Changing Realities

I had a really terrifying dream last night. Unfortunately, it was the kind that doesn't sound terrifying at all, but you just have to trust me that it was very frightening and quite exhausting. For the first part, I was the main character. I had received a card, like a comic or baseball card, with some info on it. It told me to take the card to the top of a hill where there was a castle (I was on some fairy island or something). I took the card to the castle and exchanged it for another card, not really knowing what I was doing. The man who exchanged my card looked very sinister, like Jafar from Aladdin. He also cracked my camera which was the 110 film, flat rectangular one (like this) I had when I was a kid - what a jerk.

Something about the new card meant that something bad was supposed to happen to me (oooh, cryptic predictions - terrifying!). I saw people jumping off the cliffs around the castle as I descended back down the mountain, but I did not have the urge to join them, which I sensed was to Jafar's dismay. When I got to the bottom of the mountain I swam with some friends in a huge, clear, beautiful, tropical lagoon. It was like the most perfect Bahamas location ever; the water was warm and shallow and clear blue and we were having a great time. I started to take some pictures but my camera was broken.

Suddenly, a couple men attacked me from behind. The were trying to abduct me and were forcibly pushing me underwater. I don't know where my friends went (jerks everywhere in this dream). I had to get away. I swam slightly faster than they did and kept swimming and running with them on my heels the whole way.

Then the dream switched to a movie-style setting where my perspective is through the "camera" and someone else is the star. This happens to me often. The protagonist was a man of about my age. He had straight brown hair and he sort of picked up where I left off with the guys chasing me and the bad omens,etc. He was having other troubles though: his reality kept changing.

This is a constant problem in, say Star Trek TNG*, and, more recently House, and my friend was similarly afflicted. He's in the house and suddenly water starts to seep in under the door at such a rate that he may not be able to get out in time to avoid drowning. Or, not unlike Quantum Leap, one minute he's in the shower or vacuuming or having dinner and the next he's outside a car in a valet uniform with some jerk of a Beamer owner yelling at him to get it together. He can't figure out what's real and it keeps changing and most of the time the visions are of terrifying things.

He even tries to get some help and has a friend take him to some sort of seminar for crazy people. But something just warps the room and he's suddenly somewhere else. He can't tell what's going on. Eventually he just gets sick of it and, as he's backing up in the valet car, he hits the gas hard. He plummets toward the forest behind but the reality changes in time so that he's now in a parking lot headed for a pole. And then it changes again so that he's somewhere else, and keeps barely avoiding catastrophe in this manner.

The dream ended (thank goodness) as my alarm went off in the morning. It was one of those dreams where you wake up all tense and are relieved to find that it was all in your head, a fact that somehow - amazingly - had completely escaped your attention until that point. The last vision I had before waking up was a close-up of the man's face. He had crazy clown makeup on - white, red, blue - and his eyes were huge and had fake light blue contacts. He was shaking and shouting gibberish; he had gone completely crazy.

*Like the one where Worf is switching realities and first he notices the cake changed flavors, then he only got 3rd in the Batleth tournament, then Riker's captain, then he's married to Deanna! Then all the Enterprises start appearing and they (Data) calculate that in 32 hours or something the whole galazy will be completely filled with Enterprises!!!! You know you remember that episode.