I um, just woke up from a pretty scary nightmare a few minutes ago. Since the computer is up downloading animes and all, I’ll record the dream now, while it’s still fresh in my mind. Actually, I think the dream is pretty ingenius, and I think you’ll have the best experience of it if I describe it in second person… if you dare, come along for the ride.
The dream is actually a pretty short one. As far as you remember, you’re on a line to a famous new amusement ride that’s suppose to be quite a thriller. Your friend explains to you the first part of the ride as you’re waiting in line:
“this part of the ride contains six to seven segments. A group of drivers pretending to be your personal medical staff is going to drive you out of the parking lot. You’ll have to transfer from car to car, having each of these drivers take you through a portion of the ride. Try and remember all the things and clues that they give you, because together they’re trying to kill you for some reason and eventually, you’ll need to stop them before they kill you.”
And so at the end of the line, a limo drives by to pick you up. It’s a luxury limo, the type where the windows are all black and you can’t see anything inside. Your friend wishes you good luck on the rides and you go in.
The car takes off, and goes down a spiral parking lot much like the UCI student center parking or the Social Science parking. But anyway, as much as you’d want to believe this guy is trying to kill you, he treated you really nicely and he was very chattery, “You’ll love our medical staff service,” he says, “we’ll be attending to your needs 24-7, whenever you need it. Well, my part of the ride is over. Please go to the car next to me.”
You walk out of the limo and see a convertible. So, you walk in and the next driver starts driving. “Remember this phone number,” he says to you as if he’s a counter-spy working for your side, “It’s 711-6594. You’ll need this number if you want to live. If you catch my drift.” He looks at you and gives you a hinting look. Before you know it his part of the ride is over and you have to switch cars again.
And so, you go through the next driver, who is female, but doesn’t say much. She is blonde with short hair, if that seems to make any difference. Suddenly, an ambulence starts going off behind the car in the background, sirens blaring. Without another word the female driver speeds up and try to evade the ambulance, all the while still trying to spiral down the floors in this parking lot with unlimited amount of floors. All of a sudden she stops. It seems like it’s your cue to get out and go to the next car.
Before you can barely catch your breath, you jump onto a motorcycle in front of the driver, and the helmeted driver starts the motorcycle. He starts driving as the last car tries to block the way of the ambulence; an explosion occurs as the ambulance drives over the convertible and as you look back, you see the two cars flip over and explode to chunks. And at that very moment, the last driver takes off in full speed and slams your head against a pole in the parking lot. You feel your brain getting smashed into thousands of little chunks. Everything fades white.
You wake up in sweat and turn around, looking at the clock – the clock reads 5:05, and since the clock is digital, it freakishly resembles the letter “SOS” – all of them written in blaring red letters.
…………………………..
And the dream is over. I’ll use the first person to represent me again. Obviously, the last paragraph occured when I wake up – swear to God this is what happened. Aaron can back me up on how blaringly huge the red numbers are on his digital clock.
The dream itself is not difficult to interpret: I’ve been subjected to more stress than I want to ask for when this is only the 2nd week of class. All of a sudden I’m juggling between the difficult classes, meetings to sign up for UCI employment and meetings for my work study, a possible meeting to help out a High School senior on his or her senior project, a few new friends, and still trying to make time to rewrite my resume and start sending them off to real game companies.
Worst of all, for the first time in awhile, I’ve failed in something that I do not intend to fail – I failed my grammar diagnostic for the second time, and to stay in my upper division writing class, I’m being recommended to go to LARC workshops and forced to do grammar excercises like I’ve done about ten years ago, back when I was still in Hong Kong learning elementry English It pisses me off to no end that I’m now being reminded of stupid little writing errors that I’ve been trying to avoid for the last ten years. It doesn’t help to make you feel that you’re back to ground zero in terms of writing skills.
So, all in all, I honestly felt that my life was going down a train wreak – even though some part of me do know that it’s not as bad as it appears to be. Hence the ride… and the anonymous death that I recieved at the end of the dream. The interesting thing was, except for the explanation that I got in the very beginning of the dream, the “ride” didn’t seem like a ride at all, and if I died in this “ride” I might have died in the dream, and everything that was said in the beginning would still be true – those drivers were indeed planning to kill me, maybe a lot sooner than I thought. They gave me a false premise and I took the ride looking for all the wrong clues (like trying to remember what they said and how they looked like) instead of thinking about, say, trying to get away from these people altogether and refusing to take the next ride… of course, having the amusement ride theme also meant that I was thinking less and following instructions more. Heck, maybe the guy who stood next to me wasn’t even my friend – he might be one of “them” who were trying to kill me.
allllright, I just spent a good 10 minutes trying to fix all the grammatical errors in the last paragraph. I guess my anal writing professor has a point afterall.
Finally, I present a challenge: if you’re a little smarter than I was in my dream and knew that the drivers would have killed you at the end of the ride, could you find a way to escape alive? I assume that you could jump off from any of the cars at any point, but they would know immediately that you’re onto them and they would run you over immediately. Let’s also assume that you’re not carrying a weapon, you’re not superman, you didn’t have the touch of death, and you didn’t have any other supernatural powers that allows you to take on them and win, even if it’s one on one. Perhaps something could have been said to one of the drivers so that they were either forced to drop you off somewhere, or you might have been able to find a way to take over the car, either by killing the driver or dumping the driver? Now that you have all the time you need to think about it, think about it – and tell me what you think.