Not sure if this is the right subreddit, but I NEED to get this off my chest plus wanted somewhere to document this dream of mine, to sort of piece together how the dream works I guess since I always forget some details after waking up. Plus I’d love to hear what people think lol.
Tldr; if you’ve ever played the game ‘Spore’ my dream’s basically like the cell stage, except there’s all these paradoxical and like ‘non-Euclidean’ (not sure if that’s the right word) rules that my dream adheres to.
For the long story, in my dream I exist on this black and white plane but from a top down perspective (sort of like If the entire dream was looking down through a microscope) except there is no external world, everything IS just 2D inherently and all creatures share this perspective. Usually my body will be a snake/noodle shape (maybe a blob?) I’m not sure but always some kind of solid white 2D shape with a black outline. Plus everything was covered in this ‘noise’ texture, like that one where you shut your eyes really tight and see spots, except it was grey instead of red.
Beside me, there would be other ‘creatures’ and we would basically be in a fight for survival type thing, everyone would move around randomly in a parabolical arc or some other pattern, but once a blob went on its path it had to commit to it and couldn’t change direction until it collided with something; (even me, I kind of moved around against my will and just observed this one specific blob, but at the same time I would feel all this blob’s pain, more on this later). Next, every time two shapes touched, one would die. Here’s the weird part all the shapes kind just ‘knew’ this one rule where basically if you touched another creature it would die, but at the same time if another creature touched you, you die. (That’s part of the paradoxical rules I was talking about) despite my dream universe’s strict adherence to these rules. one creature would always live and became vaguely ‘stronger’. and that just made sense at the time like ‘yeah that’s just how it is’ in my head during the dream. Plus there was this weird double standard where I would respawn perpetually at a random coordinate, but other blobs never came back to life, new blobs would just move into view from the corners of my vision.
The most unsettling part of my dream was that every time I died (about every 20 seconds), I would feel ‘physical’ pain in my dream, the sort of pain you feel when like you’re about to fall off the bed but flinch and wake up, or like when someone sneaks up behind you and startles you (But in my dream I could obviously see other shapes approach me and ‘anticipate’ the collision, and yet I still felt that ‘startling’ pain as if it was my first time getting scared, but repeatedly). Except these pains would never wake me up, unless of course I naturally woke up. Speaking of which these dreams, from my perspective felt something like 30 real time minutes, but after waking up I must have been asleep for something like 7-9 hours.
There’s some variations to my dream that occurred in the past but I haven’t had them reappear yet, although they were memorable enough for me to be recall for you guys now for reasons unknown to me, basically sometimes there would be like the ‘wall of flesh’ from terraria lol. ( I don’t think I’d played the game yet at the time) but instead of red it was white, and like every 60 seconds it would completely slide across my vision perspective, killing everything periodically, again with the same pains.
Another variation of dream featured a bunch more paradox type things (my memory of exactly how it works is unclear) but the rough idea was in this particular dream, all the blobs could I guess ‘reproduce’
Every blob would be assigned odd or even or some unknown value, and if it killed a blob of a specific value (sort of like rock-paper-scissors?), a clone would be created that wasn’t hostile to its parent so they could touch safely. Weirdly I remember this would result in me feeling ‘impending doom’ in a way as there was no conservation of mass, and blobs could be created out of thin air, as even though you could kill them, creatures would reproduce faster than they depleted, so my cone of vision would exponentially fill up with blobs, and the frequency of collisions with my ‘self-blob’ would become more and more frequent. I think there was some other variation of the dream where blobs could infect other blobs with it’s own value until everything reached like thermal equilibrium and everyone shared the same genes, again, paradoxically somehow a new type of blob would magically come into existence, (almost like a cell mutation?), and the infection would repeat with this new strain I guess.
Im not sure how to fit this into another section. But basically there was this weird ‘feeling?’ where values would be self referencing or something? Like a group that contains itself. But I’m not sure how it relates to the rules of the dream world, but like this weird feeling of ‘how can a universe exist if there was nothing before it?’. this weird existential/anxious ‘feeling’ that would build up indefinitely (like a shepherd’s tone) for the entire duration of the dream.
As I’ve mentioned, this dream (nightmare?) has been recurring ever since i was little, usually went I had a fever or sore throat. Not sure why my brain is so keen on revisiting this particular dream, I think part of it is because of my childhood when I watched DanTDM’s play through of Spore, and for some reason it just lodged deeply into my psyche, yet I could have sworn I’ve had this dream for much longer than before those videos were published. The oddest thing was the ‘mathematical’ nature of everything in the dreams with creatures moving in golden ratio, swirls, parabolas, and those sorts of things (the dream sounds complicated, but it’s much simpler when I was experiencing like 9 years back, I only now am able to describe the dream with words that that I’m DEFINITELY not using properly, but they’re the only way I can describe how it felt), despite this I never even heard of those mathematical words when I was like what? 10 years old. So makes me wonder how people can perfectly dream things they haven’t learned yet, is there something inherently predictable about our world? Probably not, honestly just my crazy fever. Lol