March 2, 2004

• Dream Game Reality

  
  

  We all liked Ahnya.  I love them all.  I guess it’s a maternal thing, their being my creations and all, but for me they’re all likable.  Doug liked her, he said, because she was a “good character”, meaning a skilled fighter and/or powerful mage, “good” in a useful sense, in the game reality.  She was also a cute blonde, and I suppose that didn’t hurt.  For whatever reasons Greyfox might have had (in the dream, he didn’t say and I didn’t question him, perhaps afraid he’d change his mind and decide not to help me “save” her), he liked Ahnya too.  He has gone back to sleep, or I might ask him now why he liked her.  It wouldn’t hurt to ask, even though I might get the usual half-puzzled, half-scornful look he usually gives me when I talk about game reality (never mind dream reality) as if it were “real”.  It was, after all, my dream.

  
  

  But with that shaman who shares my life and my dreams, you never know.  He just might understand what I’m talking about this time.  Maybe he would remember her from his dream.  He was awake briefly as I was getting up to write this, and he told me a bit about a disturbing dream he’d just had.  It involved a “water ride” at an amusement park, where the roller-coaster-like train took you under the water, just as it did in my dream-game where we “saved” Ahnya together.  (In his dream his mother told him not to worry, it wasn’t “real” water )  I mean Greyfox and I together saved Ahnya.  In my dream, Doug was asleep just as he is in this here-and-now reality.  I knew in the dream that Doug liked Ahnya, because we had both played that game and had talked about her in real-time, the “real” time of the dream of course, not “real” real-time.  I’m looking forward to Doug’s getting up and reading this, so I can find out if all three of us recall common dream elements from last night.

  
  

  Greyfox, as I suggested above, sometimes treats Doug and me as if we are idiots because we talk about game stuff  “as if it were ‘real’ stuff.”  I don’t think Doug and I truly confuse game reality with “real” reality, but we do talk about it, share strategy and our experiences, laugh together about the ironies of gaming and the comedy that is built into some of the games.  It’s a bit ironic, the Old Fart’s being thus scornful of us, considering that he comes back from his shamanic journeys and tells us about his adventures and conversations with a shape-shifting Fox and a professorial Raven who tend, in that “reality”, to treat Greyfox as if he is an idiot.  Go figure!  Reality, it is said, is an individual matter.  The shamanic Otherworld is “real” for all three of us, just as is the Dreamtime and the fact that all three of us sometimes end up together there.

  
  

  But I was telling you about saving Ahnya.  I mentioned that all three of us liked her.  Greyfox has a theory that when all three of us like something it is a significant endorsement.  My son, his step-father, and I, you see, have very different tastes–in foods, in entertainment, in people, in clothing, you name it and we probably tend generally to differ about it.  It is Greyfox’s opinion (which, of course, is not generally shared by Doug and me) that if we all like a movie or a book or a food, etc., that means it is “good”, whatever that means.  There must have been something special about that little blonde anime video game character Ahnya, I must admit, to have won the Old Curmudgeon’s heart anyway, given his general attitude toward games and gaming.

  
  

  Given his NPD and total lack of empathy for the pain and misfortunes of others (his reaction to the news on 9-11, for example, was a glee so fiendish it sickened me), I would be surprised if he’d do a similar service for a “real” person, much less for a character from one of my games.  But in my dream he was a nice guy and he liked Ahnya, for whatever reason, and he consented to help me “save” her.  That action required some complex interactions between him and me, between the computer here and the PlayStation 2 just over there diagonally across the sofa at the other end of Couch Potato Heaven.  You see (or maybe you don’t, eh?), “saving” her, for real and not just in the game sense of recording her current status on the memory card, involved moving her clothes over from one of these CRTs to the other, from the computer monitor to the big old TV that serves as monitor for the PS2.

  
  

  In my dream, Greyfox carried a big, bright, multi-colored pile of little cartoony anime Ahnya’s clothing across the room from his monitor to mine because I wanted to “really” save her, make her “real” because we all liked her so and didn’t want to leave her in the game reality, but get her out here into the “real” reality (whatever that is) and I could only get her out of my monitor naked.  She needed clothes, you see (?) , and none of mine would fit her, of course, her being two-dimensional and all, and of course our tastes in clothing are as different as my son’s, my husband’s and my tastes in that and everything else.

  
  

  So, Ahnya (whoever she may be) is “saved” (whatever that means).  I mean, in my dream we cooperated and moved her clothes for her so she wouldn’t be running around naked in “real” reality (the “real” of the Dreamtime, not this finite-observable-reality “real”).  Aw, heck, you either get it or you don’t and it doesn’t matter anyway whether you do or not because none of you is “real” anyway, eh?  In my here-and-now reality we are committed to making another trip to town today so I can take one of those “inmates” who prefer to be called “clients” out of the rehab center to a couple of 12-step meetings (AA and NA, neither of which, in a very “real” sense, is very real). 

  
  

  Both of my guys are still abed.  Yesterday, I hid the four new video games Doug had ordered:  three still sealed in their wrappers and the fourth one of which he had allowed for the last few days, contrary to maternal advice (read “orders”), to usurp his life.  The idea is that if he gets the kitchen cleaned up before I forget where I hid them (Greyfox had been threatening to wash dishes himself and that scared Hell out of me), then Doug gets his four new games.  But his dishwashing today will have to take a back seat to his snow shoveling.  It has been snowing for a couple of days and it’s warm enough that the snow on the roof is melting.  An old leak in the hallway, which only comes through this time of year, has resumed, so I will need to direct the kid roofwards when he awakens.  And so it goes, in my reality.

  • 1:49 pm
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