saturday night dream

it all began with a flying dream. i realized as it began that it was a dream and decided to enjoy it, but then it acquired a disturbing degree of clarity and normal passage of time. i somehow found myself inside a seedy club, with a huge chessboard-like fighting pit.

the two contenders came out one at a time, but the second one, after taking his place on the board, began multiplying and filled up most of it as a team of giant, fearsome-looking warrior-creatures. i realized that it was all an illusion, that the actual contender wasn't on the field, and identified him in the crowd standing near me.

we had a whispered conversation after the fight had already begun, and when he told me to swear not to let on i tried to explain that he could trust me. not trusting me, he used a spell that every time i tried to talk i got confused, and eventually i tried so hard to speak to him that i passed out.

i woke up with a sense of everything being too real. i woke up in a bed in a 50's style house, and i picked up some things (including clothes, a book and a set of keys) and left.

i eventually got to a military base along the beach, and i noticed that in the shadows under the stairs of the neighbouring buildings there were soldiers lurking, camouflaged and menacing.

somehow related to the book i was carrying, one of the armed soldiers harrassed me and we had a fight. i had to break both of his arms before he would back down, and i hurried on.

after the base i came upon a waterpark, filled with people swimming and hanging about and with giant metal circular stairwells going down three floors into the water itself. i descended as far as the water before remembering the fight, and suddenly realized that i didn't know who was an avatar for the illusionist. on making my way back up the steps someone jumped out of the water below and grabbed onto the step in front of me, and not knowing whether or not his intentions were malicious i stood on his fingers and watched him fall back, hoping he wasn't a friend.

i came to a set of corridors, walking through with a group of refugees trolleying their belongings hurriedly. i was hurrying too, and i pushed past what turned out to be an older, hardened soldier. i carried on into a more open area, with a handrail bordering a two-floor drop with stained-glass windows on the far side. the soldier began chasing me, and i started ducking over and around the others and their trolleys to keep away, with all of them leering at me.

someone got hold of my belongings while he was threatening me. i wrested them from him and then confronted the soldier. we had a bit of a scrabble, and i found myself on top and stabbed him in the neck with a tiny, bronze, axe-shaped key, which i twisted and pulled thinking it would slow him down.
i tossed my belongings over the rail, which caught on hooks attached beneath the current level's windows, and jumped after them, gripping the book, the keys and the hooks altogether as the hooks tore off the wall and i dropped to the next set one floor below, these breaking off more easily but doing a good enough job to slow down my fall. i landed on my feet, hearing the sounds of someone above organizing a group to come after me.

an odd and very familiar figure appeared looking lost behind me. i chased him into the dark, stopped him from latching a door between us and squeezed my way through after him, calmly removing a padlock from the other side and closing the door behind me, to the sounds of the crowd closing in.

when waking up to where i'd fallen asleep, my padlock-hand gripping empty air, but still a lingering sensation of how real the rusty item had felt, how i don't know for sure that it was nothing more than a dream, that awareness of it being a dream didn't provide me any more control than i already had within the limitations of the imagined environment.