Today the various dreams all shared the quality of being intrusive, and also being terrible video game concepts.

I'll start with the one I've had before, as I recognized the characters and some of the rules. It got a bit more twisted this time. You play as a company manager and oversee a grip of cutesy animal underlings who are 3d models visually styled to look like sculpy stop-motion figures. You spend most of your time micromanaging the frog. Before you can begin your cartoonish tasks in ernest, a corporate rep gives you the tutorial by way of summoning a bus that was so large I couldn't see either end, and insisting we had to get on because our franchise "aren't squishy enough." This one most resembled a chubby bat and had indigo-dark blue stylings, and to be fair, did look a fair bit squishier than my staff.

There is then an interlude where I take, on my own, a cramped bus ride to nowhere. The corporate uniform, if that is what it is, is a spare black a shirt, since that's what everyone was wearing. I could swear I knew some of the people on the bus, but in the light of day they seem made up. I'm not sure if this made my team squishy enough, but they did let us carry on with the work (game?) after I got off the bus.

A job meant mostly camera following the frog as he rolled up sushi and punted it off to the side once he had a set. The completed roll was as big as he was, so it was like he was scooping them up one lego brick at a time and delivering sterile 3d models of food off to the side, like stray bits of stuff you see in Katamari games. He had a little sing-along song which became the soundtrack, about the joy of rolling up sushi, so I guess I join the ranks of Jiro and others in so dreaming. There was little more to the game than to hold up on the d-pad to drive the frog forward, and occasionally tap right or left to send the sets to the side. This all plays out without any real challenge or stakes or timing, but had an overproduced, wild set of stuff going on on either side. This is difficult for me to describe, best I can say it was like being tiny and walking through a house that was packed with stuff but didn't feel like a mess, and everything was either waving, wiggling, or changing places with other things. There were several sequences like this one, sometimes the tasks were a little different, but always braindead easy and unchallenging. Like a Rythm Heaven that would pause for you until you did the input and then keep going.

Then I remember that my evil mind has decided to make a bad concept worse by going spooky mode, which I generally enjoy, but here feels like a tired trope, "oh what if we did a cutesy thing but bait-and-switched" I wither under the creative criticisms I level at myself for this, but, here's where things change. A live-action cutscene plays of an orderly dumping a box of rats out of the back of a hospital saying, "I gotta, it's the law." And when I return to the production line, the lights are out and there's a new game to play except it was designed by Jigsaw. Now we follow a dark, bloody, gross version of the 1d timed button press game, except instead of clean, free, clinical button presses, you have to swipe with your hand across the floor. What you are meant to be swiping and to do what are difficult to see and understand. Sometimes its flicking rocks at incoming blades. Sometimes a line of weasels on one side need you do feed them the gross bits of flesh with a swipe, and they bite you instead if you miss. With real feedback of course. I recoiled multiple times from my blunders, getting angrier and angrier at my employee, who now had a human form, until I looked ahead at the incoming gauntlet and threatened them with violence if they didn't cut it out already. I was then permitted to skip to the end where I fired the stinker after withering him with my gaze whilst my rage boiled over for subjecting me to all the blood and injuries. He seemed plenty more afraid of me, and I wondered then who I was who was like this. Or who I was meant to be. In my editorial opinion, I think a satisfying game like this could be pulled off, but the actual gameplay sections need to be interesting and inform one-another. It would probably be best as a shorter thing. I'm thinking Station 51.

There were a lot of stops and starts involved here, and the reason I think of this dream as intrusive is that I was awakened many times by loud noises coming from the industrial work going on outside my apartment. One particular single bang sat me up and made my heart race. I would fade out again and the dream would resume, seeming to pull me back into it or stitch itself back into place. Don't listen to that noise, Kaz, you're not done with the box of rats, remember?

There's two sections to this gameplay loop of the next thing that I barely understand so bear with me. In the first part, you're walking down a muppet-styled grid city with a different shop on each corner. This is the randomized menu, so to speak, and is your starting loadout for a procedurally generated run-repeating game. With your desired kit obtained, the buildings fade to empty lots and time seems to turn back. You are now in a stylized old west frontier. As you approach a lot, the set materializes with too-real looking people in a tiny town enclosed in the lot. You then choose from among the people of the town a target to be eliminated, and use the tools in your kit to first make them hate you and then get in good with enough of the rest of the town that your target is forced to leave. Your first several times, your kit will probably be a mismatch, as I had to spend too many resources accomplishing the first thing and had not enough bribe material left. Talking to people multiple times makes them hate you more, I guess as a failsafe against getting too gamified too quickly. And oh, I have no idea what these "resources" actually are, or what a kit contains. I imagine it could work something like Vampyr. Anyway, when I get the townsfolk so riled up they started shooting at me I left and the lot disappeared and I could start again. Even though I've never played it, in my head, this is what Red Dead Redemption was like. If you want a break between runs, you can explore the muppet town, which has some distractions.

Waking up mid walk from another noise, this dream also pulled me back in, but instead of being an open city there was a roof, more muppets were milling about, and they would dissolve into this disgusting clay if they laughed too hard. This dream also felt like it pulled me back in a few times, and after negotiating with the other one, I was able to get back on the job of rolling up sushi with the frog instead, pitting my dreams against one-another I suppose. I don't know how restful experiences like this are for me. I hope at least somewhat.