I had a dream last night. So I’m going to blog about it.

I don’t usually have cool dreams. Or even weird or scary ones – I mean I’ll take those, I don’t even care. I’m dream-deprived, I want something. Or maybe I do have wacky dreams, but I never remember them when I wake up. The only dreams I do remember are of completely mundane things. Like I have a dream where I get up out of bed, brush my teeth, change, and take the subway to school. And those suck. For one, they confuse me, because I can never truly distinguish between dream-reality and real-reality. So when I actually do wake up, I think to myself “Wait, I’m cool – I’ve already done everything and I’m already at school…sleeping in my bed…which is at school…for reasons which I will not question. Five more minutezzz…”

That’s also a sad waste of a dream engine. I could be running dream emulations of fighting ninjas, dunking on Patrick Ewing, having my eyes burned out with cigarettes by a vampire-fanged Shania Twain dressed up as a Malaysian bear…you know, standard dream situations. Instead I’m dreaming about commuting to school or work. That’s like winning a paid vacation to any place on Earth and choosing to go to Ajax…but only every night.

But sometimes I’m woken up mid-dream or something, and the memory of a weird dream stays with me. Those are always special treats. But the problem is that even if you do wake up with the memory of a dream, it fades fast. I don’t know if it’s just stored in short-term memory or even the shorter-term memory reserved only for dream data, but in thirty seconds, it’s gone anyway. So this time I did my best to transfer it to some longer-term memory by making point form notes in my head of the dream and verbally repeating them to myself while I sat in bed. The dream’s mostly gone, but I have just enough to devote rambling blog post about it first. Lucky you!

Here’s what I got.

It’s Gotham. I’m Batman. (Standard, right?) From the animated series, so everything in this dream looks like it was drawn by Bruce Timm, and when I talk I sound like Kevin Conroy. There’s been a series of unsolved murders, and I gotta do some detectin’.

Things kind of blur and fast forward a bit, and it turns out this new villain is behind it. I forget his name, but he looks like a Ghost from Diablo II, and he can possess people. Which is why the murders were unsolved – he was using random people to commit the crimes. Haha, see? I’m the world’s greatest detective.

At this point, there’s a new guy in town that’s tracking down the ghost as well. But goddamn, Gotham is MY city, and I don’t approve. So give him the standard Batman cold shoulder and do the standard Batman hey-what’s-that-VANISH-WHEN-YOU-LOOK disappearance after a random meeting with him on a random rooftop in which I tell him I don’t approve of him stirring up shit in my city. The weird thing is that he’s the Taskmaster, who – despite being one of my favourite comic book characters – is a Marvel character and his powers are not analogous. Though the mercenary thing still fits with the whole dream story – it just should have been a DC character, like…Deathstroke or something. It’s old school, pre-UDON Taskmaster, by the way, when he still had the full skull mask and the buccaneer-type look. Just in case you were wondering. I remembered that my dream version of Bruce Timm’s Taskmaster was awesome, but I don’t remember how it looked anymore.

Now here’s where it gets weird.

That guy who sits next to me at work, who I will refer to herein as The Coworker? He’s Taskmaster. He’s The Coworker AND the Taskmaster. Just like I’m not just Choking Yak with a Batman costume – I’m Bruce Wayne. I’m Batman. It’s weird, but since it’s a dream, you just roll with these things and don’t question them. Dream-reality is unquestionable.

Fast forward a bit more, and we’re both racing to find the ghost, working in parallel. Both of us in full costume complete with cape – he’s got the faux-Captain America shield and the Hawkeye bow and quiver strapped to his back and everything – but he’s in his cubicle, I’m in mine, sitting in our office chairs back-to-back, separated only by the cubicle wall, which is also a cool white board, by the way. I can hear him clicking away on his laptop while I’m using mine, and it’s intense. A race situation. I’m using Google. I’m typing in things like “gotham murder clues batman” and all I’m getting are bizarre hentai sites. Google keeps telling me to refine my search, but I’m the world’s greatest detective and I’ll be damned if Google is going to tell me how to do my job.

Finally I figure out the last victim on the list according to the standard plot for these types of stories. Like the ghost used to be Ghosty McGhostGhost before he died, and all the victims were past business associates in a crooked deal years ago, and there’s still one guy alive…you know, standard stuff. So I figure it out first because I’m the world’s greatest detective, and I push over the white board on top of him because I’m also an ass, and I run off to my Batmobile to rescue the old dude.

Predictably, I get there right as his janitor’s about to kill him, and I recognize the janitor’s possessed, because whenever the ghost possesses someone, their shirt looks like someone scribbled all over it with a sharpie. I don’t know why, but that’s how it was in the dream. So I stop the ghost, and right when I’m about to handcuff the ghost (I can’t ever recall Batman handcuffing someone, nor do I understand how a formless blob of ectoplasm can be handcuffed…but that’s how the dream went, and it all made sense at the time), the Taskmaster aka The Coworker shows up and fucks everything up.

The ghost disappears, and as we’re looking for it around the room, I look down…and I have sharpie scribble all over my chest. So we start fighting. And it’s pretty evenly matched, which surprises me, because I’ve always thought that the Taskmaster would take the majority against Batman in a straight up fist fight.

And somehow spontaneously, through reasons that only make sense in dream-reality, I realize that the ghost is powered by this monkey idol located on the dude’s mantle – for it’s power is bound to it. The idol by the way, looks a lot like this toy I used to have when I was little – you pulled a string, and he would like raise his arms and kick his legs at the same time. So now Taskmaster and I are working together to try and break the idol. So he throws his shield at me, an I KEECK IT RIGHT AT THE IDOL AND SMASH IT, and then all I can hear are birds chirping, and I wake up. It’s 6:17 AM, and there’s like an avian “wake up Yak” convention outside my window. Fuckin’ birds, man.

Some of the symbolism behind the dream is immediately obvious.

The sharpie scribbles caused through ethereal possession represent the pen mark I clumsily left on my shirt when I tried to put it my shirt pocket with the cap off yesterday. It also speaks of the slow grinding prison that is the nine-to-five job and my difficulty coming to terms with it, represented by the ghost.

I’m Batman because I am awesome, and Batman is also awesome. Case closed on that one, Alfred.

The whole deal with The Coworker also being Taskmaster kind of unsettles me though. I don’t really understand it, along with the whole “get out of my city” thing at the beginning changing to a begrudging “I don’t like you, but goddamn do I respect you” thing at the end. So let’s just chalk it up to my subconscious homosexual attraction towards him and call it a night.

That’s generally how all dreams end anyway.

But when we wake
It’s all been erased
And so it seems
Only in dreams