Excerpt from my dream journal during the time I was away from the site:
July 30th, 2008 8:4isham – 10:17am
I'm playing this HUGE, life-encompassing free-roaming RPG game, it's kind of cartoony but also very real, I guess that it's all continuously designed and constructed by independent programmers all over the net, filled with unlicensed copyrighted stuff like a cartoony Indiana Jones reminiscent of the Ultimate Showdown. It's great, and though I'm fairly new to it I get addicted fast like half the rest of the gaming world. Part of it is apparently played by acting your character out using little
Papo Knights, though I didn't really realize the oddness of this at the time. I was in the upstairs bathroom fighting what appears in retrospect to be a giant cartoony frog-king guy, using a little Papo red jouster and the classic looking knight with the sword and cool helmet. People are standing around watching and talking, especially outside the door which I am facing. The red is hurting him like fire. He's evil, I think at the time. I wake up a bit here, and wrench my head to the side to look at the clock and see it's 10:17am.
The turning of my head to look at something pulls me out of the dream. I'm really sad and frustrated at this, but for the first split second or so I just think that I've somehow "lost all my progress in the game". Within the next second or two I realize that I haven't lost all my progress in the game, but I've lost the game itself so I can't keep with it, the game has disappeared from the rest of the gaming world, and nobody will ever remember it but me. So yeah, pretty much the worst-case scenario for a gamer here short of actually dying. At one point in this dream or the next one I look down the basement stairs and am sure I actually see a ghost like I always think I do for a second, but it's just a black chair arm from the eams chair. I keep thinking I see different objects as ghosts and am really scared.