Now spell CHZO

[davidn]

For someone who's experienced three years of Andrew Melville Hall and has been living in Boston for another two I like to consider myself reasonably mentally healthy. So once in a while it would be nice to have a dream that wasn't a traumatic distorted version of reality. Along with the genuinely disturbing ones that I don't want to recall at the moment, I've experienced things like mind-controlling fruit, loose eyes and night-long adventures that are just inexplicable.

Last night, the dream once again took place in my parents' house. I happen to know that somewhere in the house's basement there is an ancient Speak 'n' Spell - one of those bright red things with the terrifying attempts at voice synthesis that sounds like someone who's been smoking shredded tin foil since he was born. It was probably in my dream because I was reminded about Homestar Runner by gr33bo yesterday, where it and similar artefacts of technology featured quite regularly.

In the dream, the device had somehow contracted a virus (who knows how. Perhaps it was airborne) and we had to find it before it did whatever the virus told it to do. After a search taking some unspecific amount of time, I walked into the downstairs bathroom and saw it propped up on the shelf at the back. And as I approached it, it started itself up and spoke, ensuring that I woke up with a start at 6am:

"Two... one... the Tall Man will come to kill you while you sleep."

Comments

[dr-dos.livejournal.com]

Man it's great that a 256 color computer game is making you need therapy.

[davidn]

You're the one that started all this, you know.

[kjorteo]

I find it rather interesting that you had such an uncharacteristically scary nightmare on the exact same night that I did, and both appear to involve all-too-familiar themes from our respective piles of standard nightmare fodder, and both caused an actual "wake up with a start" reaction (which I practically never get!) Though the actual subject matter is different.

[davidn]

Unfortunately, all my dreams are terrible - apart from the stream of consciousness garble headed "An adventure" that I linked to, it's been years since I had one that wasn't either actively traumatic in its own right or a strange and distorted version of something that I usually enjoy. It's unusual for me to be forced awake during a dream, though.

Despite my respectful (though large) fear of the Chzo series, this is the first time that I've actually had a nightmare that mentioned one. However, it did involve a recurring theme in the way that it featured sentient a sentient (or seemingly sentient) object or machine.

[stubbleupdate.livejournal.com]

[bonappetite.livejournal.com]

Freud would say this all has to do with fear of your father-- "the tall man", being in your parent's house, searching for something from your childhood that isn't where it is expected to be (like you turning into your father instead of yourself.)

However, whatever. It was a dream. And Freud was wrong sometimes.