There was a play going on. I was supposed to be in it, but I kind of forgot, so I ended up being in it as someone else, and another person took the role I was supposed to have originally. That role placed a big emphasis on the character's glasses, and the person who replaced me one-upped my performance in rehearsals -- he was wearing a pair of glasses and holding two more pairs with the hand he was carrying his cane in. All of those glasses belonged to me. My dad, who was my mom, was also in the play, and was supposed to be very quickly drawing something on a piece of paper perfectly. He who was she was doing quite well, but when I leaned in a bit closer to see it, I saw the trick behind it -- there was a big, textured metal plate behind the large sheet of paper, and so s/he was doing pencil rubbings of that big metal plate.
My part was over, and I got off the stage and snuck into the audience. Some short people came up to the left side of the stage and tried to get into the play. I told my dad who was now almost entirely my mom that I knew how she did the picture thing.
Somewhere around here, I was wearing a little bit of clothes and had two towels wrapped around me. I was in my dorm, but as I went downstairs, it became my house. I wanted to go across the street from my dorm to the cafeteria across the street, so I went downstairs to the family room, where the main door is. On the way to the door, there's a big coat rack, and one coat was hanging about five feet diagonally out of the coat rack and swinging around, with an enormous leaf insect on it -- one that I had apparently seen earlier. I finally got past it, after much squeaming, and went across the street to the cafeteria.
There were clear plastic boxes of cereal. I put some mustard and mayonnaise on the end of a piece of bread and dipped it into the box, picking up pieces of the cereal, which was either Golden Grahams or Cinnamon Toast Crunch. Then I noticed that some of the mustardy-mayonaissey pieces were still in the box, and I figured I should get them out for the other people's sake. At first, I was still dipping the bread in, but eventually I just resorted to grabbing large swathes of creal out with my hands and dumping them into the trash. While I was doing that, I noticed that some pieces were orange. I didn't think much of it, but later I found out that someone had been dipping Cheetos in there.
There were a few other people in the cafeteria, and all of them seemed really tired. One of them left a kitchen sink running and then ducked under it to look for something. The sink started to overflow. I wasn't sure if I should do anything. I pushed the faucet handle down a bit so it would overflow slower, but I didn't go so far as to turn it off. Then a mysterious woman came in and shut it off for me, as I slowly backed away from the sink without really moving -- sort of a Hitchcock zoom.
The play sort of became a movie that I was watching/living, where this group of people was stuck at this house in the wild west that apparently used to be my grandma's house before everything started getting weird. There was a guy, his wife, and his mother, and her mother had apparently been kidnapped by Indians awhile ago. They went inside, stepping on and breaking some toys that used to be at my grandma's house on the way in.
Sort of concurrently with this, my mom tried to tickle me, and I spun around and flung my arms out, one of which was holding a pencil. She said "Hey, stop it!" I said "Well, stop trying to tickle me!"
Inside, it was my grandma's house all over again, and I was playing with a baby who's apparently my nephew in this weird dream world. There was some kind of weird warning screen or something before. He was a bit wet, and my grandma was telling him that I was called Uncle Big Daddy or something like that. There was a sort-of-playpen-ish thing, with a roof and walls and I think open to the grass on the bottom. A baby could walk around in here, with a cord connecting him to the ceiling, sort of like a bumper car. On the other end of the cord, up in the roof, the cord ended in a little round connector. It went on a hidden track through many little square compartments, leaving a trail of string behind as it went. It was a rather complicated mechanism, but the idea was that you could look back on it years later and see where your baby went in it.
I started imagining a baby being in there and going around. I remember thinking that this part was a cartoon. The baby walked around, until it got to the southeast corner. Here, the round connector at the other end of the cord no longer went into small boxes in a grid but one big square for the whole corner. Probably represented freedom from parents or something. In there, the baby's mother got a call from a pregnant friend of hers. We only heard this side of the conversation, but it was pretty clear that the friend had just miscarried. The mother slowly dropped down to the ground. Her pinky finger, which was mine, was inside the playpen and the baby started sucking on it. She said "Right now, either everyone can hear me, or no one."
Somehow I ended up back at my house, where I had set up a computer on the porch. On the computer, there was a chatbot that was apparently a late-DOS-era Jellyvision CD-ROM game, which I had set up to talk to ALICE on its own. Meanwhile, someone was playing Zoo Tycoon. The chatbots were commenting on it. A woman was playing Zoo Tycoon and had been trying to save the life of an alligator. I was sort of helping, but I also felt as though I had seen it all before. Eventually the alligator died, and I heard her anguished cries. The way the game was programmed apparently, there was just a big list of diseases that were randomly selected as the cause of death. The alligator's cause of death was listed as homophobia.
I went back to the chatbots. Several times during the Zoo Tycoon session, they had finished a conversation, and a screen would come up offering you the option of saving the conversation in one of two slots. I had already used one slot, so I saved this one in the other, and then planned to open them, copy everything, and save them outside, probably posting them on here.
The screen where I was copying them from became an aisle in Walmart. I was supposed to be filming a documentary or something in here. The TV there was playing something from either Discovery or a local news station about finding the perfectly preserved body of King David -- who they kept calling Baby King David for some reason. I was looking for something that looked like a gold box, and in the board games aisle, I found a large square Mad Gab box, which had two skinny yellow boxes on the sides. I filmed it, and as I did, a guy, who I think at one point was black but may have been fluctuating between races for a while, appeared in front of it. It turned out that the Baby King David thing was being filmed right here. This guy was an expert they were interviewing. He was twitching a lot. At one point, he was silent for a very awkward twenty seconds. After he'd said his piece, the reporter, who may have been Michelle Malkin, and her cameraperson turned about 25 degrees to interview another guy. I looked over there, still through my camera, and then back to the guy in front of the Mad Gab box, who now had his own, bigger camera. We had a semi-serious semi-joking fight, using the cameras partially as weapons, and yet capturing the whole fight on camera and making it look really cool.
I think eventually I dreamed that I sort of woke up and was going to post all that ALICE stuff on here, but when I got here, someone was complaining that I had bumped the ALICE topic. And then I really woke up.
I'm sure I'm leaving out a lot.
