Strange Dream

Sorta like this...

OK, this is a dream I had last night (at least as well as I can remember it).

The dream started with me playing some sort of video game.  The first part of the dream took the form of a computer video game involved loading a musket.  One had to select the proper tools and parts from a list (like the ramming rod, wadding, ball, powder horn and other stuff) in the proper order and drag and drop them onto the right part of the musket.  I have never loaded a musket, so it felt kind of ‘educational’ to me.  There were a lot of weird looking tools in the menu; I suspect some of them were just ‘red herrings’ that my subconscious inserted in there to make the game more challenging.  I think  if you didn’t load the musket properly, it wouldn’t fire.

The second part of the video game was what they call a ‘first person shooter.’  You are looking down the barrel of the musket across an area where there are trees, houses, etc, as well as the shore of a river.  As you sit there, possible targets appear, some of which will be things that one might presumably lose points if you shoot them (fellow citizens, milkmaids, sheep, etc.,) and enemy soldiers.  The goal is to shoot the enemy soldiers (who look a lot like Hessians from the American Revolutionary war) without getting shot or wasting your shots on civilians, sheep or cows.  I think every time you shoot the musket, you have to load it again.

Somehow, through the magic of dream logic, suddenly it was not a video game any more.  I was in the battle, and instead of a bucolic, colonial setting, I was a part of an army defending a cliff.  We could see the enemy swarming up stairways and towers.  We had obviously just lost the battle.

I was dressed like this but my clothing was more colorful

The dream somehow transitioned to me being a captive.  A group of soldiers were walking me and a companion down a road.  My friend and I were dressed up like conquistadors;  jackets with puffy sleeves, helmets and breastplates.  I suddenly became convinced that the enemy soldiers behind us were going to shoot us in our backs and I told my comrade this.  We decided to run and advised one another to run in a zig-zag pattern to make us harder to hit.  The street we were on looked like part of a neighborhood that I lived in when I was growing up.  We ran down the street in our zig-zag pattern and as I was running it occurred to me that  by zigging and zagging it was taking us a lot longer to get away from our enemies than if we had run in a straight line.  As I considered the advantages and disadvantages of both, we continued to run.  We reached a hedge and dove through to escape our enemies.

Suddenly we were rolling down a hill.  I was OK with this sionce rolling head over heels down a hill in a dream didn’t seem dangerous and we were getting away from our enemies much faster.  At some point I landed on my head and squashed my helmet so it no longer fit on my head.  It seemed to be made of thin aluminum, but, in my waking world I have been repairing our roof which involves a lot of shingles and aluminum flashing metal, so maybe there is some connection there.  My helmet seemed to have been made from aluminum flashing so I don’t imagine it was much good as a helmet, anyway.

We reached the bottom of the hill and decided that although we had evaded our enemies for now, they would be looking for us, so we needed to ditch our uniforms and dress in some other clothing.  Searching through a dumpster, we found some ragged old clothes and changed.  At this point we were somewhere near Williams Pharmacy (which is also near where I used to live).  This seemed to make sense since Williams Pharmacy is three or four blocks north and downhill from the corner of Lindell and Asbury  (where we evaded our enemies).  I noticed that the pharmacy seemed to be closed and paper was taped up over the inside of the windows so you couldn’t see in.

After this we crossed a busy street and hid near some railroad tracks.  I realized that my companion was actually my partner, Annie.  She pointed out a mutual friend of ours, Phoebe, who was unloading some stuff from a trailer that was hooked up to her car along with some other people.  The ‘stuff’ looked like furniture and boxes of personal items which they were dumping on the side of the busy street.  Annie suggested that we could ask Phoebe for a ride but I didn’t want to because I was suddenly self conscious about my ragged clothing (which isn’t really like me — in real life I wear ragged clothes all of the time).

And that’s where the dream ended.  Weird, huh?