Dream: Computer Game World, The Ratty Attic

Dream 20020907, 7:15 AM:

This dream was very distinctly a computer game. I knew throughout the dream that it was a constructed reality, and that although I might “die” and have to start the game over, it was only a game and I couldn’t be hurt.

I start out in a bare wooden room, with wooden walls and floor. It appears to be an upstairs in an old house, it reminds me of Sullivan House. I open something like an attic door trap in the side wall, and it is like I am holding a box that opens into another space. As I open it up, I see an opossum and another small animal, perhaps a rat, and I push the box forward to dislodge them – I know they are one of the obstacles of the game

I realize that I won’t be able to climb through the attic access door that I had originally thought was the only way out of this room. I think it was a false lead, something that is supposed to distract the gamer. I look carefully, and finally find a hidden door, and it opens onto a fairly well-lit stairway with white painted walls and stairs, leading downward. I go down the stairs, and then at the bottom there is a landing. I realize that this is the space where the game is supposed to actually take place. It is a building adjacent to the one where the attic room was, and it appears to be an old office. It has a lot of old, but not antique, office machinery and supplies – stuff from the forties and fifties, lots of it with green-painted or beige surfaces, worn and scuffed from decades of use. It seems all neglected now, and things are piled around all over. There is a space that I have to duck very low and crawl under a low doorway; it seems like maybe it used to be a regular height door before stuff got piled up. There is a square-ended knife, like a butcher’s cleaver, stuck in the top of the door frame, and the light glints brightly on it as I look at it. I realize that this is something I need to pick up to use during the game, and I do so. As I move onward, I see a huge rat in a pile of the junk, and it is moving toward me. It is inside some sort of a bowl or container. I cut its head off with the knife, and it dies. The cutting causes a little bit of blood, but surprisingly little; it’s like the rat is made of wax, its head cuts very cleanly off. I remark to myself that this game is so real – I can feel the sensation of wielding the knife and cutting the rat, and I think to myself that it’s just like a lucid dream. [I don’t manage to get the clue and become lucid, however.] Moving onward, I have to climb sideways through the railings at the bottom of another staircase, this one leading upward. There is another rat or other small mammal here, but this one is inside a jar, and appears to have been covered with some kind of puffy white stuff, like it molded or something grew on it. I know that I have to avoid bumping it, because it would release a cloud of something toxic or noxious. I can hear noises in the room above me, and I am moving very cautiously so that I won’t make noise and alert whoever is there to my presence. I’m not sure if the game involves conquering this person, or sneaking past him. *end*