Unusually coherent dreams (for me, anyway)

[mithriltabby]

My dream just before waking was of slightly unusual daily life: I’d been playing a computer game called Devolution: the Fall of Civilizations, which was a followon to the regular Civilization game but dealt with the decay of civilizations. I recall having gotten to the end of the “tech” tree (which was sort of like going down the regular tech tree and sort of like developing particular techniques for breaking up civilizations, like Luddism), which was Fire, at which point your hordes run around burning everything down. The game starts from a save game from the end of a regular game of Civilization, and ends by providing a save game for playing Civilization again with a whole bunch of interesting archaeological digs available.

There’d probably be oodles of intellectual property problems with putting one of those together, even based on FreeCiv.

It followed up with the trailer for a movie where the premise was that a near-future video game company had a virtual reality game that was a cross between Mad Max and Pirates of the Caribbean, and something had gone horribly awry that they couldn’t fix. (Customers trapped in the game, in classic cheesy magical VR style? Or just that it was too much of a money-maker for them to risk doing something bad to the game continuity by restoring from backup? It wasn’t clear.) So they borrowed a time machine to retrieve a crew of Blackbeard-era pirates from a sinking ship, since no one in the modern era had the skills necessary to cope with the problem in the game. In my dream, obsessivewoman and I were preparing to take danine and divertimento to the movie, because the costuming was excellent and we knew my mother would appreciate it.

When I woke up, I had to go ask obsessivewoman if the movie had been one for which we saw a trailer when we were last at the theater; it seemed about right for Hollywood. Though my brain could certainly have raided Star Ocean 3, The Life of the World to Come, and numerous other films and books for that one...