wagnetic

Unfortunately it was a nightmare, though it doesn't sound nearly as scary written down as it was in the dream itself. I feel like I ought to play with it and turn it into some kind of casefic, but I don't know if I could pull that off. I'm still trying to figure out formatting on this thing, so hopefully it'll be under a cut.

The whole thing was first person in terms of like, seeing what the character sees instead of watching them do everything but the character in question was Ray K. There was a public event at a college campus, starring a drummer who I guess was supposed to be really good. The rest of the band was really just his backup and you couldn't even see them. They were playing in a brightly-lit structure that was basically a circle of columns packed together so tightly that you couldn't see through them with one large gap, and the man on the drums was positioned so that he was right in the middle of that gap. There were some people standing there and watching (including cameo appearances by BG and Ride) but most people were walking downhill, so he went and followed them.

Ray started noticing that some of the people there were acting strange and had circular marks on their arms. He stood really close to a bunch of people who didn't seem to notice what was going on at all, and he saw that the marks were actually holes. They weren't intents or anything, they just went straight down without any sloping on the sides, and they were pretty deep but the skin was totally healed without any blood or scarring or anything. At some point he also figured out that there was some kind of hidden message that said "I want everything." That sounds whiny now, but it the dream it sounded sinister, so maybe there was some context I forgot. He went to get Fraser, and it all gets really vague here, but
somehow they found out that there was mind control involved. Again, that sounds silly now but it was really scary in the dream.

There was some kind of underground base at the bottom of the hill that was full of those horror movie style dark corridors with dim yellow lighting, and at the end of it there was a big room with a tall, broad, muscular guy with curly brown hair, wearing an old brown leather butcher's apron, because that's what slasher villains wear. There was a machine that did whatever the mind-control thing was and he was in charge of subduing people and getting them into it. The head piece was sort of like one of those "asylum" horror movie head restraint devices that screw on, but the scary part of the device was a ton of cables ending in circular plugs in inserted a serum into the skin, which is where the cylindrical holes came from. Since Ray and Fraser aren't horror movie protagonists, they completely failed to take the guy down.

Ray woke up in a cell and the apron guy and some other thugs threw Fraser in. Ray went to see if he was ok but of course he had the holes in his skin. I think they'd both been drugged with something else to make them weaker and disconcerted as well. Whoever was behind the mind-control thing was trying to make Fraser attack (and maybe kill) Ray, so Fraser was even more desperate to fight it, and since they couldn't get it to work, they kept dragging Fraser out of the cell to try different versions of the serum. There was a lot of Fraser trying to shake them off and Ray grabbing his hand to try to keep him in the cell, but it never worked. By the end Fraser's whole chest was covered in holes and he was barely conscious, which he was actually glad about because it meant that he couldn't hurt Ray, but of course Ray was really worried about him. There was a lot of hand holding and desperate hugging (and I've never had a dream with realistic tactile sensations, but it really felt like I was hugging someone.)

The end got kind of rushed, but somehow they got out and figured out that the drummer was behind everything. When I woke up, they were having a confrontation at the top of the hill and the drummer was doing his Villain Speech about how he deserved more power and control, etc. It wasn't looking good for them at that point either, since they didn't have any way to call for backup so it was them against the drummer, the machine guy, various thugs, and a whole crowd of mind-controlled people. Ride and BG weren't in the crowd though, so presumably they got out of there before everything went to shit.

I usually go back to sleep and have vivid but plotless dreams after nightmares, and I had one of those with this one too. I was wondering around in a huge hotel/mall hybrid on a quest for Smarties. I kept getting lost, but it was annoying rather than stressful. I ran into Tatau, who was also looking for Smarties, and while I was wandering around trying to find my room, I also ran into Sea, who was in line at an ice cream place. I guess I was missing Canada and also craving sugar.