Ok this might be a bit rambling but this dream sequence was kind of amazing so I am going to try and remember as much detail as possible, starting from sitting in the basement of my old house listening to David Bowie on an old record player. The particular LP in question was from the period when Bowie was obsessed with UFO culture and actually believed he was in telepathic contact with an extraterrestrial entity he called the Thin White Duke. The "music" was highly experimental, playing with a lot of weird sound processes and strange dissonances. When I scratched the surface of the vinyl, a tall, thin, pale humanoid figure almost seemed to partially materialise in the air, before fading away.
I woke up to my bedroom door opening. I immediately thought of that one creepy scene in Lain when the alien comes into her room, and got annoyed, because I didn't feel like getting scared. But nothing entered the room.
Then I turned slightly to my left and there was a grey alien sitting next to my bed, against the window, just out of the corner of my eye, fixing me with his best almond-eyed stare. I piled my blanket up beside me so I wouldn't see him, but he inched his head over so he could fix me with those black hollow eyes. I told him to fuck off, but he was determined to see this through, so I said to hell with it and we started trying to strangle each other. But we had both been through this so often, in so many previous nightmares, that neither of us really had our heart in it. We were both just going through the motions, and we realised there was no terror left in it. So we called it quits.
Later, I was sitting in some kind of extravagant theatre with red cushioned seats, where a woman in a red dress that can only be described as resembling some kind of bioluminescent jellyfish flower performed operatic Shakespeare in the round inside some kind of enormous computer-generated hologram. Like the actors were real, but the set was entirely digital. The other audience members were laughing extremely rudely, but I was interested in the show. From the woman in red it moved through several other characters, who all lived in a strange forest of "Dark Goodness and Light Night". During the night, everything was lit as if on a misty morning, but when day came, darkness fell, and anywhere the darkness of the "sun" touched, the trees turned red and looked like huge, towering veins and arteries. Suddenly I was no longer an audience member, I was the Jester, and I was exploring the forest in search of... in search of something, some higher power. I can't quite recall it. I remember crossing a bridge made of big driftwood logs painted to resemble strange long, colourful faces, with my ally, and we were singing "He Ain't Heavy" to keep our spirits up. But we were seperated, and I found myself alone in a dark pocket universe of some kind. There were many dangerous traps written on the floor and walls, and it was looking grim, but suddenly... some kind of crystalline lights surrounded me and spoke calmingly to me.
The next part of the performance was about Kublai Khan's tour bus. As the Jester I was the bus driver, and loped about a cardboard box city wearing a kind of pantomime bus costume, waving at the invisible audience through the front window. A woman's voice... possibly the same voice as the crystal light, but I can't be sure, narrated the story as we passed by the various places of interest in, well I guess it was supposed to be Xanadu.
Finally I finished the tour and got out of my bus suit, and went to a large odd box-building where I was scheduled for my next bit. However, my best friend from childhood was also working there, and there was an old Galaga machine built into the outside of the building, so I figured I would just kill some time goofing off. So I dropped a quarter into Galaga.
I was a kid again, and the cardboard city became some kind of arcade museum, filled with old arcade machines of all kinds. Games, pinball, redemption games, you name it. The token machines gave out little translucent plastic coins of various colours (blue was worth 1 credit, yellow was 5). The woman's voice from before now took the form of one of my teachers from graphic design school, and she was taking us on this field trip to arcadeland. I wandered through the museum looking at all the games. One of them was a prize game called something like "CAN YOU HOLD ON" which was nothing but a huge box containing a serrated metal edge that you were supposed to grip, and not let go as an industrial motor ripped it away from you. My friend wanted to try it, but Teacher said it was a bad game, too dangerous, and besides, it wasn't even plugged in (she said as I caught a glimpse of her unplugging it from behind). Foiled in our quest to slice our hands off, I complained that the museum didn't have enough fun games, like I don't know, Gauntlet, and I resumed wandering around. Of course I found Gauntlet in a corner, as well as, oddly enough, the original Thexder, and the modern remake Thexder Neo. There was also an old prize game of some kind that contained toy fighters based on the Raiden games and a bunch of original classic Transformers toys that had probably been in there since 1985. Anyway I wandered around for a while but I didn't get to actually play anything.
Finally, I ended up in the Laser Tag section. There were several evocatively themed bunkers here, each with a different variation of kids running around with toy guns, but the centrepiece was "VOSTFR", the latest and greatest from Japan, the ultimate Laser Tag experience of all time. This was the game the pros played, and most of the players were adults. Two teams went into the huge, hive-like building, human marines and alien bugs. The marines looked imposing in their Jin-Roh style military body armour and gasmasks, but I wasn't able to see the alien team. So cool.
I was just about to leave, when my friend ran up to me. "Where are you going?" he said, "We're going to be in the next team!" I was like aw hells yeah and next thing I knew we were dressed in "scout" fatigues as we awaited the end of the current round. There was also a cute girl there now, who I didn't recognise, but finally we formed the obligatory trio of hero, best friend, and girl. We were allowed to wait in the starting area while the previous teams finished their game. The set was incredible. There was smoke and lasers everywhere of course, but with the sheer production value it could have been a movie set. There were alien pods everywhere and everything had a sleek, futuristic look. It was kid heaven.
Suddenly a marine burst into the room, chasing one of the aliens. The alien costumes, albeit basically just a big cockroach suit draped over a person's back, were surprisingly convincing when you saw them running around in the smoky dark. They fired invisible beams at each other and I assume points were awarded one way or the other. Suddenly, another alien leaped out of nowhere and tackled me. I'm not sure of the rules but I guess we counted as civilians or non-combat personnel of some kind that could be harvested by the aliens for points. The alien suit had this silly rubber proboscis thing that it leeched points with. Then another marine showed up and it dashed away.
Somehow though, with all the pretend aliens running around, I had realised something. I looked at my friends and they seemed to all remember too. This was all make-believe. The real aliens were, had always been, us three. We looked down at our hands, and our palms were glowing with strange symbols of coloured light. But we weren't evil aliens like the ones in silly human media. "Hey," I said to my comrades, "let's help these humans out. Let's get rid of their problems." They agreed.
So we left the VOSTFR dome and wandered around the arcade, blasting humans with light from our palms. Every time a human was struck by our space beams, the negative emotions that were holding them back sizzled and dissolved. They felt better, discovered a new way around an obstacle, fell in love, et cetera. We blasted every person in the museum, and as we did so, we started to physically age and grow up. Finally we went to leave. The woman who had been guiding me all this time was no longer a teacher, but working at the register desk, and she had assumed her true form as a spirit guide by becoming a middle-aged, overweight black woman. I went over and gave her a hug, thanked her for her help, and gave her a kiss on the cheek. Then my friends and I left the arcade and went into the city to zap more humans with our healing hands.
We couldn't fix all of humanity's problems, of course. That wouldn't be right anyway. We had just given them a little boost, a little pep. They were on their own, but a few lasers of encouragement couldn't hurt. And so, our work done, it was time to return home to the bosom of the stars. Our memories hadn't fully returned, but our spacecraft, automatically reactivated by our own awakening, soon appeared on the horizon. They were small pods, each only big enough for one pilot, consisting mainly of a cockpit with a glass bubble dome connected to a trailing biomechanical-looking spine or tail, which propelled the pod through the air like a bony flagellum. We first had to pull them toward us by psychically grasping that tail and reeling the surprisingly stubborn things to the ground, but then the cockpits opened obediently and we entered, sitting cross-legged on the floor of the pod. There were no controls inside, the entire ship was controlled psychically. We prepared for our stellar voyage.
But the ships did not take us into the sky, but down into the ground. We passed through the stony earth into a claustrophobic underworld of dark clouds. Perhaps, I reasoned, we were not aliens of another planet, but of another dimension.
It was difficult to pilot through the turbulent aether of this null universe. I lost sight of my friends' ships in the impenetrable darkness up ahead. My own ship started to list wildly, but an irresistable force had already begun to pull me into the darkness.
That's when I suddenly woke up.
It was kind of weird though, because my right eye felt funny. I blinked, and the eyelid slid down and back up slowly and jerkily, like an animatronic eyelid. I felt like I was physically inside my own right eyeball, looking out at my bedroom like a hamster in a plastic ball. I could still control my body, but it felt stiff and robotic. I imagined that I had slid, John Malkovich style, into my own skull. What a weird dream, I thought. Heh... or maybe it was REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAA A AAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAA
(uncontrollable inhuman screaming, projectile vomiting alien bile)
