I'm sorry to doublepost, but I want to keep two separate sleeps' worth of dreams separate.
I just slept a few hours during the day and had a long stream of odd dreams, one after the other. I don't remember them all that well.
The first one I can remember (almost certainly not the first one I had) was some sort of flashback- I'm not sure if it was a story dream-me read, or a story my mother told me, or what. But it was freaking creepy.
A group of people, for some reason or other, were making a trek into some mysterious land in some forgotten part of Australia, hidden in dense jungle/forest where the flora still looked recognizably Australian... but strange. Somehow fiercer looking.
I can't remember who this group was or just why they were going through this place where few humans had gone before (I think a ship might have washed up, or something? Actually no, I think they had a specific goal to their explorations) but at various points of the dream it included members of my family, as well as Rick and Carl Grimes for at least a moment.
One character who I can actually remember was some crazy old guy my mother had known, a family friend.
He lived as a recluse somewhere near the entrance to this secret place, near a beach, and would obsessively watch the ocean for any ships coming in. He was the group's guide, I believe- maybe entering this place before was why he was so messed up in the head.
The place itself, some sort of unexplored wilderness, I think in a canyon, was populated by two types of strange, mysterious sentient beings. The first were vaguely humanoid but had various oddities about them- I think they had some sort of spines/spikes- and were generally regarded as quite unhinged and scary by the humans.
The other species, which lived in tandem with the first lot, was rather horrifying to look at. They were like oversized spiders in shape, grown to almost human size, but they were definitely mammals. Elephants, actually. For some reason I remember that.
They were still vaguely 'sentient', but not very intelligent at all and their violent nature was seemingly held in check by the other beings as we made our way on this long, harsh journey- quite at their mercy.
I believe the goal of the trip had something to do with the beings these creatures worshipped, both species of them.
I can't remember exactly what they looked like, but they were some kind of gigantic, horrifying gorilla things which lived in the deepest forest and ruled over both races in the valley.
Meh, the dream's fading in my memory now. I can barely remember anything- something about a few people making a trip back down to the shore, finding some mysterious messages that had been sent to them since the group had entered and warning them just how screwed they were. Also the crazy guy was hit by a thrown spear/arrow.
Next dream, then! After that the next bit of dream I remember was me riding in a car. (Can't remember who was driving, might have been my mother.)
We were going along a big road through some large, quite open area- seemed like a lot of vacant grassy lots.
There were a lot of buildings being constructed there, offices,
huge, very strange-looking skyscrapers(?) with a lot of unusual (but still ugly) architecture. Some of them had been finished and occupied already, filled with offices from what I could see.
I was peering in through the windows as we passed, doing my best to see what the people inside were doing, getting an interesting snapshot of their little lives. I mentioned to Mum how much I liked spying on people, just going about their business- and then suddenly I was inside one of the buildings. Somehow.
So I got an inside view of it all as I wandered around, asking for directions to get out of there.
I don't actually remember a whole lot of what was going down in there, just asking some haggard-looking secretary how to get to the ground floor, being directed to an elevator, being my awkward self because there was someone in there already, and eventually coming out in a sort of open-air basement/parking lot.
I wandered out of there- apparently I was in a city, now- and started heading in the general direction of home.
(All of the architecture, sites etc in this part of the dream seem totally unfamiliar now. In my dream I believe it was a city that I lived in and knew quite well.)
I saw a police officer get out of his car as I was passing a park across from the tall building I'd just left (I think it was the same one), he had what looked like a single bike rack painted bright yellow, went over to an illegally-parked bicycle in the park and used it to impound it, locking it in place. (This all made sense to dream-me.)
As he was leaving I encountered the owner of the bike, a little kid coming back from someplace with his friends. They were all very annoyed and angry to discover another of their bikes had been impounded, and worried about what the one boy would tell his parents.
I walked with them a while since they were going the same way I was, I believe I offered to lend them a Spider man-branded bike belonging to my niece. I glanced over them, judged that they were close enough to the right side, and was going to help them- until I was distracted by a little stall selling secondhand videogames in a little laneway.
There were a bunch of Ps1 games for sale and I was rummaging through with interest, and I found something strange- a Ps2 game apparently made by Tarn. The box was very cryptic and confusing, red-themed and covered with overblown pictures of fantasy warriors in dramatic poses, but from what I could gather- dream-me having never heard of it before- it was about forming a party, running up lots of hills and maybe fighting the occasional monster.
I HAD TO HAVE IT. Unfortunately it was priced at $120, I had nowhere near enough, and those kids were pestering me to hurry up.
I think I might have woken up right there from the emotional trauma of missing out on it.
(There could have been more dreaming afterwards, but I've forgotten it all by now. Alas.)
This is what happens when I nap during the day, I guess.
That first dream was genuinely creepy.