melatonin is crazy shit
Okay you know how it can enhance dreams, right?
So let me see if I can get this straight before I forget it. I was in a pretty mundane time travel dream, I'd apparently traveled back to the 70s, this prompted by dreaming about trying to rewind or fast forward a porn tape and not using the right buttons on the remote, THAT originally prompted by dreaming that Morgan called me at 2am and I hung up on him, then as I was toasting a bagel for a snack before bed he appeared behind me and asked where he could get some good pr0n on the web. So anyway I think I ended up having traveled back in time and meeting one of the porn stars, and I was making veiled references to him about shit I would do in the future, and I was like "I'm going to make you rich." So my advice to him, I think this would have been somewhere in the 1975-1979 timeframe, was to get into computers. Get a personal computer, learn it inside and out, write some programs in assembly language to add numbers and so on. Then before I traveled back to the present I left him a text file "encrypted" with an extremely simple XOR scheme and a note explaining that if he figured it out, he would become RICH. Inside the file was a brief list of events and their dates, chiefly so he could buy certain stock (or sell it) at certain times. The list included the rise of MTV (and subsequently of Beavis and Butthead) and the Internet bubble. Between this and the computer knowledge, he'd become one rich bastard.
Here's where it gets good.
Somehow there's a segue, I think when I am time traveling back to the future. It might get fucked up somehow, I'm not sure what happened, but all of a sudden I'm like viewing, or more truthfully INSIDE a REALLY fucked up television commercial. There's this snakelike creature with a head, and it's moving along, and its body/tail stretches out behind it like it's growing in that snake game, except the body/tail splits and then splits, again and again, and then rejoins so it's like a constantly growing mesh of unnaturally-moving pretzels. It's made out of a pretzel (or as I would later find out) graham-cracker like substance. And colors and frosting are starting to appear on it! The voiceover is kids yelling different flavors. "Vanilla! Honey!" etc. And at the end of it, this snakelike creature -- I think moving over a desert, like empty and full of sand -- is a mesh of graham crackers that are divided in rows as to flavor, and a very deep and subliminally threatening voice says something like "WOK CRACKERS - THE GAME OF LIFE" and the Wok Crackers logo appears above the cracker snake written in stone.
Did I say it was getting good? HERE it gets good.
BAM. I'm a kid. I'm IN the desert pictured in the commercial -- now that I think of it I'm pretty sure it was a desert, maybe starting with a treeless oasis lake the snake was floating over. And holy crap it's a race to get the crackers! The same deep, demonic voice rumbles "GOOOO WEST" and apparently there is some deep mystic connection between West and Wok. A fucking RUNE symbolizing West even appears in my mind, and I'm racing, and swimming, running, pushing myself all out in the westerly direction with this rune floating in front of me on the sand guiding my way. I think I'm racing against other kids from the commerical, I think I hear them yelling but I'm not sure. And then I hit it, the border of the Wok desert universe. And there's a being with me who enters the teleport at just the same time! And there's this rumbly fractured teleport that goes to darkness and noise and all I sense is this being, a quadruped, in it with me, and we're falling and its feet touch the ground just before mine do! NOOO!
But POOF. We appear in a supermarket, and it's only a puppy. Cool. No big deal. We're in front of the shelf -- I must be about five -- and on the shelf are Wok Crackers. He runs over to a box, maybe picks one up in his mouth or does something with it. The chief ingredient in Wok Crackers? BONES. Bone meal.
Here's where the timeline gets a little fuzzy. I think it segued into me being back home in bed with my mother reading me a story, and me asking her about the Game of Life and trying to look in a book about it. I got the distinct sense that the TV commercials were controversial and religious groups were up in arms about the Game of Life. I'm not sure if she got uptight about that, or if she got uptight about me wanting to look in the bottom drawer in a desk or file cabinet that was in my room that I KNEW contained porn among other things, probably from the future. Can't remember the point where she got uptight. I think my father was there too. Anyway.
I think she opened the book, or otherwise somehow started the Game.
BAM we're in a (fairly posh) medieval castle, and something bad is going down! I'm running down halls, I think my father is there too, and he's running along and somehow with his hand or a stick held out is releasing the catch on a whole row of interior shutters as he runs down the hall with me, so they fly open and all this wind and noise, but chiefly wind, blasts in and into the rooms across the hall, putting everyone into pandemonium, and distracting them, which is the point. He does that for a couple halls, we turn a corner and pass an entry to a big room where apparently some sort of Mass is being held, and there is no window opening there, we just run. Then I pass a sort of landing, except it's not on stairs it's in a hall, I pass through it and there's some sort of minor nobleman bending over a table with a bowl of stew, in the center of which is a chunk of what I imagine must be mutton. I steal it out of the bowl as I run by and start trying to eat it while running.
I can't chew it though. It's incredibly tough, and I'm trying and trying to eat it, we (or I, I might be alone now and might have been for most of the halls even, I'm not sure) run up a flight of stairs and there's a 180 degree turn and there's a tall dark figure up there, and at the other side of the 180 degree turn is a flight of stairs going back down! And the figure is chasing us, again it's us, me and one other person probably my father but I could be wrong. It's like I sense the other person but they're not physically there. Anyway I or we are running down the stairs now away from the figure which is chasing me/us and calling out, I think to stop, that it just wants to talk to me/us, and it's calling out a name, like it's a fucking screenplay, all written already, [name] is after all pretty large and out of shape (not exact words), and his heart can't take it, it's starting to tire out as he runs, and sure enough my/some guy with me (much stronger presence now, like an actual guy I'm seeing from the screenplay-like reading from the thing chasing us) is slowing down, tiring out, even though I/we KNOW this is like some kind of supernatural fucking live-action brainwashing.
The dark figure chasing us, during this time, has morphed into Michael Moore. Who is still chasing us and apparently able to run better than us despite being fatter. But we make it to the bottom of the stairs!
POOF. Teleport.
We/I are still at the bottom of a square spiral set of wide wooden stairs, very similar to the ones we just came down. That lead up into the sky say about two stories... and then just stop. Like there was a whole building there that just disappeared leaving the stairs and some supporting posts. In a vacant lot of cracked asphalt and weeds. Most likely in Flint, Michigan.
Michael Moore comes over and says he just wanted to talk, what's it like [something something], and grabs my face not ungently and looks into my eyes, and I feel very emotional for a second. Then the again-ghostly presence of my father or whoever it is may or may not initiate it, but again, POOF. Teleport.
This time the idea was, okay, we've had enough fun and we're done with the Game. Unfortunately, however, the Game is not done with us. We appear on stone steps leading a very short distance down into a stone room, dressed in what I imagine pre-Dark Ages royalty garb might looklike. Colorful, with those rounded hood-hat things. By we I mean me, now maybe about 12, and my parents, who are new and improved parents, although they might have been that way the whole time. Oddly enough despite the setting, the garb, the obvious timeframe, it seems obvious that we're in New England. There is some discussion of "oh crap, we got teleported to the wrong time!" and whether or not the locals will accept us, and I think we go outside, but it's pretty hazy.
And then I'm back, possibly in my bed, possibly older, like I just woke up. Feeling VERY weird after the Game finally spits me back out.
So I start looking up shit about Wok Crackers and the Game of Life on Wikipedia. Apparently, there is a tie-in between the Crackers and the Game to the fact that after WWII, starting in 1951 or 1949, various world governments made several attempts to summon evil spirits according to ancient legend in order to help them in the Cold War and in general in improving their world standing. I wonder why the fuck they didn't try to summon GOOD spirits, but whatever. The entry or entries go on to explain that Russia actually made a statement about how they were just trying to protect their interests and certain assets, and there was a map, and apparently it had something to do with splitting Russia up into 3 "virtual contries", one named yRussia (the original mother name), one tRussia, and one something much harder to pronounce, though that one did have a brief stint being named something very similar to Jakarta. I should note that in this world Russia controlled most of Europe -- France and Spain, Portugal, Italy, all of southern Europe basically -- with the exception of Germany and the land due West of it, the Scandinavian countries and the UK. It also I think controlled parts of Northern Africa and there was an elaborate scheme in which the capital of one "virtual country" was shifted back and forth east/west across one of those seas (the Black? the Caspian?) like 46 times, between 2 cities that served as capital. And there were examples of the internal handling of the "countries", like mail addressed to various places in them, with towns named Napalm and avenues named Bombardment Street.
I don't remember what the entry said after that, but then I looked up Wok Crackers, and maybe it was at THIS point and not earlier that I found out they were made out of bone meal. The true (not imitation) brand of Crackers was made only of bone meal, "household overdrops" (butter), cinnamon, and sugar. Oddly enough I have a distinct memory of looking at a package and seeing that it contained only something like .2% real bone meal, but anyway.
At the end of the dream there was the very strong and distinct sense that all this supernatural conspiracy tie-in shit was real, because it was based on distant and hazy now-recalled memories from when I was very young, about graham crackers, Wok in particular, and the Game of Life. Like perhaps once I'd entered the Game before, and then just forgotten it, and it was there the whole time, waiting to be rediscovered. This is why the religious groups were up in arms about the Game. Because it was being MARKETED by some force, through the vehicle of Wok Crackers, to young children, teaching them to teleport into different timelines, all sorts of supernatural shit. But (I think) Wikipedia, and nearly everyone else except the religious wackos, thought it was just some weird meditation thing. Boy were they wrong.
Then khelair audible-icon-bombed me on Trillian and I woke up. I had to look up Wok Crackers, graham crackers, the Game of Life, and (for some reason) Vegemite on Wikipedia. Sadly, there were no entries regarding the Game or the Crackers.
So let me see if I can get this straight before I forget it. I was in a pretty mundane time travel dream, I'd apparently traveled back to the 70s, this prompted by dreaming about trying to rewind or fast forward a porn tape and not using the right buttons on the remote, THAT originally prompted by dreaming that Morgan called me at 2am and I hung up on him, then as I was toasting a bagel for a snack before bed he appeared behind me and asked where he could get some good pr0n on the web. So anyway I think I ended up having traveled back in time and meeting one of the porn stars, and I was making veiled references to him about shit I would do in the future, and I was like "I'm going to make you rich." So my advice to him, I think this would have been somewhere in the 1975-1979 timeframe, was to get into computers. Get a personal computer, learn it inside and out, write some programs in assembly language to add numbers and so on. Then before I traveled back to the present I left him a text file "encrypted" with an extremely simple XOR scheme and a note explaining that if he figured it out, he would become RICH. Inside the file was a brief list of events and their dates, chiefly so he could buy certain stock (or sell it) at certain times. The list included the rise of MTV (and subsequently of Beavis and Butthead) and the Internet bubble. Between this and the computer knowledge, he'd become one rich bastard.
Here's where it gets good.
Somehow there's a segue, I think when I am time traveling back to the future. It might get fucked up somehow, I'm not sure what happened, but all of a sudden I'm like viewing, or more truthfully INSIDE a REALLY fucked up television commercial. There's this snakelike creature with a head, and it's moving along, and its body/tail stretches out behind it like it's growing in that snake game, except the body/tail splits and then splits, again and again, and then rejoins so it's like a constantly growing mesh of unnaturally-moving pretzels. It's made out of a pretzel (or as I would later find out) graham-cracker like substance. And colors and frosting are starting to appear on it! The voiceover is kids yelling different flavors. "Vanilla! Honey!" etc. And at the end of it, this snakelike creature -- I think moving over a desert, like empty and full of sand -- is a mesh of graham crackers that are divided in rows as to flavor, and a very deep and subliminally threatening voice says something like "WOK CRACKERS - THE GAME OF LIFE" and the Wok Crackers logo appears above the cracker snake written in stone.
Did I say it was getting good? HERE it gets good.
BAM. I'm a kid. I'm IN the desert pictured in the commercial -- now that I think of it I'm pretty sure it was a desert, maybe starting with a treeless oasis lake the snake was floating over. And holy crap it's a race to get the crackers! The same deep, demonic voice rumbles "GOOOO WEST" and apparently there is some deep mystic connection between West and Wok. A fucking RUNE symbolizing West even appears in my mind, and I'm racing, and swimming, running, pushing myself all out in the westerly direction with this rune floating in front of me on the sand guiding my way. I think I'm racing against other kids from the commerical, I think I hear them yelling but I'm not sure. And then I hit it, the border of the Wok desert universe. And there's a being with me who enters the teleport at just the same time! And there's this rumbly fractured teleport that goes to darkness and noise and all I sense is this being, a quadruped, in it with me, and we're falling and its feet touch the ground just before mine do! NOOO!
But POOF. We appear in a supermarket, and it's only a puppy. Cool. No big deal. We're in front of the shelf -- I must be about five -- and on the shelf are Wok Crackers. He runs over to a box, maybe picks one up in his mouth or does something with it. The chief ingredient in Wok Crackers? BONES. Bone meal.
Here's where the timeline gets a little fuzzy. I think it segued into me being back home in bed with my mother reading me a story, and me asking her about the Game of Life and trying to look in a book about it. I got the distinct sense that the TV commercials were controversial and religious groups were up in arms about the Game of Life. I'm not sure if she got uptight about that, or if she got uptight about me wanting to look in the bottom drawer in a desk or file cabinet that was in my room that I KNEW contained porn among other things, probably from the future. Can't remember the point where she got uptight. I think my father was there too. Anyway.
I think she opened the book, or otherwise somehow started the Game.
BAM we're in a (fairly posh) medieval castle, and something bad is going down! I'm running down halls, I think my father is there too, and he's running along and somehow with his hand or a stick held out is releasing the catch on a whole row of interior shutters as he runs down the hall with me, so they fly open and all this wind and noise, but chiefly wind, blasts in and into the rooms across the hall, putting everyone into pandemonium, and distracting them, which is the point. He does that for a couple halls, we turn a corner and pass an entry to a big room where apparently some sort of Mass is being held, and there is no window opening there, we just run. Then I pass a sort of landing, except it's not on stairs it's in a hall, I pass through it and there's some sort of minor nobleman bending over a table with a bowl of stew, in the center of which is a chunk of what I imagine must be mutton. I steal it out of the bowl as I run by and start trying to eat it while running.
I can't chew it though. It's incredibly tough, and I'm trying and trying to eat it, we (or I, I might be alone now and might have been for most of the halls even, I'm not sure) run up a flight of stairs and there's a 180 degree turn and there's a tall dark figure up there, and at the other side of the 180 degree turn is a flight of stairs going back down! And the figure is chasing us, again it's us, me and one other person probably my father but I could be wrong. It's like I sense the other person but they're not physically there. Anyway I or we are running down the stairs now away from the figure which is chasing me/us and calling out, I think to stop, that it just wants to talk to me/us, and it's calling out a name, like it's a fucking screenplay, all written already, [name] is after all pretty large and out of shape (not exact words), and his heart can't take it, it's starting to tire out as he runs, and sure enough my/some guy with me (much stronger presence now, like an actual guy I'm seeing from the screenplay-like reading from the thing chasing us) is slowing down, tiring out, even though I/we KNOW this is like some kind of supernatural fucking live-action brainwashing.
The dark figure chasing us, during this time, has morphed into Michael Moore. Who is still chasing us and apparently able to run better than us despite being fatter. But we make it to the bottom of the stairs!
POOF. Teleport.
We/I are still at the bottom of a square spiral set of wide wooden stairs, very similar to the ones we just came down. That lead up into the sky say about two stories... and then just stop. Like there was a whole building there that just disappeared leaving the stairs and some supporting posts. In a vacant lot of cracked asphalt and weeds. Most likely in Flint, Michigan.
Michael Moore comes over and says he just wanted to talk, what's it like [something something], and grabs my face not ungently and looks into my eyes, and I feel very emotional for a second. Then the again-ghostly presence of my father or whoever it is may or may not initiate it, but again, POOF. Teleport.
This time the idea was, okay, we've had enough fun and we're done with the Game. Unfortunately, however, the Game is not done with us. We appear on stone steps leading a very short distance down into a stone room, dressed in what I imagine pre-Dark Ages royalty garb might looklike. Colorful, with those rounded hood-hat things. By we I mean me, now maybe about 12, and my parents, who are new and improved parents, although they might have been that way the whole time. Oddly enough despite the setting, the garb, the obvious timeframe, it seems obvious that we're in New England. There is some discussion of "oh crap, we got teleported to the wrong time!" and whether or not the locals will accept us, and I think we go outside, but it's pretty hazy.
And then I'm back, possibly in my bed, possibly older, like I just woke up. Feeling VERY weird after the Game finally spits me back out.
So I start looking up shit about Wok Crackers and the Game of Life on Wikipedia. Apparently, there is a tie-in between the Crackers and the Game to the fact that after WWII, starting in 1951 or 1949, various world governments made several attempts to summon evil spirits according to ancient legend in order to help them in the Cold War and in general in improving their world standing. I wonder why the fuck they didn't try to summon GOOD spirits, but whatever. The entry or entries go on to explain that Russia actually made a statement about how they were just trying to protect their interests and certain assets, and there was a map, and apparently it had something to do with splitting Russia up into 3 "virtual contries", one named yRussia (the original mother name), one tRussia, and one something much harder to pronounce, though that one did have a brief stint being named something very similar to Jakarta. I should note that in this world Russia controlled most of Europe -- France and Spain, Portugal, Italy, all of southern Europe basically -- with the exception of Germany and the land due West of it, the Scandinavian countries and the UK. It also I think controlled parts of Northern Africa and there was an elaborate scheme in which the capital of one "virtual country" was shifted back and forth east/west across one of those seas (the Black? the Caspian?) like 46 times, between 2 cities that served as capital. And there were examples of the internal handling of the "countries", like mail addressed to various places in them, with towns named Napalm and avenues named Bombardment Street.
I don't remember what the entry said after that, but then I looked up Wok Crackers, and maybe it was at THIS point and not earlier that I found out they were made out of bone meal. The true (not imitation) brand of Crackers was made only of bone meal, "household overdrops" (butter), cinnamon, and sugar. Oddly enough I have a distinct memory of looking at a package and seeing that it contained only something like .2% real bone meal, but anyway.
At the end of the dream there was the very strong and distinct sense that all this supernatural conspiracy tie-in shit was real, because it was based on distant and hazy now-recalled memories from when I was very young, about graham crackers, Wok in particular, and the Game of Life. Like perhaps once I'd entered the Game before, and then just forgotten it, and it was there the whole time, waiting to be rediscovered. This is why the religious groups were up in arms about the Game. Because it was being MARKETED by some force, through the vehicle of Wok Crackers, to young children, teaching them to teleport into different timelines, all sorts of supernatural shit. But (I think) Wikipedia, and nearly everyone else except the religious wackos, thought it was just some weird meditation thing. Boy were they wrong.
Then khelair audible-icon-bombed me on Trillian and I woke up. I had to look up Wok Crackers, graham crackers, the Game of Life, and (for some reason) Vegemite on Wikipedia. Sadly, there were no entries regarding the Game or the Crackers.