Wow, this dream I just had was so bizarre I can'tnot record what I remember of it.
I remember walking out of someplace, either a large house or a public office of some kind, and passing this woman (who seemed to be based off a character from TV show Shameless mixed with a IRL family friend) making out with her much, much younger lesbian lover who she had recently married. I smirked about this, since the woman was somehow related to an IRL friend of mine and I made a mental note to ask him how his latest something in-law was doing.
Then the dream focused on another plotline, where something strange and secretive was going on at the business owned by that mashup woman (in the show it is a bar, in this I m not sure, it looked like some large, sprawling building like a school or hotel or w/e, I think it was where the remembered part of the dream started) and another character began to get suspicious (in a light-hearted way I think?) and try to catch her out.
She was meant to go out with a bunch of the other central characters but said she couldn't, claiming some vandal had shoved a burning (rubber) mattress into a room in her place and she had to spent a lot of time and effort to clean it ASAP.
The other character, who I believe was talking to her over the phone, smirked and responded with mock sympathy, not believing a word. He then decided to go there and try to see what was really going on and catch her out. She was, of course, making that up but his reconnaissance visit ended up having unintended consequences.
...Now, I can't actually remember what exactly happened there (not to mention what her secret was in the first place), but either the suspecting guy or another bystander character (or possibly both turned out to be a robot(s), and in the course of investigating hectic stuff happened and his programming was somehow scrambled or infected with a virus (I remember the building they were in turning into some weird nightmarish version with a red filter and lots of craziness going on), which controlled him and then got him infected with some other virus-thing and then sent him on some bizarre adventure, which culminated in him winding up in this weird old abandoned, almost post-apocalyptic looking stadium, wearing a mechanical/powered mascot suit depicting some kind of googly-eyed green frog and dancing madly like someone on the tail end of a drug-fueled rave. As he danced it fell apart due to being very old and unmaintained, until he was just wearing the suit's arms and legs and looking even stranger.
As I watched this scene I was quite entertained, since I was finally seeing the "frog mascot dancing in dilapidated stadium" scene, which (a stylised version of it?) was a central parts of the show's (apparently I was watching a TV show) intro sequence.
The scene dragged on for a bit, very minimalistic with the guy dancing away in an otherwise still and empty landscape, and I realised that there was a lot more to look at in the shot. In fact, his dancing made up something just like the size of one, lower-right corner of a large landscape painting, and there was so much more to see in this show (which now seemed to be a beautifully-crafted animation) if you looked around while this long scene was ongoing.
I dragged my eyes away from the continuing, jerky dance and noticed other life in the seemingly abandoned part of town where the old stadium was. (The scene was now like a, not sure how to describe this, but like a large, flat painting, almost like a cross-section of a very cluttered part of a city. Kind of like some concept art from a cyberpunk game or something, with different chunks of city separated by masses (? probably wrong word, sleepy) of buildings in some probably unrealistic and stylized view of the district. I think there is a word for this kind of painting/image, but I have no idea what it is right now, halp.) There was some colourful string of kites or some kind of flags lazily blowing in a breeze and drifting partially out from behind a building, above and to the left of the dancing robot. There were a few other minimalistic little details to pick out amongst the scene.
Then up even higher, further on the left, I spotted some quiet little train/tram stop (it changed from tram to train between scenes, I'm pretty sure) lying quiet amongst the monolithic, ponderous buildings towering around it like some sort of shady canyon. It occurred to me that I was now looking at a very built-up Asian city, which seemed to be some futuristic version of Tokyo- fitting with the cyberpunk theme that seemed to have popped into the dream.
A tram/train (I think it resembled a tram to begin with then became a train for the next scene) arrived and left, rather quickly, and the dream followed it, for reasons that doubtless made more sense at the time. Next shot showed two apparent strangers sitting right next to each other in an (as far as I could see) empty carriage.
That would seem rather strange IRL, and indeed one of the pair, the woman seemed somewhat perturbed by having a stranger seated right next to her, shoulder-to-shoulder, but nowhere near as creeped out as you'd expect of a person IRL.
Then, the man began to speak (in English despite the both of them and their surroundings appearing Asian, I guess my dream-self/subconscious couldn't be bothered reading/writing subtitles!), casually referring to the previous scenes of the dream as he said, "And that's why you don't go out on Saturdays," whilst wearing his wisest, most sage-looking expression.
It seemed this was just another part of the show I'd been watching (although it looked to be live-action again now), almost like the regular way it ended episodes: with some seemingly unrelated character remarking on the events of the episode. Whatever the case, the woman seemed to become kind of annoyed by his faux-deep wisdom and challenged it, whereupon he launched into some rather illogical explanation that reeked of off-the-cuff bullshit, something about how one was better off going out on a Thursday/Friday or Sunday, unless of course they worked on X days of the week, in which case they would... go out on Saturday after all.
Pretty sure the dream ended with the girl getting more irritated (probably due to having some daft stranger in her personal space on public transport as much as his nonsensical explanation, I guess it mounted up) and arguing with him as he just carried on gazing at the camera with his mysterious, perhaps slightly bored but-almost-certainly entirely affected expression of overflowing wisdom.
That dream was a trip. I HAD TO write it down, despite waking up from it at like, 4:30 AM. (It's 4:59 now)
There was a lot more to it, like details on who the hacked robot(s) was/were and how one of them dragged the other into it (the first of the pair may have been human) and what happened to them as they tried to investigate the female character's hotel/whatever and just what the overarching, ongoing plot that threatened them all was.
I'm actually just remembering the existence of some overarching, ongoing threatening thing now, but none of the details... there was some ongoing threat, though, lurking in the shadows unknown by most of the characters... not sure what it was but I think the lady was trying to keep some way it had affected her secret. I think it might have involved people being replaced by robots/cyborgs, or existing robot people being replaced by malicious ones WHICH I KNOW IS PRETTY MUCH WHAT HAPPENED but I mean in a slow-paced, secret thing... in this case I believe the affects were just wild, largely accidental and temporary, like a bad trip for the probably-robot (maybe he was just affected by some organic computer thing, who knows) guy. It was really quite enjoyable and I wish I remembered more. There was definitely more before the start of this post, too, unless my subconscious is just deceiving me into thinking there was by plonking me down into the dream with a "cold opening" and letting me think stuff's already been going on.
Anyway, I'll stop rambling now. I've been having quite a lot of mildly-interesting dreams lately, after a bit of a dreamland dry-spell, but this is the first one that's been bizarre and interesting enough that I've been forced to come to my laptop and record it whilst it was still as fresh as possible. Some very interesting themes going on in this one. Very surreal, yet it felt like I knew and loved the characters.
Well, I guess at least one of them was from a favourite show of mine, so. The scene with the robot-frog-mascot dancing in what turns out to be just one corner of a huge, strange matte painting-style scene was
beautiful.