Scary Dog
I dream about my college dorm not infrequently now. Like high school, it never looks anything like itself, though unlike my dream version of high school, the dream dorms are wildly inconsistent1 This time the dorms were large, dark, and industrial. The place was run by cranky old folks instead of the usual friendly staff, and one (1) nice old man working at a retro-futurist art deco-styled smoothie bar where all the menu items were $30.
It was night time, and I needed to go to my dorm room, room 244 — no easy task because the room numbers would skip around randomly. The place was large and empty with high ceilings, like an abandoned international airport. There were may escalators leading out to giant exit doors, as though the building were a children manufacturing plant and this is where they got shipped out to their dystopian schools.
I was looking around uselessly by the rooms beginning with 400. 400 was this mindfuck hallway, full of weird optical illusions. There was a hole spanning the width of the hallway which dropped down into some claustrophobic-looking boiler room with a very conspicuous fire alarm on the wall. I knew(!) a fire alarm would never be in such a place, and therefore the room was a trap designed to probably kill me.
I remember going outside and it was raining. On a row of square, concrete planters, someone had left a pair of pants and a purse. I was thinking about finding the owner(s) but then realized they were in fact having sex on the ground, right on the other side of the planters. Oh, college!
A dog appeared. The dog wanted me to pet it, but for a moment, it had human eyes with big scleras and a huge smile that extended off its face. Though the dog wasn’t malevolent, I did not want to pet it for this reason, and instead tried to back through the last few seconds of the dream, frame by frame, to capture and post a screenshot of what its face looked like.
Then I decided I just needed to sleep somewhere and went back inside into some random guy’s room. Just then, I heard him coming in, saying “WHO’S IN HERE? Nick is that you? Quit PRANKIN’ me bro.” I hid in his giant closet which was full of music equipment. When I have to hide in a dream, I have to stay very still, even if other people can clearly see me, and hope my sub-conscience doesn’t call my bluff, like a Teemo standing in the middle of the lane. Unfortunately the old sub-conscience was not cooperating today, so the guy follows me into the closet.
“Noo!!! Wait, I’m sorry, it is just me,” I cried out, and it should be noted I had a very sweet, feminine voice here.
He changed his tune right away. “Oh no, it’s okay, you can stay if you want,” he said. It occurred to me this offer was extended solely because I was a girl, and that he totally would have beat the shit out of me if I were a guy, so I tried to leave.
Suddenly, he got really angry, and yelled “NO! YOU HAVE TO SLEEP WITH ME!”
I ran and tried to blend in with a group of people in this lounge area, but the girl next to me pointed out how wet my hair was from the rain, and how because of this I didn’t blend in at all. It looked like I had gone swimming. So I left, and went into an oversized elevator that was large and even had a chair for elevator attendant.
The elevator attendant was delusional, and under the pervasive belief that we were all aliens. “Since we’re all aliens,” he said as always, “let us enter our alien information into this panel here.” I did not. Instead, I tried to get off on the 200s floor, the elevator guy told me to come back, since the floor only spanned rooms 230-239. The next floor was 400s. “Fuck this,” I decided and got off.
There was another dude here. I gave him a Warped Lamp bookmark and we spoke briefly, discovering a shared interest in video games that clearly signaled a very Deep Connection. However, since I wouldn’t sleep with this guy either, so he got mad and ripped up the Lamp bookmark.
Then he stormed into his room, shouting “I’M GONNA GO ORDER A PIZZA DON’T FUCK WITH MY BULLETIN BOARD!” which sounds very much like an invitation to fuck with his bulletin board, but of course if I did such a thing he would know right away.
Instead I continued walking down the hall, and the cold industrial walls around me were soon replaced by warm mahogany wood paneling. I entered a room full glittery balloons and Aisha memorabilia, all and all a very good place to be.
I was like “THIS IS AMAZING!!”
This girl appeared and said, “Thank you! Welcome to my Aisha collection!” But soon her husband came in, some mobster guy whom I decided would be mad if he found me hangin’ out havin’ a grand old Neopets time with his wife.
then i think i found out that not everybody gets a dorm room every night so fuck that i guess
I kept going down the hallway. This was the “executive suites” section, where the room numbers were all pretty high and clearly everything was fancy. Eventually it led to a dead end, a wood-paneled room with a circle of doors. I saw my cousin trying to like log into a computer terminal. He mentioned his wedding date, June 6, 1986 (not the actual date xd), and how it was fitting because it was also the day some song he liked came out.
One of the doors was labeled 1355, but the first 5 was… uh… chipped, almost? so it looked more like a 0. I decided this must have been done on purpose since all the doors in this area were otherwise using the same generic set of background models. It was a SECRET-holding door!
A panel in the wall opened, revealing a nook with a laptop on a pedestal.
My uncle appeared. He was really angry. He went on a different laptop and asked, “Did anyone try to get into my wi-fi?”
“Yeah,” I said, “Rob was here trying to login or something.”
Staying out of my uncle’s line of vision, I entered the wedding date as the laptop’s password, which allowed me to download a top secret zip file onto a flash drive I took with me.
Meanwhile my uncle was slapping away at his keyboard like, “I’m sorry, I have to delete ALL MY LIFE’S WORK, including ALL THESE THINGS YOU LIKE.” I knew that the zip folder must have contained a secret backup copy of this data.
Then I was outside my house! My real house! It was sunny and wonderful! I realized that in order to wake up, I would have to picture my real life bed, so I did, but though I woke up, I just fell back asleep immediately.
It was night again. This time I was in a new dorm room which still wasn’t mine, but I was beyond caring. “Okay dream,” I said, “I will have you, but ONLY BECAUSE I want to know what’s on the flash drive.”
On the flash drive is a godawful custom mod of Hitman: Absolution called KILL SAKURA. I am Sakura Haruno now, but also not, so this is very clearly an effortful assault on my character. Why did my uncle make this @uncle explain?? The game is black and white with shitty bitmap graphics, and there’s some branching story based on doing horrible things to Sakura. you can also pay $2 to rape her was just a fact that i knew inexplicably about it. You’re supposed to kill her in the first level, but being Sakura I decided not to, and let the enemy Sakura AI kill me instead. I got a gameover. I quit the game and tried to look the full story up on the game’s inexplicably also-shitty-bitmapped website, but was interrupted by a guy and his friends coming into the room with a box of donuts.
I was like, “Who the fuck are you? Get out! This is (not) my room!”
The guy said, “Mr. Koenig told us to bring you donuts!” Mr. Koenig2 was my elementary school music teacher. Then the man himself appeared, floating instead of walking, phasing in and out of reality.
“SIGN THESE INSURANCE FORMS!” he shouted!! I don’t know why everyone was shouting in this dream!!!
I did not want to do that, so I said no and ripped them up. Then I woke myself up because Mr. Koenig had quite the temper and you did not want to mess with him even in dream format.