Dream me is inside a cavern, standing on a rocky ledge. The ledge is shaped like a long peninsula sticking out into the center of the cave. I don’t see the floor below me but there’s an opening on the far side of the cavern close to the ceiling. That’s where I’m going. I try to use a rope attached to the ceiling to swing there. Because the opening is at a higher elevation than me, I don’t make it. The rope’s swing slows and ends with me dangling over nothing. I know I have to climb up the rope but I can’t. Somehow I get another rope and try to swing to the opening using it. The new rope doesn’t attach to ceiling and I begin to fall. I realize now that the floor of the cavern is magma and the walls of the cave are glowing red. The rope I’m holding onto now attaches to the ceiling and I begin to swing around above the magma at an uncontrollable speed like I would feel on an amusement park ride in the real world. There are rocky islands sticking out of magma and I make my best acrobatic attempts, swing my legs around and pulling up and down on the rope, to avoiding slamming into the rocks. My arm feels sore and I decide it will be easier to control my swinging if I get rid of stuff in my wallet. I throw out a coupon. Then I immediately realize how dumb I was for throwing it into the magma because I was going to use the coupon once I got to the opening at the top of the cave. My arm is really really sore now and I can’t hold on any longer.
It occurs to me now that I’m actually only playing a video game and I’m losing. Noel, my real world friend from my university, is watching me play. He thinks I’m good at this game but now that he’s watching me I’m doing very poorly. He’s not actually with me but we’re communicating through a video call or something like that. We decide to play a game together but we can’t decide what to play and even if we could decide we still can’t play because Noel isn’t actually there. I start to wonder if mailing one of the game controllers to him would work but remember that even if I do that it won’t be plugged in.
I get up and start to walk around my house looking for something. My house strikes me as very unusual. The floors are either wooden or matted with some sort if woven material. The walls and ceiling are all white but where any wall meets the floor, ceiling, or another wall there is a wooden beam. The beams are part of the walls but if they were to stand alone they would have 4 sides like long rectangular prisms. Every doorway in the house is similarly outlined with wooden beams and is low so that I have to stoop to go through. There are no actual doors in the doorways but sometimes there are interior sliding doors and to get to some part of the house I have to turn once and then turn back like a complex maze. The living room has a close to the floor Asian style table. Often times one room has a different elevation than the room before it and I have to go up or down 3 or 4 steps at the entrances / exits to every room. I go to my brother’s room. It’s very small and a wooden bunk bed takes up one of the walls. My mom’s clothes are hanging in the room. They’re hanging on the walls and in front of the doorway so that you have to brush them out of the way to get around. I make my way to the front of the hose. My dad is in the kitchen there. He has a tall metal pot he’s making chocolate malt balls in and he’s collecting together a large bag of candy.
I go outside still looking for something. It’s nighttime and winter. There are lots of wire-like, leave-less trees. The path from my house is asphalt and it winds around through the trees unnecessarily. Two of the paths go around either side of my house. I can’t see other houses but I know there are many nearby. The asphalt is hurting my feet because I didn’t put shoes on. Also my feet are starting to get cold. I’ve forgot what I’m looking for at this point and start making my way back to my house. I see at least one hobo walking around the asphalt paths as well. Just before going into my house my mom comes outside and places a shoebox full of candy on a charcoal grill in front of my house. This is because it’s the night before a big holiday (though I think that the holiday wasn’t Christmas) and the candy is an act of kindness to the hobos outside.
Back inside the house my mom says “Oh, looks like the pie’s coming together.” even though my dad’s making chocolate malt balls. I try one of them and it tastes very minty. I decide to go take a bath. The bathroom is very dim and lit by candles. It has tile floors and walls as if the whole room itself is the bath and meant to be wet. There are wooden platforms like you might see in a sauna that form a square pyramid with the bathtub at the top. I wake up.
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