I fell asleep reading Harrow the Ninth and had a pretty vivid dream.

I was walking around a bare concrete exapnse backlit from apparently nothing. It was pretty dark inside, but there were lots of people bustling everywhere. The place was full of kids toys coming and going. You could will one to you by reaching for it. They were otherwise flying about all over the place on their own. The was a woman there who was acting a little rude to pretend she wasn't into me. She asked me for some water, and when I said I have some right here, her rude veneer dropped and she became more gushing. My canteen was on a plastic chain and it got hooked on something she was wearing and we had to awkwardly untangle it. "Thank you" she said, "but it looks like you're needed elsewhere, and I kinda faded out.

I faded into a very similar setting with better lighting. The colorful flying toy thing was still going on, but the place was brightly lit this time. There was a guy in a grey suit with a green cravat and topped with a dark-souls-style helmet who everyone was bustling about and we all called him God. He seemed charming but kinda hapless. He seemed interested in just walking around and looking at things. I knew it was my goal to figure out something that's wrong and correct it. At this point I realize that I'm some kind of psychonaut, and "God" is the anonymous host.

Then something strange happens. I'm walking up to a lecture, there as someone's shadow. There's no room for me and it's unclear how I should even sit. I keep getting pressed further and further back. This is taking place in a more ordinary looking warehouse with folding tables and green tablecloths. They hand out a kit to do a booster draft of Magic: the Gathering, apparently as a kind of internal promo where they had made their own cards, but all the packs were clearly pre-opened and resealed, and infuriatingly, none of them were a consistent amount, and they all had this weird kitchy merch crap in them that became a growing pile of hassle I was meant to drag around while desperately trying to find the person I am meant to pass my piles to. I ended up tossing the lot of it in a bin and made a performance of it before storming off.

There was one hapless fellow nearby, looked like a young man in a white suit. He took a photo with one of those cameras with a big old-timey flash, and this sent a wire with a little loop on the end flying across the room. I followed the flight path and it landed on some exposed wire, then perspective snapped to a wide shot of the room where I watch him destroyed in a puff of electricity like a burst balloon. Dusted. Huh, I wonder.

We're back with God, and the usual thing is now going on what with toys floating about. One of them is a numbered puzzle, which isn't a jigsaw only because the pieces are too bespoke and large. Each of the numbers also has an etched wood hole where the accompanying pieces go. After putting the finishing touch of the number 5, a small box appears next to me. It looks like a dremel tool box but smaller and form-factor nearly cubical. When I open the box, a bolt zips out of it and that photographer I saw earlier pops out of something nearby, expresses horror, and then gets zapped again. We take seeing that young man as an omen and everyone around tries to figure out what the hell is going on. Finally I tell them, "it happens whenever I open the box," and they ask, "what box?" and when I point it out, everyone tells me I'm the only one who can see it. I tell them in turn that if I try to hide it away it just comes back, and a version of the box can be found inside everything else. I remember when I saw that guy get toasted, and then I'm following that flying wire with the loop on the end. I subtbly guide it to miss the open wires, and things slow down. We pop back and God still isn't around, but instead of the bright young man, a little bobblehead doll appears that says "good boy" on the shirt, and we take this as a message from God that we got it right. I fade out again.

I'm in the anonymized subject's apartment. I can't see his face, and he's being held from behind and attended to by a friend who is wearing this powder blue onesie and has a kit of bath products in little bins down her front, suspended by a simple solid loop around her neck. She's curiously proficient at doing one thing with one hand and dropping whatever it is where it will catch in the right bin. "I told you I would do right by you," and my understanding is that she borrowed the body for the day, and is making sure to do good habits as a nightly ritual. My presence is an omenous one. There's someone else in the mirror, and he tells me I have to go back in. He seems to realize something and tell onesie-bath-bin-woman. She seems to be able to look into his mind palace just by looking in his eyes. I start to fade in and she starts yelling at me, "you're there to remove her, but I won't let you." I ask, "who," and she says, "Emily," and I say just as the fade in completes, "that wasn't her name when I was in there."

God is back, but is now wearing a guy fawkes mask and has a bowler hat. He's floating on a throne and devoting a lot of active interest in me where he was sorta dispassionate before. Whatever I'm in there to accomplish he is making actively impossible, and every time I try something: reach for an object, look for the box, or try to leave, the attempt ends in ironic puff and I get a small electric shock on my back. This clownshow goes on for a few iterations. I try to fade out and take one item with me, which I draw at random from a deck so it is known only to me. I pull a card that has clubs on it, and the numbers 13 17 18. Before I can fade out, the room resets and now there's a cardboard cutout of a clown with a bubble for a head next to the rule: a message from God that the "taking one thing with you" rule was made up. Too bad for me, I'm sure a 13 17 18 of clubs would be a killer play in Balatro. Then things got less antagonistic. Well and truly stopped from accomplishing anything, I was permitted to leave.

Awake, I can explain the electric shocks as Geemer being right up against me and nails-out. Even comparatively gentle rubbing can come through as a shock, so that's where that comes from. This one had such bizarre logic to it, as if I were a real psychonaut able to go into someone's dreams and find a logic gap and correct it to somehow help them. It seems there's some consideration for the privacy of the subject, who is anonymized in name and appearance, called "God" because it's their dreams we're entering. Whoever this guy is really likes kid's toys and magic tricks.

I'm pretty sure this is off the back of reading Harrow the Ninth and playing Fields of Mistria.