Dream Journal: Tile Puzzles and Dance Battle

Okay, last night I had a singular and vivid dream that I really felt the need to journal here. Fans of adventurous literature, RPGs and/or dream interpretation could potentially have a field day with this one. To begin with, I was in an old European palace, but the setting was definitely modern for reasons that will become clear, and the castle had glass-paned windows with those lean lines between the panes, and in one room there was stained glass too. Anyhow, for some reason, I had to pass through a series of chambers with different flavors of floor-tile puzzles.

The first of these had widely spaced tiles and I had to step between them in order to avoid a large and nasty sideways-angled pounder-purtcullis thingie. Those always ruin one’s day when they’re triggered, but I got through there safely. The next room had marble tiles, and some of those were cracked. I don’t know what the trap those were connected to was, because I couldn’t see the mechanism this time and I got through by only stepping on the cracked tiles.

The last tile trap was… different. This room’s floor tiles were much smaller, and some were scored or patterned. To get across this room to what I understand was the final goal (whatever that was I’m not sure, but there was a door I had to get through to reach it) I had to only step on scored tiles, but not just any scored tiles. I had to use mathematics to calculate which I had to step on next. The tiles weren’t numbered however: each had a numeric value based on which column and row of tiles it occupied in the room’s space. About halfway across the room, it switched from a relatively simple mathematical progression to requiring calculus. How I know it was calculus I don’t quite recall, but I know it was. Anyhow, owing to the small size of the tiles, I eventually had a balance difficulty and misstepped, at which point a pair of huge magical stone hands emerged from the walls and seized me and, rather like wallmasters, hurled me into another room.

This was another large, marble-tiled room that I understand I had already been in earlier, I think somewhere between the portcullis-smashy room and the cracked tile room. It was large enough to be a smallish ballroom, and had a fireplace, a stained glass window and a large table surrounded with sturdy chairs. Then the double doors at the back of the room swung open and out walked the challenge that I had to face: a bronze golem shaped like Michael Jackson wearing a big gauntlet-cuffed coat with fringed epaulettes. While it approached with apparently violent intent, a cast about for some means to defend myself or flee, and grabbed hold of one of the hefty chairs by the table so I could maybe hit the golem with it. Michael didn’t much like the idea and pulled the chair out of my hands before I could heave it at him and lifted it to smash me. At that point I realized that maybe there was another way to face down the Bronze King of Pop and moonwalked out of reach, and was surprised to note that he arrested his swing and mirrored my moonwalk. So a dance battle commenced, where sometimes we danced together and sometimes one at a time, mixing and matching styles. We waltzed together, we tapped, we did contemporary dance and even ballet. Eventually I overcame Michael by guiding him into an assisted ballet style leap out through the stained glass window to plummet into the gorge below, at which point I was free to proceed. Yeah. Then I woke up and never got to find out what the end goal had been.

Analyze that, or, if you dare, run it in an RPG. I dare you.

Tags: adventure, dance battle, dream, dream journal, dungeon, dungeon design, golem, interpretation, michael jackson, rpg, tile puzzle, trap