, two brothers vying for power over a land, using cards, is quite a bit reminiscent of Magic: the Gathering. And the three-resource building-construction is very much like a lot of RTS games. Age of Empires 2 comes to mind.

It was very cool, at any rate!

Well! I'm heading out to Katie's art show thing. It is, after all, the reason I'm here.

Back in Charlottesville later today, though. Probably 11ish... later than I'd like... work tomorrow, too... oh well.