Why the question marks and exclamation points?
Post-dream incredulity. (e.g. I have no connection with Afghanistan at all. I don't even think I saw a news item about the place, the day before, so how it even got dredged up as memetic building material... That sort of oddness, really.)
Meamwhile, I had an early night, last night, and thus woke up half an hour ago (1:30am, local time) with a
mass of different dreams. Including a final reviewing section where I imagined revealing the prior dreams to y'all (in which I still made sense of some things that even now are faded into vagueness).
I was playing an 8-bit+like top-down naval battle computer game (advanced, modern, style game physics and rendering, but a limited and blocky pallette to do it in, think GTA 1 but lower-res, lower colour-depth and based at sea - equally frantic), which morphed into a 16-bit FPS'n'Sneak game with remarkable gameplay depth, also beyond the level of even
Return To Castle Wolfenstein in ultimate detail (whilst still pallette limited). In the latter game, the first encounter with a 'zombie' offersban opportunity. It is not actually dangerous and if you do not shoot it (perhaps because you've played this before, which obviously I had) it holds a document that it will show you to help you take another path.
This other path (literally, as you can dodge down a side path away from the obvious game-progression zone - no glass walls or moving walls in this post-Doom non-blocky environment, but it just does not make itself easily seen) makes use of the Sneaking, taking one past some warehouses where the ultimate (living) enemy soldiers are doing their... thing. Whatever it is that the enemy soldiers are doing. You can hide behond hedges, or even a slightly overgrown chain-link fence, a bit, but it seems my machine gun is currently at too low power to actually make the explosives guy 'explode', as he should, when strafed from such cover. I think the idea is that there's upgrades possible on the 'long' path to here. The sneaky path is a few levels of difficulty up. Still, by hiding behind the fence (??) I let the explosives guy and his rifleman partner forget about me and instead deal with (by sneaking) the activity in the darkened warehouses. (BTW, the name of this latter game is something my 'review dream' was pretty sure it had tied down. Something like "Greenbrook 32"
or, perhaps, more like "Valdbrucke 32". But it was supposed to be English reminiscent (if not accurately) of a Germanic placename, the number as in "Stalagluft
##". It stopped working so well after truly waking, though, indcating possibly it was at that time stilo kore an Aristotelian
essence of "a German-sounding English name", with the apparent "green brook" (not power/bridge!) qualities that would take a little research to try to assemble into a real-life example that properly satisfies my intended impression. But that's very much a doubly-meta thing that you didn't come here to read about, I'm sure.)
Phase change from video games to TV programs. Two of them, intertwined. (Possibly I was downloading them onto computers in a hotel room, amd watching them each as I got time, but very little now exists of the hotel-room vision, so I'll skip that, and the problems with power sockets.)
First(ish), either a hard-drama with some comedy, or a dark-comedy with some deep politics. Immediately post-war, in Europe (western... France?) an ex-Axis scientist (played by Julian Rhind-Tutt, I'm very sure!) is trying to create a new identity for himself and his wife under Soviet occupation. Part of this is represented by the continual buzzing of planes, specifically the advanced "Sukhoi 27" (in my case a delta-wing jet with canard (subtler than the Saab Viggen, though) and painted mostly white apart from the red stars - I've just checked, and the
real Su-27 isn't a canard jet, as I suspected it wouldn't be) "Air superiority fighter" (yet apparently a specific threat to the ground, indcating my subconscious is playing fast and loose with the semantics of words, as well).
Part of the plan involved painting the entire damwall of a reservoir grey to obscure some incriminating graffiti (there was enough paint to cover all but a very small patch (20-30cm radius patch!) at the base, just behind some vegetation (more obscuring vegetation!), which
probably didn't matter. (It never did, but the threat of a splotch of red paint was always in the background.) Also furnishing a new house, carefully adjusting an antique table to represent the right historic French monarch, somehow, for some reason. Oh, and the house is half filled (waist deep) with water. CGI water. (Rippling 'reflective' surface but no ripples from the actors 'wading' through it - Graphics fail in post-production!) As are the pathways to it. No idea why. Maybe war damage.
Second(ish) was a special episode of Dad's Army. It featured Pvt. Walker, so an early-series filming (but in colour and had the visual appearance/grain of technicolour film stock, so maybe an 'unknown sequel' to the 1971 film?). He managed to accidentally give a bucket full of black-market crockery (...) to the wrong person, possibly a spy, instead of the platoon-member who was supposed to get it. Much fun and hilarity as several not easily describable events culminate in Walker listening through the wall of a hospital ward with a stethoscope (to the chagrine of Shirley, to whom he is not paying attention, and whoever it is who is in the hospital bed that they are 'visiting') to get the evidence that results in the spies running off down the street. You had to be there.
After that, there was a bit about getting my parents onto a bus home, but the wrong bus came to the bus-station' gate', without us noticing until much later. A rough (but impossible, in context) analogue of a real-life error one could make regarding bus-routes (a "219" instead of a "22
something", except
this 219's destination was not the same final destination (but taking the wrong side of the valley for our purposes) as the 22x, which would have allowed us to get a 22x
back to where we needed, but it was stopping part way through the route, at exactly the wrong place. Except that this place (named) was not the qrong side of the valley, but really way over the other side of the hill on the
right side of the valley. If it
had been going there, after (as the advanced on-bus electronic map was showing!) being on the wrong side, it would have
passed our originally intended destination. Believe me, this was a big plot point to this dream segment! But greatly summarised to avoid boring the bed-socks off of you.
Anyway, all rounded off by the 'summary session' half-dream, as mentioned. Semi-lucid review of the dreams, thinking about how I got the details together, and what they meant (or failed to mean!). "Greenbrook" still meant something and yet it was here that the bus destination (never reached!) was more fully geographically/cartographically analysed. Not that it all survived intact to full and unexpected consciousness, and an hour's worth (it seems) of reckless message re-editing. No wonder I've not been telling you every dream I've had, if it actually takes this much effort... Shutting up, now. For now.