Dream Journal

Context: When I biked to the office for work, I played Pokemon Go on the way. When I was waiting for something slow to load, I sometimes checked in with the game while I was there. So this mix of office and game is very familiar to my waking life.

My memory begins as I’m at my astral office building. The place I work is high up, on something like the 10th floor. I feel like I’m done working and ready to go home. But as I’m leaving, I discover there’s a big office celebration. As part of it, we were introduced to this new game. I think there were a bunch of people standing around a floor-to-ceiling gateway door. The game was going on inside. It had a kind of sepia-tone style to it. You only had to focus in on it and you were there. Inside, it kept the orientation of the door at first — mostly vertical with a little bit of depth, but once I picked a zone, it opened up fully with depth, like moving inward from an overworld map. It was incredible! Instant action and quests, so many characters to choose from. It was happening so fast I could barely keep up with the plot. I was flying up and down, leaping to new areas that were teeming with adventure. I blasted through the starting area out into somewhere in the world. I didn’t know what I was doing, but saw an interesting character and a hut with a door ahead of me. Some small dark creatures came towards me and without knowing any of the commands or skills I just projected force at them. This resulted in some inky black smoke shooting out of my hands at them, which seemed to be doing damage. Seemed an evil sort of attack, I thought. I figured it must have been a wand of disintegration or something. But it worked. I defeated a few in this fashion, then entered the hut.

I went back and forth, in and out of the game through the whole dream. It became a game on my phone, which I could re-enter just by bringing it up in front of me and entering it. The trouble was, the rest of the party in the office building was so amazing, I kept wanting to take pictures of it. And every time I took out my phone, there was the game, and I couldn’t get it to quit so I could take pictures. At one point, someone else, seeing my frustration, asked me to hold out the phone and she calmly tapped a few things until it quit. However, it didn’t go to my regular phone screen but an incredibly cool game-related photo app.

Back to the office celebration. After returning from the game, some people directed me toward the center of the building, where this floor and the two floors below it were part of the party. Entering this area, I found a series of rooms built around a staircase, where one could circle through the rooms before descending to the next floor. I hadn’t realized the building even had this area. As I walked around the corner, I saw a huge display of artfully presented multi-level displays of food on tables with servers behind it. There were many cakes and such in fancy shapes. I wanted some of the glazed cakes, but it was crowded here so I decided to check out the levels below. Each area of each level was intensely and fantastically decorated, each with such unique style. I loved them completely. It reminded me of Dragon Con in a way. On the level below I found another food station. I watched as a person next to me was reaching into one of these weirdly-shaped cakes on the top level with tongs to remove a piece from the center. As he did, the piece he removed expanded to twice the size and the whole cake moved. Confused, I watched, and I began to think that maybe this wasn’t a cake but the huge head of a boar, with the spiky parts at the top of the cake being the ears and snout. I looked at the other cakes, and it wasn’t very clear, but they could have been heads, too, so I got out of there, thinking that maybe on the next floor was more iced cakes.

I think at this point I went back into the game again, and as I played, I made this huge leap to a new area. However, this leap was also reflected in the office building, and I found myself on the outside stairs on the 2nd level. Oops! I needed to find my way back to the party. So I went back inside and found my way to the center area again. I found myself in another amazingly stylized area. I tried to take pictures. I eventually got the game-related photos app and took some, but each one ended up being something really weird that quickly faded to black.

Then I heard Rebecca calling to me in my mind. She was here with Holly! They had wanted me to show them around, and I had forgotten. I went back to the building entrance I had just come from and saw them there. I hoped they hadn’t been waiting long, and she responded that they hadn’t. There on the wide front steps I saw a donkey laying down. I began to pet it and it responded enthusiastically. It stood up and put its front legs up on my shoulders. I decided to take the donkey inside with us. I shifted its front legs down to the crook of my arm so it could walk with me. It was pretty awkward at doing this.

So Rebecca, Holly, me and the donkey went inside and I began showing them around, starting on the 2nd floor and moving up. The celebration and stylized rooms were down here as well. I got a lot of surprised looks from people about the donkey, which was satisfying. But it had such trouble walking that I eventually put its front legs down and let it be. Coming back to Rebecca and Holly, I saw them dressed in some amazing new flapper-style clothes, and after struggling with the game app, I began to take some pictures with the weird photos app. I took a few, and when I went to look at them, each photo of them turned out in a completely different style — different colors, contrasts, time periods, even cartoon style. I wondered if it was one photo and I was scrolling through infinite possible styles. Each faded to black after a second or two. Frustrated, I put it away.

I continued to explore. At one point on another floor, I saw two donkeys lying down and pet them. A minute later a goat came up behind me and put its legs up on my shoulders for a minute.

Thoughts: It’s another dream that doesn’t change astral realms with ascent/descent.