Chapter Text
I looked out the window of the bus as the pulsating synth flooded my ears, a warm sound I was well accustomed to. The bus had begun to move, finally the summer holidays were among us. 5 to 6 weeks of working on personal projects, gaming and of course, chilling.
As the melodies were layering on top of each other, I began to think about what I should work on. There is that YouTube video that I need to complete, there’s also the PS2 that I need to get running games from the Hard Drive, then again there’s other problems with that thing. what about those visuals for a song I like…
Oh yeah should probably introduce myself: the names Tyler Jason. I’m 18.6 years old; I live in the UK in what could best be described as a very chaotic world where every moment it feels like it’s just going to completely crumble. I like listening to music, a lot, playing games here and there, some movies and TV, a lot of YouTube, done some of that myself. Just a simple lad getting on with life and I was going to enjoy the new few weeks. No School, no unnecessarily early wake up times and all focus on personal stuff that I feel more comfortable with.
[HOME – Decay]
Sometime later I was just at the final corner before my house when all of a sudden, I paused. A sudden sense of caution, like something was off. I checked my surroundings and slowly creped forward; as far as I can tell nothing was different… I shrugged it off as I continued on at my usual pace. I approached the door and let myself in.
I reached for my phone to turn off the music, went into the kitchen and set everything down, grabbing a drink of juice since it was scorching that day before picking everything back up and heading into my room.
It’s not the most brilliant of rooms but it has all my stuff here, except for a Nintendo Switch which was downstairs in the living room, bit of a mess though. Random CDs both printed and burnt laid on the ground, in their cases obviously, a controller here and there. A Yamaha PSR-E323 keyboard placed in front of my guitar which was sitting on top of some more CDs and other small gadgets. Though the computer desk was the messiest thing of the bunch. Absent of a computer, it functioned more like a workbench, it was littered with mostly cables but also some other controllers, a box of CD-ReWritables, a Drawing tablet, lots of bits of paper and off to the side was a stack of video-game consoles, an Original Xbox, Xbox 360, PlayStation 2 and an Original PlayStation in that order, I call this the “Tower of Power”. The PS1 was plugged into the bottom of two VCR’s which was situated between two TV’s, a 24” flat-screen LCD on the left and a 12” CRT on the right, behind the mess of cables on an elevated section of the desk. On top of the VCR’s was a pile of blank VHS tapes and CD albums. A big blue box sat underneath it which held most of the rest of the cables including some other stuff like broken laptops, a small VGA monitor, two projectors, two Wiis, a Wii U and other things, though mostly cables. There was a shelf next to it on the adjacent wall with a bunch of books, most of which I haven’t read yet. And on the wall adjacent to that, next to the door, was some drawers with all of them except for the bottom drawer holding specific types of cables, the top two were power, the next was audio and video and the next was data. The bottom drawer held a decently sized PS1 game collection, including Gran Turismo, Spyro: The Year of The Dragon, Destruction Derby, Collen McRea Rally and a PS1 Demo Disc titled “Demo One”.
I sat on my bed and pulled out my MacBook Air from my bag to begin whatever task I was to set myself. Not before I was called by my mum to help her with something in the garden… *sigh* maybe later.
Sometime after that, as well as dinner and other things, I had returned to my room. As expected, I had forgotten what I was originally going to do and instead booted up Beam.NG Drive to mess around in freeroam while also shuffling a selection of songs to play in the background.
Honestly freeroam in Beam.NG is where it’s at for me. Driving around to the best of both me and my controller’s capabilities in a small hot hatchback of sorts while the music plays like a mixtape. Literally perfect.
It was approaching 8 o’ clock. I had moved on from Beam.NG and the Laptop and was continuing my save of Wipeout 3 on the PlayStation, I’d say this is one of my favourite games on the PS1. Fast pace, brilliant soundtrack and also somewhat easy to control. I probably spent about… 45 minutes playing that before I decided to call it in for the night. Making sure to save everything I switched it all off and headed off to bed. However, during that night, something happened. I never figured out what specifically but whatever it was, everything was about to change.
For the past few weeks, I had been getting more frequent dreams. Most where quickly forgotten, they were mainly ones that played out exactly like how my usual day goes (sometimes even being exact events I would experience a day or so later, weird) but then there were others that stuck in the back of my mind. Some good, some bad, for example I had this dream where I was messing around with this AI generation thing, something I would usually not do, however it generated stuff in real life rather than as an image or video. At one point it glitched and created this unstable symbiote like creature, rapidly changing shape and material, making unnatural computerised screeching noises and it almost immediately started chasing me. I was able to get away from it because I somehow became spiderman and could cling on to walls. It moved sporadically and could phase through walls and doors as if they weren’t there and every time I saw it, it made me feel extremely uneasy, like I would throw up just by looking at it… right I’ve gone off a tangent. *ahem*
Sometimes a dream would be so vile for whatever reason that I would immediately want to forget it even happened. This only happened once and so far, it’s never cropped up again.
But tonight’s dream was something different…
[Xploshi – Logging In (slowed down)]
There was no gravity and all around me was these bright blue streaks of plasma, they moved around like caustics in a pool. And in the background was this ambient synth track, I’d heard it before however here it was slowed down and… drowned in reverb. It felt calming in a way.
The blue plasma, and the music, slowly faded away. I could feel a sense of gravity being introduced as my feet met the ground. It felt like some sort of tarmac.
[Xploshi – Customize (slowed down)]
Then new music started to play; I recognised that it was from the same album and was also again slowed down and drowned in reverb. Gravity had returned to normal, as in earth conditions, as a night sky appeared in front of me. It was painted in a dazzling, saturated blue with what I could figure was the milky way embossed onto it. Lots of stars dotted around. Though what striked me the most was that the sky was in a sort of… cartoon like style, the clouds which also slowly appeared followed the same style.
It was then that I noticed the silhouette in front of it. It was a house. Seemed like there was an environment slowly appearing around me. The house had an arched roof, like a pyramid, with a chimney offset to the left; it’s all I could make out.
The night sky began to fade, as did the music once again. I was left with silence and a black void until a new sky made its appearance; reminiscent of an early morning sky before the sun passes the horizon, a gradient of turquoise, then hints of orange, then yellow, and suddenly another piece of music yet unlike the others, this was more direct as if it was playing right in front of me; no ambience, nor was it slowed down.
The sky got brighter as the sun rose from behind. I turned to look behind me as I saw houses sharing a similar style to the one on the hill being brought into the light, then some lampposts and finally the ground. I was indeed standing in the middle of a road.
All this light bouncing around brought the silhouettes in front of me out of the darkness, I could make out small details, the house had a red roof and a window on the right that looks like one of those windows that extrudes from the front of the house, it also had its own little arch. It was also situated in a cull-de-sac.
But before I could make out any more details I was blinded by the sun finally climbing over the house. Everything faded to white… then to black. Once more, the music was gone and I could no longer feel the ground beneath me.
Once more, I was left in an empty void…
[crt paralysis – “Mystical” 2009-06-08]
From that point on there was nothing else; Presumably the dream was over.
They say dreams have meanings… well maybe not all of them, I’d like to see what the meaning of that weird AI abomination dream would be.
But this one, the one I had just experienced… it was very cryptic. And to add to that, the music was still playing; This looped sample of a harp sequence over and over, for minutes straight. I tried to think of something to bring into this void, to try and take control of the situation but to no avail.
Soon the music would finally begin to fade away as my mind finally relaxed into a deep sleep, unaware of the events to unfold in the morning.