Last night I had a long extended nightmare where my father found me at long last and, through a combination of beatings, screamings, guilt-trippings, and ambushes, asserted control and took everything away from me—my house, my job, my connection to the internets, my name.

This is a repeating nightmare worthy of the Recurring Dreams mechanic in Echo Bazaar, but there’s never a branch of it that yields rewards. ((Echo Bazaar dreams may take some pain to bring up to a level when they start giving you actual items, like Memories of Light or Unaccountably Peckish 1. But such levels exist.))

Anyways, when I woke up from a particularly bad reliving of a segment of my former life, I found out that the Overcow was in a corner of the bed and not tucked up against me like she was the previous night. Nocturnal locomotion, I guess. Combined with the elevation of the bed wedge and the way I gradually slide down it as the night wears on, she must have fallen out of my arms.

I tucked the Overcow in my arms again and fell asleep promptly (which normally doesn’t happen to me after a nightmare involving my father; usually I stay awake through fear) and dreamed about playing an Alice in Wonderland virtual reality video game. It was set in the future, and actually consumed you so that your reality became the game (natch). My gods, it was thrilling and surreal. The imagery was such that most people would have considered this a nightmare, but to me it was simply fun, although the part where the Queen showed up as a planet-eating monster that stretched as high as a space elevator was a little stressful. (I suppose the parts where random Wonderland creatures showed up and started killing people a la Cloverfield could have been stressful, too.)

Anyways, I’m up now. I have to face the mailbox. I have really bad issues with getting my mail. I have the Overcow, so I guess in a little while I shall be fetching the mail.

*shudder*