Posts Tagged The HoytHouse

Date: November 16th, 2010
Cate: dreams

dream: making the zombies real

It was a convention akin to PAX – my housemates and I had managed to get into the main event, where some company was poised to make some sort of fantastic announcement. Showing off, they peppered the seating with flatscreens that you could plug your laptop into and play with your friends while you were waiting.

We were making fun of one super nerd, skinny and small with long ratty brown hair, who was wearing what looked like bear pajamas, and saying everything stupid thing that came into his head loudly so that everyone else would hear. Me and Ryan speculated that he was the Molly Monster, reincarnated as a bear.

Finally, the presentation started – and my perspective sort of faded, picking back up after it was over, and we migrated out of the event hall. I caught something out of the corner of my eye, and, telling Andrew and Ryan to wait a few seconds. I ducked after a shady looking guy, and my suspicions were correct: he was selling a new kind of drug that basically enduced group-hypnosis and let you explore a fantasy world, accompanied by anyone else who had dosed at the same time. Naturally I wanted to try some – and we were headed back to wherever we were staying for the night anyway, so I bought 3.

Later, at the house, we had somehow brought the annoying nerd back (I think he was hitting on me,) and after we more-or-less drank him under the table (it didn’t take long before he was passed out on the couch) we excitedly cracked open the packaging on the drugs. Ryan suggested that we do them like cocaine – he demonstrated, popping his capsule open, pouring out about a tablespoon of chunky white flour-like powder, then leaning in and snorting it up one nostril.

“Whoa – it comes on fast,” he warned, as Andrew and I followed suit.

My vision was swimming, blurring and twisting, darkness bleeding in from around the edges, and we all sort of slumped forward onto the table to enjoy the experience. There was about 30 seconds where we were all paralyzed, blind and unable to move, except that we could still talk before the game started -

“Who’s that on the couch again?” Ryan asked.

“The new Molly Monster, remember?” I reminded him.

When I opened my eyes, I was lounging on the couch in a log cabin. Ryan was standing unsteadily against one wall, and Andrew was sprawled unconscious over a chair.

“Have you been up long?” I try to ask Ryan, but there’s a noticeable lag between my trying to speak, and the words actually coming out, so I end up sort of slurring the words.

Andrew fidgeted, then opened his eyes – and within a few minutes, we were all walking around, shaking off the effects of transitioning from the real world to this new one.

The rules of this new Dead Rising game were simple – you were given a safehouse, which contained a bunch of weapons to get you started, several exits, vending machines and/or stocked refrigerator, and furniture to nap in while you were recovering from outings. After three days, the several exits would become unsecured entrances, and you’d have to defend yourself against as many waves of enraged zombies as you could, using all the weapons and tools and allies you’d found from the surrounding territory up to that point – until finally you had to duck back into the saferoom, and end the game, getting points for each piece of ordinance, each rescued survivor, and each zombie kill.

I found the melee weapons stash on the back porch: lengths of pipe, aluminum baseball bats, complicated looking sword/cudgel things, night sticks (which Ryan decided to wield two of) and legit mace-and-chains, which I said I’d hold onto. Andrew found a glock and remarked that it looked like something that had been used in a movie we’d seen, so he would take that.

Afterwards, we had a few awkward moments where the game was still giving us time to explore our safehouse and the border of our property – the zombies were all at half-opacity, we couldn’t swing and hit them, and they weren’t aggressive. So we sat up on the roof, drinking out of the maltov cocktails we’d found – which turned out to be filled with brandy.

—

Analysis time!

  • PAX is a gaming convention in Seattle that Andrew and I have gone to for the past few years. It’s always been a big deal, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it had fixed itself in my mind as the prototypical convention setting.
  • The nerd sounds like a variety of people we could’ve met at the real life PAX, or even people I knew from college or highschool.
  • The bear pajamas were identical to the bear suit that the main character wears in Serial Experiments Lain, the cyberpunk anime I’ve been watching lately.
  • The Molly Monster was a real guy that Ryan and I met at a halloween party – he’s now right up there with Karma Kurt on the list of ‘people we meet who are high on something and have alliterations for names.;
  • Also, we met Karma Kurt on a camping trip with another friend of ours, who used to pass out on our couch at parties, much in the same way that the bear-suited nerd did.
  • Dead Rising 2 is a real game, and the whole concept of your safehouse being unimpeachable, but only provisioned with basic supplies, the treasures being outside with the zombies there to stop you from getting to it… that’s the game, basically. I played a demo/preview version a month or so ago, and thought it was fun.
  • Speaking lag – we were playing a game after all. Also, my brother and I were voice-chatting while playing a game called League of Legends last night, which may have contributed.
  • The glock – I don’t remember what Walter Sobcheck wielded in The Big Lebowski, but we all understood that it was that character that Andrew was referring to – the character he’d dressed up as at one of our previous halloween parties.
  • Also, Ryan and Andrew and I have been known to get together and play Left 4 Dead 2, which is another multiplayer zombie video game, though very different from Dead Rising – we just played last week, in fact, while Andrew’s friend was visiting.
  • Oh, and the maltov cocktail brandy at the end was probably Metaxa, our house’s favorite brand of brandy, which I myself was enjoying a sip of before I went to bed.
… I think that’s all the stuff. Super interesting, right? I went to bed at like 2:30 AM, and woke up a few hours later – it’s so early in the morning, and I haven’t had enough sleep, but somehow this dream still woke me up. Crazy! I’m going to try to go back to sleep now – hair cuts and DMV visits need to happen tomorrow-today-whatever.
Date: November 16th, 2009
Cate: dreams
1 msg

broke into the old apartment (dream)

It’s worth recognizing that Toby’s apartment and the HoytHouse are now each constant locations featured in my dreams (as The Apartment and The Hill House respectively) – that is, I have recurring dreams that take place in those environments. As with most of my dream locations, they’re only somewhat allegorically related to their real world counterparts.

In my dream last night, I’d already moved away from The Apartment. It’s a small, odly-laid-out space, the result of walling off some living area from the midst of the utilities and support infrastructure that take up the rest of the ground floor of the building. Above is a series of condos, which are accessible via stairwell and elevator – but if you walk past those in the lobby, and through a double doorway, you come to a long dingy hall. There are janitorial supplies and fuse boxes and various other things needed in the upkeep of the building… but there’s also a rickety stairway, built out of two-by-fours. It leads up to what could almost be the ‘one-and-a-halfth-floor’ – a dark collection of rooms that squeeze inbetween the air conditioning and plumbing and electrical lines and whatever else is up there.

And now I find myself in an interesting position – by merit of its relative obscurity, this little living space has become a secret hideout, a haunt, more or less. Technically, I’m squatting – I don’t pay any money for it anymore. When I lived there before, the landlord let me have it cheap, off the books, took money under the table for it – so when he died and a big real estate management company took over, no one really knew that I lived there. I mean, I’m sure people recognized me – I’d walked in alongside much richer looking people in the lobby plenty of times, giving them a friendly smile before walking off up the hall. I guess that they assumed I was part of the help, you know? And the actual ‘help’ probably either assumed the same thing, or didn’t even think to assume in the first place.

So my weird little apartment continued to open to my key, continued to power the refrigerator and the stove and the TV, continued to blow hot and cold air, but ceased to draw money from my account. Even though I now live at The Hill House, I still have The Apartment as a hidden hideaway. I was tempted to occasionally bring people there, but I wanted it to be my little secret. Only Ryan and Andrew, my current house mates, and Toby, my previous one, knew about it.

This was a lot of setup for the action of the dream, which featured three main parts. I headed downtown, parked in the building parking lot, and wandered in through the doors, expecting as usual that this time would be the time that they’d noticed, and that my key would no longer work. But it opened as easily as usual. I strolled through the lobby, around through the maintenance hall, up the stairs, and into The Apartment – I was planning to paint the stairs outside for some reason, in retrospect I’m not sure if it was smart, since keeping a low profile was what was keeping that space available to me. Anyway, I grabbed a drink out of the fridge, peeked out of the dingy curtains and watched the people walking by on the sidewalk (although the rooms were sort of on floor 1.5, as I said, somehow the windows came out at basement level on the sidewalk, so I could see people’s feet and shins as they walked past.)

I picked up the cans of paint I had left by the door, then went about my work, painting the steps bright red, the supporting beams blue, and adding white wherever I felt it was appropriate. Somehow in the midst of that I switched from the brush to just finger painting. And that’s when i came across the little stray cat that had hung around the building, and had occasionally followed me into the lobby and been let into my apartment before. It was dead, a little black cat, lying underneath the stairs. I wasn’t sure what to do… but I knew it needed to be buried, and there didn’t really seem to be any place appropriate around the outside of the building, since it was all urban highrises and stores and whatever – and there was no way I could get away with burying a dead cat in the grass on the sidewalk.

So I called up Andrew, and Matt Allen, both of whom agreed to come with me to my parents’ house  and bury the cat, although this necessitated letting the other Matt in on my secret abode.

… and that’s it. Here’s where I think all this came from. First off, I didn’t get enough sleep the night before, and I went to bed early, then woke up for some reason around 5:30 – so I was still in the midst of dreaming when I started waking up. Earlier in the day I’d seen both Andrew and Ryan, naturally, and Andrew had mentioned talking to Toby and Seth, both of whom I lived with in the real life apartment downtown. Matt Allen was playing XBOX Live, I noticed, as Andrew and his brother were doing some multiplayer Borderlands action earlier. The cat… ah, my aunt and uncle had a cat that just died. My parents’ house is my parents’ house, I don’t think it needs much of an excuse to make an appearance, although it’s worth nothing that it appeared exactly the same as in real life, as far as I remember, probably because conceptually it’s been insurmountably anchored in my mind as looking that way ever since I was born. Not sure where the paint came from.