Note: all names of people I know IRL have been changed.
The first part of this dream I don't remember as well, and honestly it was pretty depressing. It was me complaining and being depressed about failing to find love because of the problems caused by dating apps and the basic rant you here from all guys my age. But in any case, it transitioned to a scene where I was visiting a local theater with a group of childhood friends. It was a midnight movie showing that they wanted to see and I figures it sounded like a fun excursion even if the movies weren't ones I cared about. Now the midnight showing was a special one: It was a marathon showing of every Harry Potter movie back-to-back. Now, this was an epic endeavor in my dream, but not the absolute madness it would be to actually sit through those in a theater. Somehow it would be over in like 3.5 hours in the dream. Now, I'm not a fan of the Harry Potter movies. I only saw the first four I think as a kid and wasn't that into them. I never read the books. But I figured that as a social outing it might be fun.
In this dream, I was still being somewhat of a sourpuss. It wasn't helped by the situation: my friends were all sitting in the middle/front of the theater in seats together while I was stuck near the back. So I was immediately bored and in fact feeling sort of tired. I wanted to just lay down and ignore the movies and read or something, but you can't exactly do that in a theater, especially since this one was somewhat packed for a midnight showing (much less one that would be what, 10+ hours?). The theater was strangely bright and also strangely unperturbed by my talking to those around me. I went out to the lobby to get a snack and drink as something to do to kill time. I saw the menu and it was some stuff which looked like potentially tasty but really unhealthy goyslop: ICEEs and some Oreo/cookie dough ice cream nonsense. I thought about it and got a medium ICEE (blue flavor... I guess it's "blue raspberry" but it's really just "blue flavor" isn't it?) and no snacks.
But when I got back in the theater there was a cute Asian girl in front of me. She seemed to be younger college age, and maybe I was in this dream too. I had some box of cereal with me and offered some of it to her and her friends. In reality I didn't want to eat it all myself for health reasons. I genuinely wanted to be nice. But in dreams you are often a lot more of a dick than you are in real life (or some would say that maybe you just make less excuses for yourself and are more pure id). My ulterior motive too: Be nice and give her some to hopefully make her like me and become my friend/partner. I poured some out in a bowl she had, but she was holding it over her open backpack full of schoolwork. She got the last part of the bag of cereal where half of it is crumbs and dust, and a lot of that spilled into her bag. I felt awful about it, although she was still just overjoyed at the generosity of me giving her some of my cereal. (Also when I look at it in waking logic I have no idea why she'd hold the bowl over her open backpack, dumb bitch lol.) I wanted to go even further out of my way to be chivalrous and offered to help her clean the crumbs out of her backpack while she watched the movie, but she said I didn't need to.
Around this point, there was some intermission/featurette of some famous comedic actor. I don't know who he was, but I was kind of thinking of Bruce McCulloch and Kids in the Hall I think. It was a less conventionally "attractive" version of him. This one was balding and basically looked like a middle aged dad. But the girls in the audience thought he was hilarious. It was showing some highlights of his best sketches. The audience was going INSANE over it. I had to admit that he was quite funny and talented, but I guess out of jealousy I kind of was being obstinate and looking down on them. Suddenly, there was a special surprise and the actor himself appeared to the audience in person, walking around! Not sure when this stopped being a Harry Potter screening. I think part of my feelings here were resentment at having this screening last even longer since it was only the second or third film in the series and I was already ready to go home. The Asian girl was going as crazy for this guy as the other chicks in the audience and it made me angry. You might say that it should have given me hope instead that chicks can like a balding dad-bod guy if he's funny/charming, but my dream persona was very much stuck in a petulant "mad about girls" kind of adolescent state of mind.
As a method of pouting, I wandered out of the theater and went to a small game center in the corner of the theater complex. To my surprise, their selection was quite decent and they had some arcade games I liked. One of them was somehow an arcade version of the NES game Rockin' Kats. They had some STGs as well. In these dreams, I always imagine the STG screens as being simply HUGE for some reason. Basically imagine one of those basketball hoop games from an arcade, but the entire back wall is a CRT monitor with a shooting game instead. That's what I always imagine them as, and this dream was no exception. To my chagrin, they took cash and I didn't have any on me. I'm not sure why I couldn't just go to the counter and ask for change, but that was the case. Maybe I was still a petulant adolescent and, appropriate for the character, I was out of allowance. The STGs were, unfortunately, not some of my favorites. It was DonPachi and DoDonPachi, but I only think that series becomes excellent with DoDonPachi DaiOuJou. Still, I surveyed the area and decided that if I did have some cash, I would play DoDonPachi. Somehow I imagined what would happen if I had to spend a year in this arcade as a prison cell (and all the games were on free play). I imagined I would certainly become a DoDonPachi superplayer and then probably show off my skillz when I escaped. But I would rue the lost time I would be unable to play other games.
I'm not sure exactly what I did at this point, but I somehow "glitched" the DoDonPachi machine. You know those screencaps where people take error messages in Windows XP and drag them around the screen, creating a glitched trail of windows? It was like that happened, but with the bullets on screen of the game. And they all got spit out the bottom of the machine. It was like a huge cloud of physical bullets from the game spilled out in a glitched pattern and created a pile at the bottom of the machine. It was, coincidentally, about the length of my body. So I laid on it and closed my eyes to relax and hopefully wait out the rest of the Harry Potter screenings. At this point, my mother came in to see me. I'm not sure when she joined the party. Apparently this actor guy was a childhood friend of the family or at least knew me. My mom said that the actor wanted to see me and spoke highly of me. It was like some cheesy self-boosting anime/game: I felt so insecure, but really the "hot"/"cool" guy was envious of me the whole time. He was on his way out and met me, and I was very shy and sparse in my language. Around this time I woke up.
I promise I'm not this much of a loser in real life lol. Sometimes weird parts of your personality float up in dreams.
This dream was primarily an animated series of sorts that I seem to have been imagining in the dream proper. That is, whatever I was seeing was my own projection and imagination of what a show could look like. It was an animated series set in some future date. As I was imagining it, I kept changing it in my head to possibly toy with or revise. The basic idea is that the series is set after a potentially apocalyptic scenario of unaligned artificial superintelligence. I put the date of things beginning to be taken over at something like 2035, then thought maybe 2045 would be better. This series would be set a bit after that, something like 2065. The idea goes that AI began totally fucking up the world, exacerbating inequalities and breeding crazy technology. The only example were these huge lumbering cars with like spider legs that were running rampant in cities like kaijuu. I guess they were self-driving, but more like self-running rampant.
Well, the setting was after AI was miraculously scaled back and delimited. The exact details were obscure, but it was basically the utopia we dream of: People don't have to work very much, everyone has UBI, AI gives us all the time-saving help we want with none of the downsides, etc. It was, of course, necessary to establish a global government to do this. But the government is benign and committed to privacy and liberty. It was thirteen brave computer scientists who managed to do all of this, and now "the Thirteen" are literally worshipped as gods around the world. It's kind of like the Nine Divines from Oblivion. A narrator explaining this says that it might seem odd to see these individual computer scientists as gods, but that they are literally responsible for saving and safeguarding the existence of humanity, so if we can't call that a god, what can we? He named all of them in alphabetical order, referred to by their last names. I only remember the last two, who were both of Chinese heritage I suppose: Zhao and Zou. I thought that these two names might be confusing together, so made a note to revise them.
Now, this is all happening in big cities. Like anything, rural areas lag behind. So the story is set in a small town that is rather desolate and is still recoiling from the problems. They still worship the Thirteen and welcome the new developments, but they are moving slower in the countryside. And he focuses on one of the developments that is most relevant for the story: the creation of conscious robots with nearly-perfect human appearances. The main character is a robot boy of middle school age. These robots exist, but they are not perfectly omniscient. They are kind of autistic and weird. And most of them hide the fact that they are robots, because they are experiencing discrimination and hate during the anti-AI backlash, even though society tries to teach people that these robots are not perfectly omniscient, and if anything are more like neurodivergent humans with only slightly above-average intelligence. All the "perfect" robots were destroyed during the AI purge. The main character disguises himself and just appears like a weird human. Think of Invader Zim or something like that. Robots can talk to each other via a WiFi-like system, but not to humans. So they have something of telepathic system where they can attempt to talk to each other. They have to both agree to "unlock" their telepathic communication to each other, so they can be notified via requests for communication but not bombarded by messages until consenting to it. One day, the robot notices a strange girl waiting by the bus stop with an umbrella (the robots are water-proof, but like humans they don't like to get wet in th erain). He has suspicions and tries to reach out to her with his WiFi. She picks up and he says "Aha, so you're a robot like me!" and she responds "It took you this long to notice? Boys really are stupid..." They then get into a bit of a playful back-and-forth, but we sense that they both have a deep unhappiness and feel out of place in the world that wants to forget and ignore them.
If I can say so, I would say that this is a pretty interesting setting for an animated series. But I don't know how I could integrate it into the CHARACTERS I already have. Maybe a new series would be necessary.
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