messed up dream: “the betrayer”
ok. So I just took a nap, and fell into this rather insane dream.
The dream started out at something not unlike a large supermarket. I was working there, just stocking shelves and whatnot, but that was just a front. My real role was infiltrator.
See, this supermarket was, itself, a real supermarket in a rather insane world.
See, I was actually an elite special operations soldier, infiltrating a rather mysterious compound. From the outside, it looked like it was two stories tall, and it flew, and allowed airplanes to land in the top floor (so … pretty huge).. But occasionally it would land, and open up the doors to the bottom, and people would get out.
My team was investigating it, in the hopes of taking it down. We infiltrated in one of the infrequent landings, and tried to generally act like an infiltrating military team, once we got inside. And over the course of a couple days sneaking around, trying to figure the place out and find a weakness we could exploit to bring it down, we had made no progress. We came in with a crew of 6, and over the course of the time we were there, other members of my team died to the fire of mystery soldiers, until it was just me and one teammate left. And, unsuccessful, we found our way out.
But just as we were leaving, my buddy refused to leave. For some reason, our having an opportunity to get off this head-trip was extremely rare. Even to get that opportunity, we had to fight through hundreds of enemies, in colorful and concealing body armor, with tanks and jeep-like vehicles, while we drove whatever we could find. The place was huge. Bigger than it could possibly be.
Well, my friend and colleague’s refusal to leave blew our last opportunity. He ran off the same day, apparently betraying me to the enemies in the process. Now I was living my life trapped in this psychotic mgs3-on-acid hell.
Back to the supermarket. They were re-tiling the floor in some areas. The deli closed at 5, and it was 5:15, they were just rolling up the mesh carpet thing in front of the deli now that it was closed, and they were going to re-tile that area tonight. I was acting like I belonged, and listening in on conversations of random workers. Most of them revolved around what sounded like some work of entertainment — a tv show or something called “the Betrayer”. Then I got out of there.
Flash to a scene from my daily life. I go through a door next to where I usually sleep, into my bathroom. There’s three doors in it other than the one I came through: one next to the toilet, which is sometimes open and sometimes closed, and when it’s open it leads to a different place every time. There’s a linen closet across from the toilet with a door, and just enough space to hide in. There’s also a door to a staircase going up, right next to the linen closet. My door is on the other side of the toilet from the random-door, and I’ve consistently kept hidden that I had a hiding spot there to keep it safe. This time, the door was open, and I could see as far as the eye could see a long line of identical toilets. And half a dozen guards walking around casually, patrolling the area. I quietly closed the door, but not before one of them caught a glimpse of me. So I ran up the stairs, but there were civilians at the top of the stairs. They hadn’t noticed me, but they would give me away if I passed by them, and it wouldn’t be ethical to hurt them. So I wedged up into the ceiling above the door, and when the soldiers came in and looked around, they didn’t look up and see me. They left, stationed one guard in my bathroom, and closed the random door on their way out. Then I climbed down, cqc’ed the bathroom guard, tied him up and shoved him in the linen closet with two others that met a similar fate, and went about my business. This was apparently not an unusual cycle, though the civilians there were a bit of a disappointment.
There’s also a scene involving me and the crew driving what amounted to a gunboat, trying to escape, while “they” chased us in orange cruisers that I could only say would be grub-like. As we fled, they shot similar mini-grub torpedoes at us, which we used a dilapidated machine gun to fend off. I knew that they were testing our tactics, but we took advantages of lulls in their torpedo barrages to attack the ships, and one by one sunk them.
This dream was very, very surreal. It had sort of a portals/simulacra feel to it … like I was in some sort of insane alternate universe, or trapped in my own mind and in a world that only vaguely bore any resemblance to reason. I think it would make a good video game.
As an added bonus, the title had two meanings, because my buddy was a betrayer for betraying me, and I was a betrayer of the operators of this surreal world, sneaking around attempting to destroy them from within while trying to make some sense of it.