A Gamer’s Dream March 27, 2012

I’m not a very good sleeper, and whenever I do fall asleep, if I can remember the dream I had the night before at all when I wake up, it’s usually because I had a nightmare.  But I’m not the type of person who has a typical nightmare.  I don’t run from the monsters in my dreams, I stand my ground and fight them with whatever I can.  Typically, this will bring the dream to a stalemate until eventually I wake up.

When I was in high school I had a dream that probably should be recorded in history books.  My details are a bit fuzzy about it over the years but I still have a complete memory of its beginning, middle, and end.

The dream began and I was in a mall with my family just as it was closing.  As the sky in the skylights turned dark, I saw them.  The mall began to fill up with droves of aliens, and I’m not talking about just any aliens!  Sharp pointy claws.  Drooling mouths with sharp gnashing teeth.  They were fast as hell and even able to climb walls.  They were also filling up the mall, headed right for me and my family.

The decision was made that we had to make it to the top floor of the mall and get to the parking garage where our cars were located and escape.  As more aliens piled into the mall and started filling up the lower floors we knew we would have to do that as quickly as possible before the aliens got to us.

But with all of my reasoning, I knew that our odds would be better if we had some kind of help.  I hoped that something, anything, in the mall would be able to help us.  I broke into a game store and after going through it, out of all the things there, I stole a Game Boy.  Upon switching it on, I suddenly had the same technology of the Predator!  Two plasma cannons formed holographically over my shoulders and a series of vision modes extended in front of my face.  When I pushed the A button, one of my cannons fired, the B button cycled through my vision modes.

Armed with Nintendo’s technology, I was unstoppable in the halls of the mall.  No matter what aliens appeared before me to tear me and my family apart, thumb fixed on the A button, I continued to plow them down.  Leaving a trail of aliens in the wake behind us, my family finally arrived at the parking garage, which, thankfully, the aliens had not yet made it to.  Rushing to pack into our cars, we leave the mall.

That’s when I woke up, and all the questions started entering into my head as to why I have such weird dreams.  That was just at the beginning of my gaming life, and while it was a total fantasy, it sure was a wild ride.

Figure that one out, Freud!